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This week: On History Edited by: Waltz Invictus  
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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
-George Santayana
It is the soothing thing about history that it does repeat itself.
-Gertrude Stein
Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft.
-Winston Churchill |
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Cultures, in general, aren't blank slates.
In fantasy, or science fiction, or even in the so-called real world, there's a reason for almost every law, custom, tradition or observance. And that reason is somewhere in the culture's history.
Now, I'm aware that history class is one of the least favorite of schoolchildren, second only to math. And yet, when designing a world for your stories, or even when modifying our own, a sense of the history involved gives a reader something to grab on to, some context in which to hold the characters and events of the story.
Obviously, you're not going to be able to come up with thousands of years of detailed history. Even Tolkien couldn't do that. But general trends punctuated by a few key historical figures and events - that, you can do.
But history isn't always laid out in neat rows for us to contemplate, and often, there are at least two perspectives on any historical event.
Here in the US, for example, we're about to celebrate Independence Day, commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Of course, it wasn't actually signed on July 4; the signing took a few months because they took it around via horse, or something. And it was passed by Congress on July 2. And by that time, the war for independence had been going on for about a year, and wouldn't be won until 1783, until which point I expect it was called "evidence of high treason against the King."
Or consider Columbus Day, which... well, look it up yourself. I don't know why we're still observing that.
History is messy, which is one reason people don't like it, but we can't fully understand events of today without considering events of the past. It may seem silly for US students to learn about the Russian Revolution, for instance, but the Russian Revolution led directly to us putting a dude on the moon.
So consider what your fantasy or science fiction cultures celebrate. Wars, important documents, rulers doing stupid things, peasants doing epic things, whatever. It makes for a better story if there's background, even if the background never makes it into the story. |
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Fantasy: July 02, 2014 Issue [#6410]
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