{"id":36,"date":"2014-03-28T12:52:51","date_gmt":"2014-03-28T12:52:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/francesthomas.org\/blog\/?p=36"},"modified":"2014-03-28T12:52:51","modified_gmt":"2014-03-28T12:52:51","slug":"past-or-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/francesthomas.org\/blog\/?p=36","title":{"rendered":"Past or Future?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"redcap\"<\/a><\/b><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/b>As I hinted before, one of the reasons I\u2019ve started this blog is that I\u2019m intending to self-publish a trilogy of books set in ancient Greece with a mythological twist. I\u2019ve had the usual reasons which, alas, many writers are familiar with these days from\u00a0 publishers who don\u2019t want to take them \u2013 but one pops up more frequently than most; books set in the past don\u2019t sell, they say.<\/p>\n

The current acceptable mode still seems to be fantasy. I\u2019ve nothing against fantasy; I read fantasy and science fiction with pleasure, and I\u2019ve written fantasy novels myself.\u00a0 But it\u2019s sad that at the moment it seems to be the only thing going. There\u2019s much good fantasy out there, but also plenty of dire stuff \u2013 too many \u2018feisty\u2019 sword-slashing heroines ( why do feisty heroines\u00a0 have to behave like violent men?) too many Chosen Ones finding their way among dragons and orcs and elves to the Throne that awaits them.<\/p>\n

When I was a young reader, there wasn\u2019t that much fantasy around. What I loved, and what expanded and excited my imagination, was historical fiction. Impossible to imagine my reading days without Rosemary Sutcliff, without Geoffrey Trease.\u00a0 Historical fiction, well-told, breathed life into the dull dates and statistics of history lessons , and told us valuable things about how our present world had got to be the way it was. It reminded us that people managed to live, and live full lives, in circumstances which we couldn\u2019t imagine in our comfortable middle-class households, that human nature was really unchanged\u00a0 over the centuries.\u00a0\u00a0 And looking at how the Romans performed their task of conquering the world taught lessons, many not quite comfortable, about how the British had attempted to do the same, and left red smears all over the school maps we then used.\u00a0 I think misguided political correctness was one reason why both conventional history teaching and historical fiction fell out of fashion in the 70s and 80s \u2013 history obviously needs to be taught in a different , less imperialistic way now, but it\u2019s still just as important as it ever was.<\/p>\n

Above all, it was fun.<\/i>\u00a0 I loved charging about in the Middle Ages,\u00a0 or the seventeenth century,\u00a0 or Elizabethan London \u2013 or just about\u00a0\u00a0 any-when as long as it was vividly and imaginatively described.\u00a0 Also, much of it was gender-neutral; boys could identify with heroines and girls with heroes without really noticing that they were crossing the sex-divide. I\u2019ve\u00a0 still got some of those precious books on my shelves now; I\u2019m looking at Ransom For A Knight <\/i>\u00a0by Barbara Leonie Picard,\u00a0 Redcap Runs Away\u00a0 <\/i>by Rhoda Power, The Gloriet Tower <\/i>\u00a0by Eileen Meyler, Sun Faster, Sun Slower <\/i>by Meriol Trevor\u00a0 (great time-travel, this,) lots of Rosemary Sutcliff, of course. Others, equally precious, have got lost, stolen or strayed over the years.\u00a0 Somewhere, there should be, but I can\u2019t find, Henry Treece\u2019s Thirteen Banners <\/i>and\u00a0 Rosemary Sutcliff\u2019s\u00a0 The Armourer\u2019s House <\/i>in a lovely OUP edition with illustrations by C.Walter Hodges \u2013\u00a0 the illustrators were as important to me as the writers; so few books seem to be illustrated any more \u2013 a great shame.<\/p>\n

I think my proudest moment ever as a writer was when Geoffrey Trease gave one of my books a kind review \u2013 I was quite overwhelmed; that someone who was a near-deity of my youth had actually read <\/i>one of my books and had enjoyed<\/i> it was almost too much to take in. I remember I sat down and wrote a gushing over-ebullient letter of joy which I then tore up and reworked through several drafts, cooling it down in a very Lucy-Snowe-ish way until what I finally sent to Geoffrey Trease probably didn\u2019t contain\u00a0 much sense of the excitement which I felt but found so hard to communicate. I\u2019m a bit sorry about that now \u2013 I think I could have gushed a bit more. And he was a nice man \u2013 I\u2019m sure he wouldn\u2019t have minded.<\/p>\n

I know I\u2019m not the only one to be saying these things \u2013 the excellent History Girls blog has been doing great stuff in publicising new historical fiction, and I hope they\u2019re winning the battle for the rest of us.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What other historical novels do my fellow readers remember from their youthful days? Or didn\u2019t you read it at all? Do tell me. I\u2019d love to hear. I hope to print my top ten list in my next blog \u2013 I wonder if you\u2019ll share any of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0As I hinted before, one of the reasons I\u2019ve started this blog is that I\u2019m intending to self-publish a trilogy of books set in ancient Greece with a mythological twist. I\u2019ve had the usual reasons which, alas, many writers are familiar with these days from\u00a0 publishers who don\u2019t want to take them \u2013 but one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/francesthomas.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/francesthomas.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/francesthomas.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/francesthomas.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/francesthomas.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/francesthomas.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40,"href":"http:\/\/francesthomas.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions\/40"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/francesthomas.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/francesthomas.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/francesthomas.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}