"It was a dark and stormy year..."

I keep having these ideas that cross historical times with fantasy elements. More or less. I'm interested in that intersection between the rational and the fantastic, particularly as a societal conflict. That's making me think of several possible time periods.

First is a somewhat hazy zone somewhere between Victorian and Edwardian, the place where antiquarianism is giving way to modern archaeology. When the map of history is slowly losing the "Here be monsters" in its margins. Not to say there aren't still endemic and deep-seated misinterpretations of both ancient and living cultures. Far from it; this is an age of the uncovering of Troy and extensive biblical archaeology. An age, also, where Piltdown could reside in a place of honor because that ridiculously obvious forgery supported what a part of the western world wanted to believe of itself.

I don't think this can be nailed down to a single year. You can have Budge and Petrie meet, but the latter is still fumbling and the former is more than a mere antiquarian. Nor can you concatenate the decipherment of Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphs, cuneiform and Linear B. The stories of each of these, taken alone, also spreads across decades of which far too many of the stories are too interesting to want to leave out.

And oh yeah; the fantasy element? I don't know. I don't know if I even want it, except for the crassest of reasons (shelf space for SF/fantasy is bigger).


A new one just occurred to me today. And that's basically the EC Comics Weird War Tales, but using WWI. Because you can leave the weird completely out and the conflict that interests me is still there. It is the conflict that most steampunk stories shy away from recognizing; the old empires are falling, the old ways, the rigid social classes, the flower of French Chivalry and all that are falling as everyone flails around trying to get a grip on the quite literally world-changing technology of mechanized warfare (and industrialization in general).

Of course that's a slower process than just one war. It is just a place and time -- especially the earlier parts of the war -- where you can throw it into sharper relief. And more than one story, fiction and non-fiction, has already been written with just that same focus!

There's again no real need for the weird here. It is also unclear what roll the supernatural (or otherwise non-part-of-history) elements. To put it in strictly Lovecraftian terms (I wouldn't want to use the Mythos, not even in a serial-numbers-filed-off way, because it doesn't go where I want to go with it), you could have unspeakably ancient, indescribable lurkers in the dark representing either the fears of the coming modern world (as Lovecraft used them) or the reactionary and irrational. Or have the weird split, with something like Lovecraft's Migo representing the darker side of technology, fearful and impossible to fully understand.

One possible direction to take this is alternate history; that a completely new element is introduced, quite possibly one that reflects and emphasizes part of the existing societal conflicts. Such as (given purely as illustration because as an actual idea I hate hate hate it) zombies erupt in the middle of no-man's land and both sides have to turn their efforts towards combating, understanding, and possibly exploiting them.



A rather different venue, and one of my first ideas, is World War II. I particularly like the Pacific War for various reasons, but in any case. This could be a Secret History -- there are quite a few mysteries around and quite a few odd secret organizations and adding a few occult ones to the mix is hardly even fantasy (until and unless they actually manage to get something to work). Plus I'm fascinated by the side players, the civilians, the Coast Watchers, the boffins, etc.

Or it could turn alternate universe as various supernatural entities enter the fray. In any case, the key place where I would approach this period differently than the earlier war is that in this one, humanity is the greater monster. Or to be more specific; Cthulhu rises from the ocean and we start dropping nukes. And nobody is happy. Except the writer, because I am fascinated by the dawn of the nuclear age, the cast of characters, the way scientific questions were confronted, etc.



The last period of interest is modern day. And the sub-setting is archaeo-gaming; the intersection between archaeology and games. Here the core conflict is not exactly science versus tradition, or rationalism versus the demon-haunted world, but more the way modern Archaeology is trying to be honest to the facts and sensitive to other cultures, versus commercialism and lowest-common-denominator audiences and all the ways "it's just a story" can be used to trample the real concerns of real peoples.

I realize that sounds a lot more didactic and preachy than it should be. It wouldn't be. And there's plenty of space under the basic umbrella for retro-tech and paleo-gaming, the vibrant current cultures of emulators and 8-bit music and arcade restorers and all that. And real current concerns about intellectual property and cultural appropriation when archaeological artifacts can be scanned and those files printed in physical media or reproduced within virtual worlds.




All bunnies are, again, free for the taking. If you think you can write it, then you have my blessing.



And the rabbit's foot dropped today, during lunch. I'll write more (far too much more -- you know me!) on it soon, but the gist is that my area of interest is the Ancient World and the period of interest is....The Bronze Age Collapse!