Fiction reflects reality but cannot reproduce every detail. In real life, we have various heads of state, the King of England, the President of the United States etc. In Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, there is an Emperor of Terra. In real life, we can read royal biographies and volumes like
Fear:
Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward. Such works
would be written in the Terran Empire but unfortunately we cannot read any of them. A future historian
could incorporate fictional biographies, documentaries, analyses etc into his series but never as many as exist in real life. We are grateful that Anderson's Technic History
does include
The Earth Book of Stormgate which not only collects twelve of the forty three instalments of this future history series but also presents additional background information about them. Meanwhile, what do investigative journalists record about Emperors Josip, Hans etc?
2 comments:
Take Procopius: he wrote hagiographic accounts flattering Justinian, Theodora, and Belisarius and Antonia.
And then he wrote the "Secret History", which survived only by accident, in which he trashed the lot of them in lurid terms.
Official histories tend to survive... 8-).
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Ha! I have read Procopius' surviving works, including the SECRET HISTORY. That last work is so vicious that it can only be used with caution, because historians can't be sure how much of what was written there was true.
Another example I've thought of was St. Gregory of Tours HISTORY OF THE FRANKS, written not long after Procopius' time. Gregory had his own biases, but he tried hard to be fair about the people he wrote about. And, quite simply, he was a very good man.
Ad astra! Sean
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