Fiction is make-believe. The readers or viewers know it is fake… but believe it anyway. A story is “immersive” when what is imagined seems strangely real. The reader or viewer feels as if in the universe of the fiction.
The setting of my novel Sorcerer of the Realm is this planet as a different world. Like Middle-earth (The Lord of the Rings) and the Hyborian Age (Conan), it is historical fiction customized by its author into fantasy. It is not the magic in all these universes that divorces them from history. It is the alternate history itself.
Middle-earth is Europe… but not really. The Hyborean Age is the Dark Ages… but not really. Sorcerer of the Realm is about World War 2… but not really.
J.R.R. Tolkien wanted an alternate history of the Anglo Saxons as a horse culture. Robert E. Howard wanted ancient Egypt and ancient Greece to be contemporaries of the Cossacks, Renaissance Italy, 18th Century Pirates and the American Wild West. I was fascinated by the idea of the Confederate States of America and the 3rd Reich as contemporaries in the modern day.
Tolkien and Howard wrote classics. People study their lore as if researching authentic history.
Like in The Lord of
the Rings and the Conan stories,
the reality that inspired Sorcerer of the
Realm is recognized, and the recognition gives the fantasy credibility. The
realism must be respected, or the fiction is discredited. The fantastic must be
tempered accordingly.
Nothing comes out of nowhere. You see things and it makes you want to create things.
ReplyDeleteYes. Using reality to express imagination is sharing our fantasies with others by othering them a universal basis of comparison.
DeleteTo make a work compelling, it helps to employ aspects that are real. An alternate history accomplishes this by reminding people about what was and suggesting what could have been. This often creates a longing for an imagined world.
ReplyDeleteIt also takes history out of its box, making thoughts about it outside of the box.
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