#Historical uchrony

[savantefolle]

My reading pile update into the new year

My reading pile update into the new year

A reading pile update for my fans. I am not always writing, and those days of the new year, I am currently reading five very disparate novels. Two SF Canadian authors first: Den Waldron’s Axis of Andes for the historical context of south America before WWII, and The Nightingale’s Tooth by Sally McBride, a fantasy novel set in an historical uchrony. Progressing through Joyce Carol Oates, A Book of…

[ma-chi1993]

💌🍭🤍🎀🌈

💌share something with us about an up-and-coming work (WIP) that has you excited!

There's this fic that it's already finished that it's a 15k long one that I can't wait to post. It's st in the uchrony i created for the 2ps, a sort of au. I'm really excited to make it see the light after weeks, I think i did a good job with 2p!France and his characterization, i'm really proud.

🍭why did you start writing?

At the cost of sounding crazy, I just had too many ideas in my head, I needed to let them out in some way or another. I can't draw for shit, but I realize that I'm pretty decent at writing so I kept goign with that. I've been writing since I was 11, my first fic was about a boyband called Blue and inspired by the videogame Rule of Rose lmao. I've started writing more seriously after I got in Naruto.

🤍what's one fic of yours you think people didn't "get"?

It's more a "I don't think they would get it": it's the series I've made on the 2p. The reason why I didn't translate it it's because I fear people in the international fandom wouldn't appreciate a uchrony, despite tht fact that I know the 2p are more "famous" in the international fandom than in the italian one. I really don't have the strength to deal with weird discourse tbh.

🎀give yourself a compliment about your own writing

Oh lord.

I'm really good at writing emotions I guess?

🌈is there a fic that you worked *really fucking hard on* that no one would ever know? maybe a scene/theme you struggled with?

The amount of research I'm doing for the FraIta one. I'm not kidding when I say I could do an exam about the Congress of Paris in 1856 by now. I never expected that I would stick with the historical context so much tbh. The scene I'm currently writing it's so hard to put down because I didn't manage to find a chronological order of the meetings of the congress, so I have to create an order of my own. I wish it was easier lol

[mask131]

Fantasy read-list: A-1.5

I thought I had concluded the whole “A” part of my big fantasy read-list last spring... 

... BUT FATE WOULD HAVE IT OTHERWISE! In between then and now I found a collection of articles covering the evolution and chronology of fantasy literature, and they added a lot more of titles and informations that I think I will add to my “Fantasy read-list”. 

My original “A-1″ post dealt with works of fiction and poetry that, beyond being masterpieces of the Greco-Roman literature, were the key basis of Greco-Roman mythology as we know it today, and massive inspirations for the later fantasy genre. Here, I will use an article written by Fabien Clavel asking the question “Is there an Antique fantasy?” to add some names to this list.

Not the names of works written in Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome however. No, when it comes to the great classics from “before Christ”, the same names are dropped - Hesiod’s Theogony, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses... The only antique work Fabien Clavel mentions that I did not mention was Lucan’s Pharsalia. Also called “On the Civil War” it is, as the name says, an epic poem retelling the actual civil war that opposed Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great. Why would a historical work fit into the world of fantasy you ask? Because this epic retelling is pretty-fantasy likes, with several omens and oracles of the gods (including trees that start bleeding like humans), and even scenes of necromancy where the ghosts of the dead answer the protagonists’ questions. 

Fabien Clavel’s article, however, focuses much more on the modern fantasy inspired by the Greek and Roman myths, that he classifies into four categories.

1) The retellings. Works of fantasy that retell classic legends or well-known myth of Greco-Roman antiquity. You find in this category the works of the fantasy author David Gemmel, be it his Troy trilogy (retelling of the Trojan war) or his Lion of Macedon trilogy (a more fantastical version of Alexander the Great’s life). You have Gene Wolf’s Soldier of the Mist, about the titular soldier, cursed with both retrograde and anterograde amnesia, and forced to find his way home through mythical Ancient Greece. There is C.S. Lewis’ last novel, Till we have faces, his retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth from The Golden Ass. And in French literature, you have Maurice Druon’s Les Mémoires de Zeus, an autobiography of Zeus himself. 

