The Concession

Yeah, so that thing about how you can make one big concession at the start of an SF story? It sort of works for pseudo-history based stories too.

I just read a book that did it and it seemed to work. Then made it not work. And both choices are informative.

Right at the start of the story, it is presented that the Sphinx is older than the Pyramids. Okay, fine. For the purposes of this story, we are in a world where this is true. And where the secret library buried under the Sphinx is a thing, too.

There's no pressing need to argue that the whole library thing is clearly a fabrication as it didn't start being talked up until the Christian era. Because this is the beginning; this is the place where you can say, "For the purposes of this story, light has mass. For the purposes of this story, India doesn't exist. For the purpose of this story, Elves." Whatever.

Okay...I do still have a small problem with it. I think that to really be fair to actual science you need to do as they did a scene fairly close in to the start of The Core. Which is to have someone point out just how absolutely stupid the idea is. And then go and do it anyhow because that's the story. "Elves? Are you insane? There's no way...oh, look. There they are."

You don't need to defend it, not really. The audience is totally willing to accept this as a premise so they can get on with the story. You don't have to give them some convincing story about how Michelson-Morely should really be interpreted or how Google Maps lies or how pointed ears can easily be hidden by hats. Sure, you can, but that is for entirely different reasons than convincing the reader.

One is because it is useful in-story; say, you want to do a big scene at the Explorer's Club where your hero explains how he is going to launch himself in a giant cannon and therefore launches into similarly ballistic arguments. One character convincing another. One character demonstrating their character (the physicist demonstrating how they are smarter than anyone since Einstein).

The other is because its fun. It is a nod and a wink to the audience, a spoof explanation given because it is funny. It is a chance to trot out your research. And I have to remind you again; because this is while the Contract With the Reader is still in the process of being signed and ratified, this farcical "explanation" is done in full view, the merest sop of a top hat and a cheap sparkly wand while the writer does it. The reader knows they are being spoofed and they are enjoying the ride.

So here's where the book I read made a big mistake. It made arguments later in. After the author already had the audience on his side, he created situations where someone could bring up the erosion theory, or...since the Sphinx was part of a parcel of Ancient Alien stuff...the Bagdad Battery, the lack-of-soot argument...all the horribly familiar and long-debunked trash of the Von Danieken brigade.

The only reader this isn't going to annoy is the reader who is gullible enough to either fall for or (more likely) already fallen for the pseudo-history in question. The average reader is going to be increasingly annoyed.

Not saying you couldn't make this kind of delayed argument work in the right context, but basically this is where you've moved from making one clear concession for the purposes of the story to trying to argue for a clearly counterfactual when there's a perfectly good story you could get back to telling.

So...if this is how it works, does it make it harder to write an adventure archaeologist story? Perhaps. What seems to me is that the process remains familiar. If on page three you introduce the anti-gravity paint, the only things you are allowed to do from then on are either science as we know it, or extrapolations that follow logically from that first concession.

Follow logically. Science as we know it. If you've set up the 25,000 year old Sphinx in the first chapter, if you later want to talk about Battle of Kadesh you can indeed explore the implications of an ancient Sphinx. But you can't also unveil that the Hittites are, for completely unrelated reasons, riding against the Egyptian chariots on their trained velociraptors.

Depending on the type of book, of course. It all does have to do with the contract with the reader. If you've introduced a traditional mystery, you can't have Miss Marple give up on ever making sense of the clues and in the last act, gun everyone down with a war surplus Thompson. World-building a fantasy world means you can't suddenly have dragons appear in the third act -- not unless you've been planting the proper portents all along. Magic users can't develop new powers on demand.

It all comes from the original premise you've asked the reader to accept. So if you want to add Atlantis and Crystal Skulls and Pakal's Spaceship to your Sphinx story, the opening premise has to be not that this one thing is different, but that lots and lots of things are going to be different.

But I still think that premise needs to have structure. Saying, in a Science Fiction story; "A lot of the physics you know is plain wrong" gives the writer too much license. It is hard to concentrate on the dangers faced by the heroes if you aren't sure if inertia works in this universe, or even oxygen. You kind of need some ground rules in order to be emotionally involved. And for anything that is a scientific technological or historical puzzle, to be intellectually involved.

"Lots of history is wrong" is a poor premise because it doesn't constrain the possible. At any moment Elvis and Bigfoot could pop out to take down the bad guys. "Some history is wrong because this thing here" is a better premise. There is a race of immortals. A long-lived conspiracy. A crash-landed spacecraft. A really, really weird Pope. Or some other schema that regulates what sorts of para-historical things are liable to pop up in the manuscript; "Welcome to the monster hunter club," "Your mission is to go to critical battles across time and make sure they come out the right way," "This book of your grandfather's explains all the things he discovered."