Glimpses—Making History

For all too many people, history is the boring drone of a classroom lecturer and an endless, meaningless list of names, dates, and places. This is a terrible disservice, for when one is free to explore it as one wishes, it comes alive with all the comedy, tragedy, pathos, drama, adventure, and fascinating personalities one could ever desire.

James Burke, perhaps, best exemplified this with his ground-breaking television programs Connections and The Day the Universe Changed. While the former originally aired in 1979 and the latter in 1986, they are every bit as fresh and absorbing today. Their appeal rests not only with Burke’s witty and offbeat delivery but with the intriguing and unexpected interactions of seemingly unrelated people and events widely separated in time and space.

Over and above the individual points made in each episode, Burke’s work teaches some of the most profound and fundamental lessons for any student of history—or any world-builder. History is nonlinear. It does not happen in a vacuum. Influences may extend across centuries and continents. Unintended consequences abound. Uncertainty and gaps are frustratingly common.

All Gaul is divided into three parts

History is such a slippery thing that one must regard it in three different lights. What was the actual course of events? What did people at the time think happened? What do people today think happened?

The first question is usually the most difficult to answer. Modern archaeologists digging through ruins and anthropologists digging through documents conduct what might be called forensic history, piecing together facts and evidence as objectively as possible to reconstruct just what happened. Even so, it is very difficult not to allow prejudices and assumptions learned over a lifetime to color one’s examination of another time and culture.

The second question is dominated by the old—and very true—maxim that history is written by the winners. Apart from history as propaganda, many obscure chapters may rarely or never come to light because no accounts were written or, if written, none survived. How many isolated or preliterate societies vanished into obscurity, lost passages in the human drama? How many ancient treasures were destroyed in the burning of the great library of Alexandria?

The third question is subject to a host of influences apart from what is taught in school, assuming formal education is widely available. Popular entertainment and so-called urban legends are two of the most pervasive. Most people in any age are woefully ignorant of any but the broadest outlines of history, and even that tends to be rotten with error and misapprehension.

The Devil is in the details

As mentioned previously, those who write the histories (or cause them to be written) often have their own agendas—as do those who would teach it to later generations. In their hands, history is not marble; it is modeling clay, malleable and protean. After it passes through enough hands, it may bear only a passing resemblance to the original events, as with the old parlor game of telegraph. Moreover, history is fractal: the more closely one examines it, the more complex it becomes. Details emerge and fit together in new patterns, sometimes very different from the perspective at a distance.

The so-called verdict of history, then, frequently is quite unfair or at least distorted. Galileo Galilei is a household name, even today. What most people know is that he was tried by the Catholic Church for heresy after publishing his theory that the earth revolves around the sun. He is therefore seen as a hero, standing up to the dogma of monolithic authority in a defiant quest to shed the light of new knowledge on the world.

Lost in this golden vision is the fact that Galileo was a very unpleasant personality. He was an intellectual bully and a prodigious ego. He made trouble, sometimes gratuitously. In his famous manuscript, written as a dialog, he cast the opposing viewpoint as a character who seemed suspiciously like the Pope, and whose name translates roughly as Simpleton.

So was Galileo Galilei victim or loose cannon? The answer probably has more to do with one’s point of view than with any objective judgment.

So very difficult is it to find out the truth by history

History is a living thing, changing and evolving not only as it lengthens with time but as new facts and interpretations cast new light on past events. Historians, too, abhor a vacuum and may try to fill gaps in the record with anything they can, including outright speculation.

Some historians may have a vested interest in the status quo and will resist, sometimes fiercely, new theories or evidence—which, after all, may or may not be credible. Others may stake their reputations on radical new ideas, whether out of sincerity or out of a desire for fame or notoriety. Egyptology today is the scene of growing unrest as some raise questions over what they see as serious flaws in the established timeline while others defend it vociferously.

Newly unearthed evidence may overturn the established order. Texts on Precolumbian studies recently were rendered obsolete (and at the time of writing hadn’t yet been corrected) when archaeologists realized the Inca were not one civilization, as previously believed, but four!

The fury of Nature

While “history” here generally refers to human history, the impact of natural history should not be neglected. Major disasters are the most spectacular aspect of this impact—for example, earthquakes, wildfires, volcanic eruptions, and plagues—but there are also less obvious facets.

