I've seen what detailed research can turn up on daily life in Mycenaean Crete. The biggest things I've learned is that far too little is known (and those scraps are fought over far too much). And that it takes a lot of time and no little expense and I really don't have the kind of mind that can bring in, store, and organize all those little tantalizing clues.
Conan was created because at $.05 a word Howard couldn't keep doing that depth of historical research.
I'm not under the same financial pressures as Howard and I'm certainly not as creative, but where I am in my life I have to make the same choice. When all is said and done, it is fun to try to tease out the nuances of what might have actually been, but I'm a lot more interested in what is colorful and amusing. And I really don't mind if I get it a little wrong.
Sure, I can make a good argument that making fiction vivid should weigh more strongly than making it accurate. The tasks of historical fiction are to entertain, to teach, and to (when it is done very well) to illuminate. In all these cases, having a clear picture -- even if it is what Gene Roddenbury insightfully called, "a uniformity of error" -- is paramount.
What that boils down to is that I need to be working on what I want to say about the Mycenae and the end of the Aegean bronze age, how I want to portray them, and how to best support an interesting story around them and the other players of that time and place.
The original idea (from almost one year ago today) was a fast-moving adventure, taking a motley crew of heroes on a whirlwind tour of the Late Bronze Age. And that really hasn't changed. I've flirted with doing something more serious, and in a sense I am going in a more serious direction -- not so much more careful history: more like semi-deconstruction of some of the adventure tropes. But when it gets down to it, the basic conception of the characters -- heck, the essential conception that they are plural; that people from social circles and civilizations so far apart become stalwart friends -- requires that they be larger than life.
I love the challenge of trying to make the most authentic picture of a textile workgroup as depicted on the Linear B tablets, but to go through the length of a novel with my Cretan Weaver I also want her to be able to invent a new loom, fall in love, hang out with an Egyptian nobleman, join a revolution...yeah, and probably jump a bull or two while she's at it ("When in Crete..." as the saying goes.) So basically exceed historicity and the statistical likelihoods of her life.
In Greek Mythology, most of the heroes were born that way. They generally had a god or two in their parentage. There is certainly plenty of fiction in which a character is presented as hero qua hero; a few throw-away lines about "thrice-decorated ex-green beret with a doctorate in particle physics and an expertise in medieval weapons," so the reader won't be surprised when he emerges from his time machine into the Battle of Nicopolis and proceeds to kick Ottoman ass.
The other common mode, however, is the hero by circumstance, hero by experience; the ordinary man who rises to the challenge. Thing is, a novel is long. A series is even longer. And series inflation is totally a thing. Just by virtue of living, this once-ordinary protagonist becomes bigger than life. Just like Hercules* lifting a newborn calf above his head twice daily, and continuing the exercise until he is benching 1,600 lbs of beef, the well-done series character is never seen jumping the shark. Each challenge they face is just that little incremental bit tougher. Just that bit more exciting, with more at stake, and more and tougher enemies than the last time.
For the writer consciously trying to do this, you want to be able to drag the reader along on the journey, beginning from a point of identification, "Hey, I could do that. Or at least I think I could, if properly motivated," through to -- without ever losing the reader's investment -- "Of course he can do that! He's Indiana Jones!"
And, yeah. Where my Cretan Weaver -- where my Athenian Mercenary and my Egyptian Scholar-Magician and my Phoenician Merchant Adventurer -- are going character-wise is to something that doesn't work solo. By herself, Kessandra** would be seen as a Mary Sue. The reader needs to know the context is that of the Team Adventure. That this isn't a polite historical, but that it plays by a different set of ground rules.
Which suggest to me I may want to bring in the other characters early, in interleaved scenes or prologues or other material. Heck, I might go so far as to show Setna at Deir el-Medina at the moment he realizes Paneb is trying to kill him, and my as-yet unnamed mercenary somewhere in the Troad with Hittite chariots on his tail, all as prologue before we settle down to 30-40,000 words with the people of Knossos.
This may get a bit rambling. I'm drinking my first glass of Ouzo. A necessary experiment -- I have my flight tickets to Crete, and I need to be ready to down a friendly glass of Raki. (They don't, unfortunately, sell Cretan Raki at BevMo. Hence the Ouzo.)
So, basically, it is time to step back and orient on the larger plot, on what exactly this band of heroes is going to do in regards to the LBA Collapse. I'd like to do more than travelogue, but I also feel constrained to the realities of history. The Collapse had no single cause -- and is also what in NuWho gets referred to as a "Fixed Event." The heroes aren't going to stop it.
The best I've been able to figure so far is that their victories are local. And as for the fight, in general? I like having the narrative essentially walk through a para-historical overview of the collapse; that is, moving from potential cause to potential cause (although for them it is more like moving from perceived threat to perceived threat) and allowing the reader to experience some of the academic paradigms as they were considered and discarded.
At the heart of it, Kes has been given a prophesy. And there are signs and portents for those who wish to look for them (some real, some less so); earthquakes, famines, etc. And I still haven't decided, but the Red Tide could be a powerful portent and symbol as well. I also haven't decided how much of an end-of-an-era spirit to infect people with. How much of a 14th-century (AD), or for a more recent example, late Weimar Republic vibe to give it. There is certainly reason to be fearful for the future -- again, if you go looking. But at the same time, I want a spirit of hope on Crete, and in Byblos if I get there. And Egypt dreams of eternal stability.
Yeah, and apparently consensus now is there is nothing in the Pylos Linear B tablets suggesting that this was a time of panic and mass mobilization. Whether or not anyone was conscious of re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic the tedious documentation of ordinary grain disbursements and shrine donations and legal cases was business-as-usual up until no more than a week or two before the palace burned.
When it is obvious the known world is in trouble, my Egyptian can go on about ma-at, and my Athenian mutter about gods playing games with people's lives (he was at least near Troy so he had a front-row seat to that kind of behavior). Not that there are gods at play here in this story. I am still reserving a little magic but I've decided gods are out.
*Actually, Theseus. I asked a retired classics prof I know at the pub. Theseus of the Minotaur, appropriately enough, who left Ariadne at Naxos, fit Procrustes to his own bed, and kept his ship in better condition than did Jason (sorry...very classics in-joke there contrasting the philosophical Ship of Theseus -- a nautical version of George Washington's Hatchet -- with Jason's ignominious end, broke and alone and camped under the rotting remains of the Argo until the prow fell off and crushed him instantly.)
**It is a name from the Pylos tablets, of a woman with surprisingly large land holdings. I might have originally reached for it because of the clang association with another famous (and famously unlucky) prophetess, but it clicked for me when a shortened "Kes" (which I suspect is entirely un-idiomatic to Mycenaean speech patterns) seemed the perfect fit for my cheerful, geeky little goat girl. As Wanotreus is probably going to say (in a "how would you write my name?" scene); "That's too long a name for so short a girl."
How's the ouzo?
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