Ever wonder what happened between the lines of history? I do. In the thousands of years of recorded human history, the accounts that have come down to us represent a tiny, tiny fraction of human existance. What happened between those records that survived the ravages of time? How much of that was as important to our understanding of the past as the fragments we actually possess?
Dan Carlin, in his incredible podcast “Hardcore History” highlights this phenomenon when discussing the Achaemenid Persian Empire. The story of early Persian kings is long, detailed, and full of color, but the further you go, the less information seems to have survived. This leaves us with the impression that the later kings really didn’t do much, building a picture in our mind’s eye of decadence and lazy pursuit of leisure that is probably not completely accurate. In fact, by the time of Alexander’s conquest of the Achaemenid Persians, that empire stretched way beyond the borders of what was achieved by those energetic initial rulers. Certainly, somebody was doing something during all that dead air time!
I find it fascinating how much of the story of humanity has been lost to us. The more scientific amongst those individuals squinting into the darkness of lost history—archaeologists and the like—slowly add to our accumulated body of knowledge, but huge gaps in understanding remain. What caused the mass migrations of Sea Peoples that overran so many Bronze Age civilizations? Where did the vaunted Persian cavalry disappear to, allowing the Greek victory at Marathon? Why did Hannibal hesitate to march on Rome after the crushing victory at Cannae? And this is just the tip of the iceberg of things that keep me awake at night!
To be honest, there are more holes than pieces in our puzzle picture of world history. Some societies were better than others at recording contemporary happenings, offering the chance, at least, of modern humanity attaining greater, and fuller, understanding of what transpired so long ago. The Egyptians, Persians, Chinese, Romans, Koreans … the list of really good, really detailed record-keeping civilizations goes on and on. Yet the library at Alexandria was burned by Caesar, of all people—likely by accident—in 48 B.C. Poof! 40,000 scrolls stretching back to the beginning of recorded civilization, up in smoke! Baghdad and most of its ancient Persian texts was burned by the Mongols in 1258 A.D. There goes another 1,700 years of historical records!
Rome was, by the end of the empire, invaded so many times one quickly loses count, making it all but impossible to even estimate the scope of the loss through multiple sackings. The various capitals of successive Chinese ruling dynasties were all attacked and burned—at least once—eliminating potential records going back to the Qin Dynasty in the third Century B.C. And Korean archives, stretching back to 300 A.D., have been burned so often by so many foreign invaders, the court started making multiple copies (by hand!) to ensure something made it through to posterity! Should it come as any surprise whatsoever that the first moveable metal type printing press was invented in that country?
To get back to our puzzle analogy, then, its like trying to piece together a picture knowing from the very beginning that when you run out of loose bits you’ll have more holes than fully-formed elements. While this state of affairs fires—no pun intended—the imagination of archaeologists, driving them to fill in those blanks in our historical understanding, it also has a subsidiary effect on a very different group of people. For some, the storytellers, those gaps are fertile soil, wherein as long as a tale is grounded in what we do know, almost anything believable can be inserted to make for impactful drama.
This is the realm of historical fiction, a sub-genre that makes many novelists cringe! In fact, upon meeting a very successful author at a party once, and telling him of my plans to write in that very genre, he audibly gasped and shook his head. “Too much work” was his earnest pronouncement. As a writer of Sci-Fi/Horror—I’ll admit that until that moment I didn’t realize that was really a thing—he never had to stop and look up … well … anything! He was free to simply make up any detail at all and, as long as he kept that new “fact” constant throughout the book or series, he was good-to-go. “Can vampires survive with no atmosphere?” “Absolutely!”…and just like that, you’ve created your own new fact.
I understood instantly what he meant, as by then I’d yet to publish Persian Blood, but had spent the better part of a year doing research before ever putting words to paper. And that, as it turned out, had been just the beginning as elements of the story I was writing—you’d think the author has some control over these things, but the story kind of possesses you and goes where it goes once you start—required constant fact-checking and additional, usually more detailed, research as the story progressed. By the time that first novel was published, my head was full of so many extraneous facts and historical details I felt like it would burst!
That said, the collection of all those facts drives a very narrow purpose, an attempt to render a completely made up story believable and real to the reader. Poor historical fiction, or just a lazy author, ignores those facts and jumps right to the “make-things-up” stage, leaving us with products like many of the movies we see today. Most movie directors simply don’t seem to care as much about historical accuracy or believability as they do about visual impact.
The most egregious example I can cite—and those of you who know me well can cringe now—was the movie 300. In my opinion this was fantasy not historical fiction as very little of what we actually DO know from the Classical Greek period was represented in that Hollywood retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae. I will, till the day I no longer walk this earth, characterize that movie as “Lord of the Rings in Greece” as most known facts were intentionally discarded in favor of sensationalism. And this, to the great detriment of the Persian people—today’s Iranians—who are already terribly misunderstood in the western consciousness.
I see good historical fiction, works I’ve mentioned before like Stephen Pressfield’s Gates of Fire, Aztec by Gary Jennings, and Shogun by James Clavell, as filling in the gaps in our collective perception of history. Not with made up “facts” like a multi-pierced King Xerxes driving a rhino-driven chariot (???), but with plausible stories that help to illuminate what life may have been like for people just like us living so long ago. These stories, fiction though they may be, connect us to our ancient predecessors and, if done well, help us to feel what they may have felt. To experience, in some small way, the joy, the terror, the highs and lows of their precarious existence in far away and ancient worlds.
This is what has drawn me to the genre. Ultimately only time—and readers—will tell whether or not I’ve achieved that goal in my own writing. In the meantime, be assured that I remain knee-deep in books on the Roman Republic and research related to the tribes of ancient Illyria (bit of a hint there) in preparation for drafting the continued adventures of one very, very bad “Quintus” Fulvius.
For my part, I’ll do my best to remain true to all that history has left to us.
M. G. Haynes