I’m getting critiques back about the first 50 pages of my second draft. Responses are mostly positive: definitely still needs work but it’s evidently it’s a compelling read.
Most of my critique partners aren’t historical fiction enthusiasts so I find their input valuable re: possible cross-genre appeal. One even said that though she’s not a history buff she’d read my book for the alchemy and magic alone.
I never thought I read historical fiction as a child, at least in the “pure” Dorothy Dunnett/Philippa Gregory/Margaret George mold. I preferred “real history” (I cringe at my childhood snobbiness). But after this discussion it occurred to me: I was reading histfic all along. I just found it in other genres.
Take Anne Rice. I was a teenage goth so of course I read and reread her Vampire Chronicles and Mayfair Witches series. Rice typically falls on the horror/fantasy but Lestat and co. survive through pre-revolutionary France and antebellum New Orleans; the Mayfair family moves from England through to the Caribbean and thence to the New World over five centuries.
Octavia Butler’s Kindred also stuck with me. Time travel puts this sobering read squarely in the sci-fi box but Butler’s nuanced depiction of slavery in the American south suggests painstaking research of the type associated with the best historical fiction.
Kage Baker’s Company series goes everywhen: Tudor England (Baker taught Elizabethan English as a second language and it shows) to 17th century Spanish California to the 19th century old west and elsewhere…with time-traveling, historical-artifact-saving cyborgs.
More histfic with scifi/paranormal elements:
Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series goes without saying.
Sarah Waters’ 19th century spiritualists in Affinity and post-WWII haunted house in The Little Stranger
M. J. Rose’s Seduction is a fictional account of Victor Hugo’s seances in search of his daughter’s ghost. Witch of Painted Sorrows involves fin de siècle Parisian occultism and possession.
Deborah Harkness’ All Souls Trilogy has it all: witches, vampires, werewolves, and time travel
The Witch Who Came in From the Cold: John LeCarre-style Cold War spies…with witches
The Voynich Manuscript motivates the antagonist in Linda Lafferty’s The Bloodletter’s Daughter (and oh hey – someone over at CipherMysteries made up a huge list of novels revolving around Voynich)
Chelsea Quinn Harbor’s Saint Germain series – the vampire St. Germain through multiple time periods
Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula series – mixes Victorian vampires and Jack the Ripper
The quality and success of all of these genre mash-ups reassure me that there’s a place for my hybrid WIP someday.
Please share your own favorites in the comments!
Definitely Barbara Hambly’s Asher/Ysidro series, which so far has spanned 1907-1914 (six books and a short story available only as an ebook so far, with a seventh book supposed to come out next year) and has had as background the pre-WWI social attitudes and politics of that time, not only in Britain and Europe but also Turkey, China and other places not usually mentioned in association with the war. Further history and society supplied by James Asher’s memories of his work as a British agent in the Great Game, Lydia Asher frustrations at treatment of women (she’s one of the first female graduates of Oxford’s medical school and has friends who are active suffragettes), occasional flashbacks to Ysidro’s past (he became a vampire during the reign of Elizabeth I), plus the interesting notion that vampires in general don’t deal well with the culture shock of passing time and most are still the products of their various eras and places of origin (and the older ones still have a Catholic/Protestant feud going on). The plots of the fifth and sixth books also touch more than a little on alchemy (some of the characters date back to that era and have whiled away decades and centuries experimenting long after humans moved on to other interests). Current titles are:
Those who hunt the night
Traveling with the dead
Blood maidens
The Magistrates of Hell
The kindred of darkness
Darkness on his bones
Sunrise on running water (short story)
Thanks for replying, and I apologize for my delayed response!
I think I’ve heard of Hambly but for one reason or another hadn’t followed up on it. I’m especially intrigued by the realistic notion that the passage of time might prove a genuine shock to someone so long lived, and that old attitudes would persist.
I think you’d enjoy these books (you’d love the clothing details). Re the vampires and changing times, one thing I really love in this series is that there’s a wide variation in how individuals react … it’s not the same “template” for all. Ysidro is still managing to adapt, a contemporary of his who was a doctor managed to keep up with medicine for many years but then reached a knowledge wall of some kind and still tends to do his cussing in a very Elizabethan manner. A married couple has the wife still doing okay a couple of centuries later while the husband has become severely agoraphobic because he can’t cope with the changes. It’s suspected by some of the characters that reaching a point of inability to change is the most common cause of death in older vampires.