history vs histories
One of my favorite parts of writing fiction is the historical backstory – specifically, how everyone has a slightly different version of what really happened in the past.
That’s how history works in Real Life. If you ask twenty different people what happened in a historical event, you will get twenty different answers. Even if the facts are beyond any possibility of dispute, you will get twenty different interpretations of those facts.
Like, think about the CLOAK GAMES series. In that series, the backstory is that the High Queen of the Elves conquered Earth on Conquest Day, and the Elves have ruled mankind ever since.
Except, what really happened? Nadia’s heard many different versions of the story in the last nine books:
-The High Queen destroyed the corrupt governments, and brought duty, order, and peace to mankind.
-The High Queen brutally conquered Earth, executed anyone who resisted her, and enslaved mankind.
-The Conquest has brought stagnation and coercive control to Earth.
-The Conquest has brought peace and order to Earth.
-The High Queen seized control of Earth in a day.
-The High Queen spent several decades putting down various insurgencies.
-The Archons liberated their homeworld from royal rule and established a republic, while the royalist Elves cowardly took shelter on Earth.
-The Archons overthrew the rightful government of their homeworld and slaughtered millions, forcing the survivors to flee to Earth to save their lives.
Nadia’s heard different versions of that story from different people. Which one is true? Maybe they’re all true, but it depends on who you ask.
Or maybe Nadia’s going to find out the hard way in CLOAK GAMES: LAST JUDGE. 🙂
I think that being able to put that kind of historical perspective into fiction is the most valuable lesson I learned from two semesters teaching college history. 🙂
-JM
The Conquest also seemed to have frozen human technological development completely which is extremely unrealistic. No advancement in any tech for 300 years ? Does no human study science or do R&D any more ? I find it rather strange that Elves have suppressed this – they could have waged their wars against the Archons far more effectively if humans had advanced technologically.
In 300 years time, we would most likely have broken biological barriers of ageing via medical nanites that perform cellular repair, invented and produced reaction-less drives and explored the local solar system, possibly productised quantum entanglement for communication or at-least quantum computers for supercomputing, our guns would be hyper-velocity electrically driven rail-guns, we would have a far better understanding and practical application for plasma and nuclear fusion and invented super-capacitor batteries that drive our infrastructure, chemically grown food produced by auto-chefs indistinguishable from real food for all but expert tasters and maybe just maybe discovered a unified model for matter, gravity and energy. And possibly many more things if we didn’t wipe ourselves out as a species.
Nadia’s world still looks like if its stuck in 2010, which is a bit unrealistic. You would think that Elves would want to leverage human ingenuity rather than suppress it. The latter breeds more resentment.
The High Queen did that on purpose.
Some technology has advanced quite a bit – like, agricultural science and medical technology are way more advanced than they were at the Conquest. If James Marney had lived in 2013, he would have died from his wounds, or at the least we would have lost the leg. There are also fusion plants that Nadia doesn’t know about, and electrical technology is more advanced – think about Nicholas telling Nadia about EMP shielding. A lot of the technological improvements are quiet things that Nadia doesn’t notice or takes for granted.
That said, the Elves have deliberately stalled human technological progress in three areas:
-Weapons tech. No one but the High Queen has control of any weapons of mass destruction. Not humans, not Elven nobles, only the High Queen.
-Information technology. The Elves don’t want people organizing without them knowing about. So IT and the Internet are carefully monitored.
-Automation technology. The High Queen wants all her former men-at-arms to have stable jobs so they can marry and have children and raise the next generation of men-at-arms, and a large pool of unemployed men is fertile ground for a revolution. So any kind of automation technology that would make jobs redundant gets shut down. Like, if a grocery store owner installed a self-checkout, he would find himself in a lot of trouble very quickly. The Elves care more about social stability than any economic inefficiencies this generates.
The tricky part about writing CLOAK GAMES is that Nadia is at times a very solipsistic narrator – if she doesn’t care about something and it doesn’t affect or threaten her, she won’t think about it at all. On the other hand, this makes it easy to reveal plot-important information without resorting to infodumps.
It seems to be Nadia’s fate to learn everything the hard way.
Every single time, too. 🙂
Great thought on perspective(s).