Historical Focus

Was looking over my research this morning and realized I could be telling almost the same story if I left history out of the picture. But it would be simpler, probably easier on the reader, and on me.

When you look at the template Adventure Archaeologist story, the history is only barely there. I just watched the Sandra Bullock sort-of-remake of Romancing the Stone, that is, Temple of Gold. Which did one odd thing; it leaned in a couple times about how doing good academic work was important and the protagonist should be allowed to take pride in it. Everyone else in the movie treats it as some boring hobby she has and she should just concentrate on writing the romance stuff -- even the bad guy (a wonderful Daniel Radcliffe) just treats her as a living version of Google Translate; "I don't care about the ancient culture, just tell me where they hid the gold."

But the movie doesn't. Maybe it is an artifact of camera POV (with few exceptions Sandra is the focus character) but the movie seems to act -- for just those few moments -- like everyone else is in the wrong. I mean, sure, it is still a character bit. It matters because it matters to the protagonist. But it is cool that this is considered of equal weight to how good she looks in a purple jumpsuit.

But for all of that, I can't tell you if that was actually a real culture. Because that's true for probably half the stories, even more so when they are part of a continuing series (like the Tia Carrere-led Relic Hunter); the historical element is either completely obscure or a jumble of a couple of different real-world elements.

The other half of the time, it is going to be the pop-history version of the Holy 13. You are going to see a lot less of Seti II and a lot more of Cleopatra VII Philopater. It's the establishing-shot version of history; we're in Paris? Oh, look -- Le Tour Eiffel. Classical Rome? Ave Caesar!

Which is a really long-winded way of getting around to, that in most fiction of this sort, the concentration is on the globe-trotting and the gunfights and the treasure/threat. Briefly, the Designated Academic or some convenient other plot exposition fountain will say something like, "King Axelrod the Seventh fought the Danes with the aid of a Sword of Light. We've been unable to find more about that artifact but we believed it was buried with him under Glastonbury Tor."

If you are lucky you can zero in on the country...and century.

I've already got my various exposition machines (narration, dialogue, demonstration...) working at delivering the contemporary world. I consider that the package I'm trying to deliver; for whatever place that book is set in, show off a few things unique to that place and culture. A few things the reader may not have heard of, and a few things they might not have heard about things they already know.

I'm tooling up for the Palais Garnier scene that closes Part II right now. So there is going to be a bit about Phantom but also a few things about the building that you at least need to take the tour to get.

And that's...enough. I don't need to deliver a chunk of history as well. For the Paris book, I think it works. This one is a long musing on the experience of history; how play is necessary, through popular history, fiction, and historical recreation, because that educates and also helps in exploring history, even as it can distort history as well. The metaphor here is the historical treasure hunt through why the two different parties (Penny, and Nathan) chose to do it and what they get out of it, and what the consequences might be both to them and to the actual monuments they are climbing around.

This is a book where I already have Penny replaying memories of incidents and conversations from before the book started, each time looking at them from a new angle, Rashomon style. So it totally works for her to both travel contemporary Paris and to glimpse the 1900's version through the lens of Huxley's memoirs.

Although if I was starting from scratch today, I'd have found ways to have a lot less Napoleon. That is my version of the "greatest hits"; Hux is consciously doing what I'm talking about, using what Penny calls his "scavenger hunt" through clues scattered across Paris to remember the Paris from before the Great War, the Paris of his youth. Nathan has decided the real purpose of the clues is Napoleon's Gold (Penny; "Which gold? There's about a dozen conspiracy theories about Napoleon and hidden gold.")

But I'm thinking this more and more as I think about some of the other books I want to do. I am really thinking the desert one and that might not have a convenient specific chunk of history that can be explored compactly. Also was thinking early space program, but that one is really about retro-history itself; about the specific kind of future that was being imagined in things like the Syd Mead illustrations for American Steel (or whatever that company was) and the paintings commissioned by the L5 Society and so on. And also thinking warbirds in the context of living history versus preservation, and that is probably a lot of WWII stuff but...

And yeah. I already know I would have had an easier write if I had chosen fake history to begin with. Not just because it is less research. And not just because it plots easier; finding a reason to have life-or-death struggles over identification of some Ancestral Pueblo pottery is a lot harder than having that struggle over the Glowing Scepter of Alien Power buried in a booby-trapped pyramid.

But because dealing with the history is just one more thing to try to fold into the already uncomfortable amount of, well, exposition.

(I do have to say; if the Kindle Unlimited numbers can be parsed that way, nobody who gave up on the first book did so over the chapter-long discussion of the Dorian Invasion. They bailed a full chapter earlier, roughly when Penny goes for lunch with the French couple she met on the Acropolis.)