Some cool folks

Thanks to my research for the upcoming Sea Beyond duology, I became aware of something called the "Alexander Romance." Like Arthuriana, this is less a text than a genre, an assortment of tales about how Alexander quested for the Water of Life, slew a dragon, journeyed to the bottom of the ocean, and so forth.

Yes, that Alexander. The Great.

How the heck did we wind up with an entire genre of stories about a Macedonian conquerer who died young that bear so little resemblance to the historical reality?

The answer is that history is much easier to forget than we think nowadays, with our easily mass-produced books. However much you want to lament "those who do not remember the past" etc., we know vastly more about it than any prior age could even aspire to. The legendary tales about Alexander arose quite soon after his death, but by the medieval period, his actual life was largely forgotten; more factual texts were not rediscovered and disseminated until the Renaissance. So for quite a while there, the legends were basically all we had.

Historians tend to not like the phrase "the Dark Ages" anymore, and for good reason. It creates assumptions about what life was like -- nasty, brutish, and short -- that turn out to not really match the reality. But while plenty of people have indeed used that term to contrast with the "light" brought by the Renaissance, one of the men responsible for popularizing it (Cardinal Cesare Baronio, in the sixteenth century) meant it as a statement on the lack of records: to him, the Middle Ages were "dark" because we could not see into them. The massive drop in surviving records had cast that era into shadow.

How do those records get lost? Year Two went into the perils that different writing materials and formats are vulnerable to; those in turn affect the preservation of historical knowledge. Papyrus texts have to be recopied regularly if they're to survive in most environments, so anything that disrupts the supply of materials or the labor available to do that recopying means that dozens, hundreds, even thousands of texts will just . . . go away. Parchment is vastly more durable, but it's also very expensive, and so it tended to get recycled: scrape off the existing text, write on it again, and unless you were lazy enough in your scraping that the old words can still be read -- think of a poorly erased blackboard or whiteboard -- later people will need chemical assistance (very destructive) or high-tech photography to see what you got rid of.

And when your supply of written texts shrinks, it tends to go hand in hand with the literacy rate dropping. So even if you have a record of some historical event, how many people have read it? Just because a thing gets preserved doesn't mean the information it contains will be widely disseminated. That is likely to be the domain of specialists -- if them! Maybe it just sits on a shelf or in a box, completely untouched.

Mind you, written records are not the only way of remembering the past. Oral accounts can be astonishingly precise, even over a period of hundreds or thousands of years! But that tends to be true mostly in societies that are wholly oral, without any tradition of books. On an individual level, we have abundant research showing that parts of the brain which don't see intensive use tend to atrophy; if you don't exercise your memory on a daily basis, you will have a poorer memory than someone who lives without writing, let alone a smartphone. On a societal level, you need training and support for the lorekeepers, so they act as a verification check on each other's accurate recitation. Without that, the stories will drift over time, much like the Alexander Romance has done.

And regardless of whether history is preserved orally or on the page, cultural factors are going to shape what history gets preserved. When the fall of the Western Roman Empire changed the landscape of European letters, the Church was left as the main champion of written records. Were they going to invest their limited time and resources into salvaging the personal letters of ordinary Greeks and Romans? Definitely not. Some plays and other literary works got recopied; others were lost forever. The same was true of histories and works of philosophy. A thousand judgment calls got made, and anything which supported the needs and values of the society of the time was more likely to make the cut, while anything deemed wrong-headed or shocking was more likely to fall by the wayside.

The result is that before the advent of the printing press -- and even for some time after it -- the average person would be astoundingly ignorant of any history outside living memory. They might know some names or events, but can they accurately link those up with dates? Their knowledge would be equivalent to my understanding of the American Civil War amounting to "there was a Great Rebellion in the days of Good President Abe, who was most treacherously murdered by . . . I dunno, somebody."

In fact, there might be several different "somebodies" depending on who's telling the tale. John Wilkes Booth might live on as a byword for an assassin -- imagine if "booth" became the general term for a murderer -- but it's equally possible that some people would tell a tale where Lincoln was murdered by an actor, others where a soldier was responsible, and did that happen at a theatre or at his house? (Booth originally planned to kidnap Lincoln from the latter; that detail might get interpolated into the memory of the assassination.) Or it gets mixed up somehow with Gettysburg, and Lincoln is shot right after giving his famous speech, because all the famous bits have been collapsed together.

Even today, there are plenty of Americans who would probably be hard-pressed to correctly name the start and end dates of our Civil War; I'm not trying to claim that the availability of historical information means we all know it in accurate detail. But at least the information is there, and characters who need to know it can find it. Furthermore, our knowledge is expanding all the time, thanks to archaeology and the recovery of forgotten or erased documents. Now and in the future, the challenge tends to lie more in the ability to sift through a mountain of data to find what you need, and in the arguments over how that data should be interpreted.

But in any story modeled on an earlier kind of society, I roll my eyes when characters are easily able to learn what happened six hundred years ago, and moreover the story they get is one hundred percent correct. That just ain't how it goes. The past is dark, and when you shine a light into its depths, you might get twelve different reflections bouncing back at you, as competing narratives each remember those events in variable ways.