Solar fluctuations may change climates very slightly for the better or worse, resulting in bumper crops or “little ice ages”. Eruptions may cause temporary cooling, which besides inducing crop failures might encourage plagues of micro-organisms that thrive in the new climatic conditions. What if the solar system passes through a cloud of dust or gas, or even the gravitational influence of another star?

The Black Plague that reduced Europe’s population by a third, for instance, eventually led to the Renaissance. With labor forces so dramatically reduced, peasants and artisans found their bargaining positions greatly enhanced. Social mobility increased and conditions for the lower classes improved.Mercantile and fincancial innovations followed, further eroding the nobility’s monopoly on power. The astonishing explosion of art, letters, and science that resulted led directly to the world we know today.

Human beings for the most part tend not to be rational creatures. Thus it should come as no surprise that their history is hardly more rational. As Mark Twain said, the difference between fiction and real life is that fiction has to make sense.

History often is tragic or hilarious—usually unintentionally. The cliché “someday we’ll look back on this and laugh” applies just as much to the history of a people or nation as it does to the history of an individual.

Sometimes, though, history can seem quite unlikely. H. Beam Piper’s story “He Walked Around the Horses” describes the sad fate of a British diplomat who abruptly and inexplicably finds himself shifted to a world in which Napoleon never set out on his road to power. From the point of view of the high and mighty of that world, the despatches carried by the diplomat describe a nightmarish fantasy out of a fever dream. Attempting to tell the story of the Second World War in a world where Hitler never came to power might meet with the same sort of dismissal—possibly with a lecture about hackneyed world-conquering villains.

O brave new world, that hath such people in’t!

History is likened by many to a great river, its course shaped by broad, diffuse forces and trends—migrations, wars, and plagues, among many others. Disagreement, however, arises over the role of individuals. Can they, indeed, divert that mighty flow by themselves, or are their risings, achievements, and (often) falls simply the result of existing larger changes?

Regardless of one’s opinion, personalities can and do stand out, giving history much of its color and excitement. They may lead what seem to be charmed lives; U. S. Grant’s brushes with death in the U. S. Civil War seemed nigh-miraculous. They may dominate their surroundings by sheer force of will, as with Jeanne d’Arc. Walt Disney and J. R. R. Tolkien cast long shadows over the worlds of moviemaking and literature. It could be argued that Nicholas II, the last Tsar of All the Russias, and his wife Alexandra are largely responsible for much of the tumult of the twentieth century, since their bad decisions played a leading role in causing the Great War, which in turn led to the Second World War and the Bolshevik Revolution, the latter of which resulted in the Cold War.

The universe is queerer than we suppose

In 1800, the world’s population was about one billion; by 1900, this had grown to about one and a half billion, and by 2000 it had mushroomed to more than six billion. Birthrates are dropping gradually around the world, but the population still is expected to exceed ten billion before the next century is out.

In a statistical universe of such staggering size, very strange things start happening. Extremes of ability or happenstance appear; for instance, insurance actuarial tables, based on huge amounts of empirical data, suggest that, somewhere in the world, somebody is 130 years old.

A bad cause will ever be supported by bad men

As mentioned before, the judgment of history is anything but objective. Many individuals and nations have been labeled villainous, whether fairly or not. It’s important to remember that nobody is a villain in his own mind.

If a leader or a country is sane—and it is possible for an entire nation to be effectively insane, at least temporarily—most actions are taken because, at the time and with the information available, they seemed to be the best things to do at the time. Advice may be bad, or the decision-maker incompetent or stupid, but malice is not as all-pervasive as cynics would have it.

Neither is it absent, however. The Second World War arose in part from Germany’s humiliation at the end of the Great War, when France and to a lesser extent Britain went out of their way to grind the vanquished nation’s proverbial face in the dirt. The United States argued against doing so, for both humanitarian and practical reasons, but the demand for revenge could not be swayed by sweet reason.

When insanity enters the picture, however, all bets are off. Actions and decisions may or may not make sense to outside observers, and they may or may not be consistent. Only within the framework of the insanity in question, whatever its form, will they seem logical.

Great oaks from little acorns grow

Often, with hindsight, it’s easy to follow historical threads to see where and how world-shaking events come about. Just as frequently, though, such major happenings arise from seemingly trivial incidents or decisions, perhaps decades before.

