Get a detective fiction fan to read Poul Anderson's Trygve Yamamura Trilogy and short story and his few other detective short stories.
Get a historical fiction fan to read James Blish's Doctor Mirabilis and Anderson's:
The Golden Slave
The King of Ys Tetralogy (with Karen Anderson)
Mother of Kings
The Last Viking Trilogy
Time Patrol series
Would the historical fiction fan stop reading on encountering the fantasy in The King of Ys or Mother of Kings?
The Time Patrol series is strongly grounded in real history from its opening episode and the passages that are either pure historical fiction or historical analysis increase in length as the series proceeds. Would the historical fiction fan become sufficiently interested in this series to continue reading it to the end? Might he then become interested in the discussion of historical processes in other works by Anderson, in particular the Technic History? The Time Patrol series and the Technic History address the past and the future respectively albeit not in the same timeline.
10 comments:
Interesting! I've always thought historical fiction was closely related to historical fantasy/time travel/alternate history in its appeal.
There are plenty of authors who cross over in what they write -- Patrician Finney and Barbara Hambly, for example.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I have read some of Hambly's books: THOSE WHO HUNT THE NIGHT, TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD, and SEARCH THE SEVEN HILLS. That last one esp. interested me because a major secondary character was one of the early Popes.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: try her "Benjamin January" series, set in New Orleans in the 1830's. Catches the alienness of the period very well.
And Patricia Finney (writing as P.F. Chisholm) has done a very good series set on the Anglo-Scottish border in the 1590's -- a fair chunk of my ancestors came from there, and it was a wild old place and time, the peak of the Border Reivers.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
All of these are good suggestions. Alas, so many books we should read, and so impossible to read them all!
That bit about how wild the Anglo/Scottish reminded me of how Henry VIII ravaged Scotland during his final years, what came to be called "England's rough wooing."
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: there aren't many surviving buildings south of Edinburgh that antedate the "rough wooing".
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Absolutely no surprise! What Henry VIII did was more like rape!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: it's interesting to compare Henry and his daughter Elizabeth.
In many ways they were very similar -- similar physically (tall pale red-blond types with high cheekbones), and similar mentally.
They were both highly intelligent, they both had volcanic tempers, and they could both be chillingly ruthless.
But the big difference was that Elizabeth had self-discipline: she was patient, subtle, flexible in tactics even when unbending in her objectives.
The way she wore down Habsburg Spain is an example; it was masterful, wheels within wheels within wheels.
Even when she lost her temper, she did it strategically -- to keep her courtiers and advisors in check, for example.
Probably the differences in their childhoods was the explanation. Elizabeth -had- to learn patience and subtlety, or she wouldn't have survived.
(I think her father's life also gave her a lasting horror of marriage, too.)
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, while still disliking Elizabeth. To say nothing of how, like it or not, she still persecuted Catholics and was the first English ruler to TYRANNIZE Ireland.
MY view remains there was no need for Elizabeth to have gone down the Protestant road in 1558-59. The English Catholics were no threat to her and did not try to prevent her from succeeding Queen Mary. Unlike the Protestants, who tried to install Jane Grey as queen in 1553.
I can see her father's terrifying "family life" scaring Elizabeth away from marriage!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: no, she wasn't the first English monarch to tyrannize Ireland; they tended to vacillate between ignoring the place and beating up on it. Ditto private-enterprise types like Strongbow.
In Tudor times, neglect was no longer an option since improvements in shipping made it a natural 'pointe d'appui' for continental enemies of England to use as a launching pad.
NB: Mary had queered the pitch for English Catholics and identified them with foreign enemies.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
First paragraph: I mostly agree, about English rulers between Strongbow/Henry II and Elizabeth either mostly ignoring or beating up Ireland. But that ignoring was so lengthy that English "rule" was mostly restricted to the Pale of Dublin, with the Irish and Anglo-Norman-Irish barons and chieftains left to their owe devices.
But Richard II is the only other pre-Tudor monarch I can think of who took a serious interest in Ireland, even going there twice. In fact, it was his absence from England during his second Irish visit which allowed Henry of Bolingbroke to return from exile and depose Richard, usurping the crown as Henry IV in 1399. Henry and his successors down to Elizabeth mostly returned to neglecting Ireland, because concentrated attention to Irish affairs could be DANGEROUS.
I agree a rebellious and discontented Ireland became a strategic liability to England from Elizabeth's time onward. But that was because a now Protestant ruled England persecuted and oppressed a stubbornly Catholic Ireland refusing to "conform" to Anglicanism. I don't think a still Catholic England would have been so harsh, with no religious disagreements to inflame relations. Absent that, I think Ireland/England would have bumped along not too much worse than Celtic Brittany did with the rest of France.
I also still believe Protestant domination of England after 1558 was not inevitable. At the very least I think it was so evenly balanced in 1558 that Elizabeth could have chosen not to reverse Queen Mary's policies restoring Catholicism, still the faith, after all, of most of the English.
Ad astra! Sean
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