For a writer, though, I don't think that's a bug. It's a feature. Let your characters struggle with this challenge! Muddy the waters with contradictory accounts! If you want your readers to know the "real" story, write that as a bonus for your website or a standalone piece of related fiction. Then you get to have your cake and eat it, too.



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/Tnyzpz)

(I have finished a draft of The Worst Monk in Omnu, just in time to kick back for the holidays!)

Philosophy is one of those topics where, if you're intending to explore it in detail in your fiction, you probably already know more about it than I do.

The way we talk about it nowadays, it's the exemplar of a rarefied field of study, the province of intellectuals who hardly engage at all with the world around them. As a result, you're unlikely to center philosophy in your worldbuilding unless you know quite a bit about it to begin with (as I, freely confessed, do not). But I do know this much: philosophy is far from disengaged with the world. Indeed, its purpose is to consider why the world works the way it does, how we should engage with it, and other such fundamental and vital questions. So even though my own knowledge is limited, it's worth taking a bit of time to unpack just what philosophy is.

We've touched on parts of it already, because philosophy is not fully separable from other topics. The Year Six essays on sin and salvation? Those got grouped under my broad "religion" header for obvious reasons, but they're also philosophical topics -- specifically the branch known as moral philosophy, which concerns itself with ethical questions like what is good and whether one should weigh intentions or consequences more heavily in evaluating an action. For many people, religion has long been the foundation of moral philosophy . . . though the notion some hold, that a person can't really be moral without faith to enforce it, is utterly without foundation.

Last week's science essay also touched on philosophical matters, because philosophy asks questions like "what do we know and how do we know we know it?" This branch is known as epistemology, or the study of knowledge itself. That revolution in thinking I mentioned before, where the Royal Society said nullius in verba and started testing long-held dogma to see if it was right? That was an epistemological shift, one that declared sense experience and experimental procedure to be the proper basis of knowledge, rather than deference to authority.

Science also ties in with the logic branch of philosophy. How do you know if someone's reasoning is sound? Among specialists, different logical methods often get discussed in very abstract, dry-sounding ways, but we use them all the time in daily life: if you come home to find toilet paper shredded throughout the house and the only living creature who was there is the dog, ergo you conclude the dog is to blame, you're applying logic. Science, medicine, and the law all share the task of looking at the evidence and attempting to formulate an explanation that adequately explains what you see -- or, alternatively, to show that an explanation fails that test. Because, of course, the flip side of logical reasoning is the fallacy: incorrect reasoning, which fails at one or more steps in the chain.

The fourth major branch is metaphysics, and it's the hardest to pin down (thanks in part to the definition changing over time; that's what happens when your field of study has been around for thousands of years). This, I suspect, is what most people think of when they hear the word "philosophy," because metaphysics is the branch asking questions like "why does reality exist?" But here, too, it loops around to touch on other areas of culture, as the beginning and end of the universe fall under this header: religion-themed topics you'll again find in Year Six.

Enough of the abstractions, though. What does this mean for fiction?

Whether you mean it to or not, philosophy is going to soak your fiction, because it soaks your thinking. If your student at magic school decides to experiment with different ways of casting spells to see if what the teacher said is true or not, that's demonstrating a certain epistemological stance, one that says experimental results are the most valid way to answer a question. If your protagonist investigates a mystery and comes up with a theory about what's happening, they're using a specific logical approach. If your villain is pursuing a potentially admirable outcome by really terrible means, they're subscribing to a consequentialist view of ethics, the one commonly shorthanded as "the end justifies the means."

If you don't make a conscious effort to worldbuild the philosophy of your setting, its philosophy is likely to default to yours. Which is not necessarily a bad thing! But it can feel anachronistic or otherwise out of place. If the protagonist in your medieval-esque story approaches questions of knowledge and logic like a modern scientist, they're going to feel a bit like a modern person dressed up in fancy clothes. If the good guys all do that while the bad guys adhere to different philosophical stances, now you're adding an implied moral dimension to the result.

And I suspect that for most stories, it's that ethical dimension of philosophy where this influence becomes most obvious and, at times, problematic. Protagonist does a bad thing, but it gets brushed off because they've got a good heart and that makes it okay? The story is presenting a philosophical argument, whether the author thinks of it that way or not. When the chips are down and a character has to make a hard decision, which way do they jump? Will they bend or break a principle to help someone in need? Will they sacrifice their own desires for the sake of upholding that principle? This is the stuff of deep personal drama, and simply recognizing it as such -- and thinking about what stances the various answers would express -- can result in more powerful stories, rather than simple ones where the supposed hard choice is really a no-brainer.

But especially on that ethical front, it's going to be difficult to write a story that endorses a philosophy you, the author, do not support. Deontology, for example, is the field that looks at ethics from the perspective of obedience to rules . . . and for many of us, that rapidly leads to "lawful evil" territory. We'd have a hard time writing a sincere story in which the protagonist virtuously obeys a terrible order because their duty requires it -- not as anything other than a tragic ending, anyway. It could be the basis of a villain or an antagonistic society, though, and in fact we often deploy these elements in exactly that fashion.

So even if you don't have a degree in philosophy, just dabbling your toes in the shallow end of that ocean-sized pool can help you become more aware of what message your worldbuilding and plot are sending. And that, I think, is worth it!



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/fDGUFl)