Unintended consequences and irony often figure large in these apparently minor happenstances. During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the United States was more than happy to supply the mujahideen resistance with weapons and training. However, after the USSR gave up and retreated—a significant factor in its later crumbling and the end of the Cold War—the US quickly abandoned their erstwhile Afghan “allies”, leaving many with a deep, abiding bitterness. These armed, trained men at loose ends, some of them unable to return to their homelands, became the troops of the Taliban, the Northern Alliance, and al Qaeda. The nation that had more or less created that raw material in the first place was forced to deal with the results, however inadvertent.

Sometimes apparently minor functionaries or bureaucrats wield surprising influence. When Alan Greenspan became chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States, it was a post little known to the public. By the mid-1990s, however, financial observers around the world, and even individual citizens, listened closely to news reports of his announcements.

Advanced techology is indistinguishable from magic

Science and technology tend to be cumulative processes. Discoveries that reveal more about the workings of the world make it easier to build tools and theories that, in turn, lead to more discoveries. The longer this continues uninterrupted, the greater the “momentum” and the more the pace of such discoveries accelerates.

This pace is not constant; even the acceleration accelerates. The rate of change itself becomes faster over time. This poses tremendous difficulties for the creator who wants to project past the current state of the art, assuming the current state of the art can be determined. In many areas, national security considerations make it impossible to find out, even for the conscientious researcher. Some authors have found after the fact that classified military or industrial research had already surpassed their seemingly wild or radical ideas. Arthur Clarke observed that authors’ predictions tend to overestimate advances in the short term and to underestimate greatly advances in the long term.

Since the Industrial Revolution and especially since the advent of the Information Age, this acceleration has been seen by some as a social problem in its own right. The sheer scope of man’s knowledge has become far larger than any individual could possibly grasp, making it more and more difficult for the proverbial “man on the street” to make informed decisions about esoteric topics. As well, that information changes at a bewildering rate, rendering a childhood education obselete by late middle age.

Who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it

A related point is the fact that social as well as technological trends rarely continue in a straight line. They change, circle back, or fade out; the pendulum swings, and nothing is inevitable. A pitfall in any attempt to project history is to carry developments too far in a given direction. Science fiction of the 1970s and 1980s was often rather dystopic, reflecting a pessimism arising from the perception that the US was a has-been and that other nations were ascendant.

During the seventies, many stories featured as a background element Arab ownership of most US assets, thanks mostly to Middle Eastern domination of the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries (OPEC). In the eighties, Japan took over that role, due to its ostensible industrial might. Yet by the end of the nineties, OPEC had become a virtual nonentity, the Middle East was a dogfight pit, Japan’s economy had all but collapsed, the United States was more powerful than ever, and all those stories were obsolete and dated-looking less than a generation after they were published.

Remember also that nations and societies do not rise and fall at the same time, especially not in a preindustrial world. At any given moment, somewhere in the world, there are likely to be up-and-coming young contenders, mature, well-established cultures, and decaying or even collapsing civlizations. Of course, this does not mean such rises and falls aren’t connected in some fashion; in fact, it’s very likely some if not many of them are!

Human behavior is in many ways fundamentally similar to that of other terrestrial mammals and especially fellow primates. After all, this root psychology evolved to address the same basic imperatives, such as survival, food, and reproduction. It is unique not in kind but in complexity and sophistication. (Whether intelligence is a successful adaptation, however, remains a subject of endless debate.)

Those same primal drives may be buried under layers of abstraction, indirection, or elaboration, but still they underlie nearly all of human endeavor, great or small. On a grand scale, they tend to manifest as competition or cooperation—or an intersection of the two. Politics, religion, economy, war, technology, all are inextricably intertwined, and all are powered by the same irreducible, atavistic wellsprings in the human spirit.

Politics is the womb in which war develops

Lamentable as it may be, violence is one of man’s favorite recourses for problem-solving. Organized and harnessed to the needs or desires of the authorities, whomever they are, we call it war. Apart from the obvious impact war has on history, it also has spawned, directly or indirectly, nearly every technological development of any consequence.