2) The “feminist” works - which technically are a sub-division of the “retellings”, since they are retellings of ancient legends and tales, but with the twist that the focus is placed on female characters, often side-lined or pushed away from Greco-Roman narratives. In this category you will find Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (the Odyssey through Penelope’s eyes), Maron Zimmer Bradley’s The Firebrand (the Trojan War as told by Cassandra), Ursula LeGuin’s Lavinia (an exploration of the titular character, from the Aeneid). To get out of the  English literature, you will also have the work of the Hungarian writer Magda Szabo, The Moment, or the Creusiad, another Aeneid retelling focusing on the character of Creusa. 

3) The “appropriation” works. No, this is not used in a negative way but a neutral one. In this category, Clavel places all the works that are not a precise retelling of a given myth or legend, but rather a fantasy story reusing the elements, tropes, characters and settings of Greek or Roman mythology. You have Thomas Burnett Swann’s Trilogy of the Minotaur, Guy Gavriel Kay’s Sarantine Mosaic series - and in French literature you have Rachel Tanner’s Le Cycle de Mithra, an uchrony imagining what the world would look like if Mithraism had become the official religion of the Roman Empire instead of Christianity. 

4) The “interaction” tales - aka, fantasy works that take elements of Greek mythology and have them be confronted by elements not belonging to Greek mythology. For example, there is the Merlin Codex series by Robert Holdstock, describing how Merlin the Enchanter resurrects Jason and the Argonauts in the Arthurian world. There is also in France Johan Heliot’s Reconquérants, an uchrony fantasy about a group of lost Roman colonizers who built a second Roman Empire in Northern America, and fifteen centuries later try to return to the “old world” they left behind only to find it overrun with mythical creatures. Finally, Clavel adds the Percy Jackson series, the new best-selling series of teenage fantasy fiction/urban fantasy a la “Harry Potter”, describing the adventures of an American teenage boy discovering the Greek gods moved to America, that he is the son of Poseidon, and that monsters of Greek mythology are trying to kill him. 

Clavel concludes his article by saying how hard it is to pinpoint exactly where the influence of Greek mythology stops in the fantasy world, since elements of Greek legends are omnipresent and overused in the fantasy genre. To illustrate this he mentions the centaurs, that appeared in four of the classic works of fantasy for children that are however VERY different from each other: Harry Potter, the Narnia Chronicles, the Artemis Fowl series, and The Neverending Story. 

As a personal note I will add to this list the recent success of Madeline Miller’s Greek mythology retellings, which I have seen regularly pop up in book shops and that some of my friends fell in love with (I never read them though) - be it her Song of Achilles (the life of Achilles told through the eyes of Patroclus) or her Circe (a novel about the life of the famous Greek witch). 

[verloonati]

VNA #46 Just War, Lance Parkin, 1996

As a rule i detest Nazi uchronies, they are the most unimaginative form of time travel fiction, and almost always rely on using the nazis as pop villains rather than an actual political and militaristic force that commited genocide and expansion wars in the most bloody conflict in human history. Just War is also the second nazi uchrony of the Virgin range. At least, the element responsible for the different course of history is genuinely interesting. The doctor making an oopsie and fucking up history is interesting and the way the doctor is written is interesting enough altough Parkin doesn't seem decided between the manipulative streak of the seventh doctor and the most empathetic, genuinely upset by his action contemplative streak he had since the also people.

Just War is filled with violence whose historical implications put it from tasteless to genuinely upsetting, both because Benny spend most of the book getting tortured by nazis in great detail, or by how companions killing people, including a 17 year old soldier is barely even adressed, and the doctor "suiciding" a guy. Roz doesn't get a break and as usual her b plot is to deal with racism, she gets engaged with a fetishist that proposes after they fucked one time.

