Once Upon A Time It Was Now by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

Author:JAMES ALEXANDER Thom
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781681570525
Publisher: Blue River Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

SHIFTING IMAGES

One of the real and constant challenges you’ll face in taming your research data is that data isn’t dead and inert. It is usually changing and evolving, as I’ve said, which also means it grows. Much of your accumulated research will subtly contradict other materials you’ve dug up, and anything heavily studied by historians will gradually change with the evolving “perceived wisdom.”

No matter how diligently your colleagues research, or how clearly they write, other able historians are busy somewhere revising the facts and the images. And historians don’t like to be out of step with their respected peers.

That’s just one more reason why your research material piles up to a nearly unmanageable mass: because there are so many versions of everything.

And you, as a historical novelist, will be judged by the look of the story you put together. Your description of something or someone might have developed from your reading of original documents or your examination of pictures—long since refuted facts that may have “gone out of style” according to later research.

My father, an army doctor, liked to say with a wry smile: “I learned just two truths in medical school. Both of them have been disproved.”

YESTERWAR, TOMORRWAR

A friend who was a big-city newspaper editor once sent me the manuscript of a novel he’d written. He is as well read and savvy as anyone I know. But his story made reference to the “Mexican War,” and mentioned the infamous Pancho Villa. My erudite friend had confused the 1846 U.S. invasion of Mexico with the Mexican Revolution more than sixty years later.

It’s understandable. World history is such a constant succession of wars that it’s hard to keep them straight, and the United States has been one of the most aggressive and meddlesome of nations. Yes, we even got involved in that Mexican Revolution. A recent “Isaac Asimov SUPERQUIZ” syndicated in the newspaper mentioned fifteen wars, the United States being involved in eleven of them—nine on foreign soil—and even that list omitted some of ours.

For years I’ve been making “a modest proposal” that the names of two of the planets in our solar system be swapped. Mars is named for the Roman god of war, but there’s never been a war there.

On Earth there has seldom been a year of peace in the whole duration of history. This is the planet that should be called Mars.

The protagonist of your historical novel, even if he doesn’t get involved directly in combat, will likely be aware of war, or impending war, or the economic effects of war, nearby or afar. Therefore it behooves you, as his creator, to know all about the wars that involve him or occupy his thoughts. War is, unfortunately, the constant occupation of man, and the source of the mightiest drama. It’s hard to ignore it if you’re writing about this world, the one we should call Mars.

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