Even the Space Race was a child of war. Despite protestations of peaceful scientific and humanitarian motives, the United States and the Soviet Union were in reality competing to demonstrate to each other and to the world the superiority of their missile technology and industrial might. Once the Soviet Union effectively conceded the game by announcing they would not be sending men to the moon, the Apollo program—originally planned to continue through Apollo 21—was promptly cancelled.

Illogical belief in the improbable

Humans suffer from a will to believe. This is evident everywhere: religious zealotry, the circulation of scientifically implausible urban legends, and the durability of tortuous conspiracy theories are but a few examples. It is a powerful force reaching back into the mists of prehistory. Because of it, folklore, propaganda, or other oft-repeated tales eventually can become accepted as history, especially when catering to a society’s need to see itself as great or triumphant.

Revisionist history as propaganda is a recurring theme, dating back at least as far as ancient Egypt. Defeat may be turned to victory, burying embarrassment or shoring up the government. The current regime may be legitimized or the previous one demonized, especially if the transfer of power was violent or involuntary. The more dysfunctional a political system is, the more likely it is to force-feed distortions to the populace, and the greater those distortions are.

Even if the truth is told at the time, later scholars may introduce alterations. Their pet theories may not stand up under the facts. Their ideological convictions may demand a particular interpretation of those facts (as with so-called “political correctness”).

The general public, too, often tends to romanticize the past, especially its own. The glories of the past are idealized in a “golden age”, particularly in regions with long histories. Exceptionally traumatic periods, such as the Holocaust during the Second World War, are seen as warnings not to let such things happen again, especially by those who lived through it and the immediately following generations.

Tradition grows ever more venerable

Customs, traditions, and even laws can linger for decades or centuries, sometimes long after the reasons for their existence are forgotten. They may continue for their own sake, out of social inertia. New reasons or conditions may breathe renewed life into them. Underlying human imperatives may still drive them despite the changing face of society. Just as old, so-called “legacy” technology may soldier on despite the introduction of newer standards, people may feel the old ways work well enough and don’t need changing—especially if they help preserve a cherished ethnic or cultural identity.

The modern Western wedding, with all its pomp and ceremony—and expense!—traces back to medieval weddings among the nobility and royalty. (Commoners marrying often involved little or no ritual.) This custom was adopted by middle-class and wealthy commoners who wished to affect the trappings of nobility, a desire that figured strongly in British culture from the Northern Renaissance through the Victorian era.

I am the magical mouse

If magic exists in the world being created, its nature and impact on history must be considered. Who uses it? Is it powerful? Is it common? Does it require extensive training or special characteristics on the part of the practitioner? In many if not most fantasy worlds, magic is stongly associated with religion or at least mysticism. All of these considerations will have a profound impact on history.

In one furry world, the mice—who stand only a few inches tall—seemed to take most naturally to the practice of magic. (It’s been theorized they are inherently magical, to fit human-level intelligence in such small brains.) As a result, they were able to hold their own against much larger enemies in early history, and often filled the niches occupied in the real world by such mythical creatures as elves or gnomes. Even after usable magic faded away in more modern times, their ingrained tendency toward secretiveness and a separate society remained, becoming the focus of many conspiracy theories, such as “the mice of Zurich”.

The conscientious world-builder should strive to make fictional histories “realistically lumpy”, as a friend put it. History is rarely tidy or symmetrical, and it is shot through with mysteries and gaps. Unlikely things happen—but not out of the blue. There is always a sequence of events that led up to the odd or bizarre result. Anton Chekhov advised an aspiring playwright that “If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.” This works both ways; if one needs a gun to fire in the last act, it had better be shown to the audience earlier as foreshadowing.

Even if a chunk of history is lost to the characters, the world-builder should know, at least in general outline, what happened during the “missing” period. In addition, the history in general should be self-consistent. That doesn’t mean abrupt or strange changes are impossible; it means that such changes should be supported by other events and should not feel like they were grafted on.

A history should be workable at any given moment. A visitor should be able to dip into the timeline at will and find a believable, consistent picture of the society. In the computer games Final Fantasy VI, VII, and IX, the creators did a beautiful job of presenting the period in which the world-endangering menace arose and the period in which the main characters live, but gave the centuries between short shrift. As a result, it is difficult to believe that the world proceeded from one to the other.

A well-worn piece of advice to writers is “write what you know.” The converse is true as well. Learn at least the basics of science and human behavior and build a firm mental picture of the people whose history is being created.

It’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to paint it

The more thoroughly planned a fictional world is, the less likely it is that glaring errors of continuity will creep in. These include not just simple disjunctures (“in this story he’s a fox, in that one he’s a wolf”), but “show-through” as well. The latter occurs when part of a fictional world obviously, often jarringly so, dates back to an earlier stage in the creator’s development process than the rest.

Don’t fall in love with a history—further reflection or research may reveal possible flaws. Be prepared to perform surgery as necessary to make changes and adjustments. There is nearly always room for improvement in even the most carefully constructed timeline.

It is tempting, after all that work, to show every bit of it off to the audience. Don’t! Masses of irrrelevant details are simply boring and confusing, not to mention glaringly amateurish. Show only what is necessary to serve the creation at hand, whatever it may be, or perhaps just a bit more, for flavor. Yet another good writer’s aphorism likens world-building to an iceberg: nine-tenths of it never makes it to the page, being instead deep background.

The other obvious amateur mistake is not to go through the work, since most of it won’t show up. Unfortunately, this results in a world that feels flat and flimsy, nothing more than movie-studio false fronts.

Balance the amount of work put into a history with the size of the project of which it is a part. A single short story probably doesn’t require the in-depth world-building that a series of novels or a role-playing game might demand. On the other hand, be aware of the possibility that a short story may grow into something much larger and more unwieldy, as happened with Anne McCaffrey’s Pern stories.

My mind’s made up, don’t confuse me with the facts

Everyone has a point of view and opinions about how the world works—or should work. It’s difficult not to let them dictate the directions one’s fictional world will take, but unless the object of the work is satire, try to resist the temptation. Obvious bias may alienate a potential audience, and even subtle bias can cause uneasiness, at the least. If the bias rests on a shaky foundation, the creator’s credibility is easily damaged or destroyed. One near-future timeline portrays Catholic nuns voluntarily committing a major act of terrorism, a proposition calculated to upset instantly an objective observer’s suspension of disbelief.

Few personal opinions are more fiercely held than political and religious beliefs. As a result, these are the hardest to set aside, but for the same reason, doing so can be critically important. Try to be analytical, even or especially about one’s own cherished views. There may be unexpected rewards, no only in one’s work but in one’s life.

The bottom line is that the world-builder should countenance no sacred cows—unless maybe they’re the priestesses. No religion or political system should clearly and overwhelmingly be the One True Way. After all, if one were, everyone would have converted to it long since!

Of course, one is perfectly free to posit characters or cultures that are convinced something is just that, and real history is filled with demagogues persuading whole nations to unite behind some appealing idea. Usually, but not always, the results tend to be very unfortunate, for the nation that bought the bill of goods, their neighbors, or both.

Utopian societies, too, are unequivocally a bad idea. Utopian fiction went out of fashion a century ago for good reason. Not only is Utopia unworkable on any large scale, it is uninteresting: by definition, there is no conflict in Utopia. Without conflict, there are no stories.

Two heads are better than one

One reason “shared universes” often seem so rich and vibrant is that many different points of view and bodies of knowledge have been brought to bear in their creation. Even if the universe being created isn’t a shared one, it’s still enormously useful to pick as many brains as possible.

Even more important is finding, and paying attention to, a good editor—and a good proofreader. Many amateur creators don’t want anyone else touching their precious brainchildren. Professionals know editing and proofreading are absolutely necessary if those brainchildren are to be presentable to an audience.

If a worldbook seems called for—for instance, to aid fellow creators of a shared world or as an adjunct to a role-playing game—be aware that it is a very different form of writing than fiction. Clarity and precision are key, and information must be accessible and relevant. Good organization is probably the most important single method of achieving these goals.

No short essay like this can more than scratch the surface of the considerations involved in detailing vivid, believable histories. The hope is, however, that it will stimulate the reader’s imagination by asking questions, pointing out possibilities, and leading the reader into asking—and answering—still more questions.

As with any topic the aspiring world-builder must address, nothing beats good research for answering such questions. Even for cultures not based on historical templates, it helps to understand what is possible or likely for societies at a similar stage of development.

Making History

Designing Histories for Fictional Worlds