Perkin tries to adress how great britain is itself one of the most brutal empires of human history, and that the war wasn't a great moral endeavor of good versus evil but an affair of geopolitics regarding the invasion of an allied power. He fails in this that every sympathetic side character is british or french, and the nazis are of course one dimensionnal. Still, he tries to explain how "from the fascist perspective they are the good guys" by having a very large number of moral arguments on fascism between the main antagonist Steinmann and the doctor.

Since this is doctor who, and the book is dealing with very raw, very real kind of violence, it comes of as gratuitous and utterly tone deaf, because the horrors being discussed aren't removed at all by the layer of fiction. he tries to use the silly time space adventures show to deal with the horrors of world war II. And well it's one thing to argue and depict what societal violence looks like in the form of allegory, it is another entirely to just... depicts it.

3/10 i can see why it is regarded as a classic of the range, it IS very well written, but it's content takes none of the care the issues it depicts demand.

Since i've started reading trough the vna again, here's my opinion about each and every one of them because it's my blog and i do what i want with it

VNA #1 Timewyrm: genesys (1991, John Peel)

Okay, this book is bad, like it's a disaster. The idea of "dr who meets gilgamesh" is pretty good on paper, but damn does this miss the mark at every term.

Every single scene with ace is gross mysoginistic mischaracterisation, Gilgamesh is insufferable, Ishtar is a completely uninteresting antagonist and her motives are cliché af.

At the very least, the stranded Anuans are an interesting twist and the introduction of avram makes for an interesting Change of Pace.

2/10, that was Five hours of my life i'm never getting back

[demoiselledefortune]

Do you know any good reincarnation stories like Please Save My Earth? Don't care if it's manga/tv show/movie/ book/etc.?

If you haven’t checked it out yet, run, do not walk, and check out Bokura no Kiseki. It’s a josei with a similar premise to Please Save My Earth in term of how the reincarnation is handled (aka there’s a set of modern day Japan teenager who are remembering their previous incarnation progressively and figuring things about what happened and there’s some mystery because some people are lying about what incarnation they were before and dealing with those memories when you’re a teenager isn’t always easy and so on) Also the main character is a male character who was a princess in his previous incarnation so there’s that bit of genderfuck fun :)

Otherwise, i think it’s a bit hard to find other works that are in the same kind of ballpark. I’ve heard good thing of Fantastic Children but haven’t checked it out yet myself.

Jo Graham’s historical novels has for premise the idea that her cast of character reincarnates, you might find it interesting.

Kim Stanley Robinson also uses reincarnation as a framing device for his historical uchrony The Year of Salt and Rice but it’s a bit more transparently a framing device but might still be fun.

(I think there’s some celtic fantasy from the 80s i vaguely remember as well but it wasn’t so good)

That’s all i can think of for now. Wish I knew more because i love those sort of tropes.

[gareauxtrains]

I love this story and how Napoleon's ex married the man who would betray him afterwards. I've read accounts on how Napoleon spared Bernadotte in a few occasions because he was married to Eugenie.

I've read a book about this novel and Napoleon's relationship with Eugenie, the book was written during ww2 and while France was occupied. And the author went full uchrony (the Napoleonic uchronies are always the wildest) imagining Napoleon marrying Eugénie, having a son sooner, a son that would be 20 by the time of his father's demise, which would have changed the course of french history... And maybe made us prevail upon the Germans.

I won't unpack all that but I love it when the historian's historic setting mix up with what he's writing about and you can have like a history inside the history.

(Also he compares Napoleon's prose to Rousseau's and like... Émile calm your tits.)

JACOBIN FICTION CONVENTION MEETING 30: CLISSON ET EUGÉNIE (2009)

1. The Introduction

Hello, Citizens, and welcome back to Jacobin Fiction Convention! So, today’s the day we get a rather unexpected author on the scaffold in the spotlight - Napoleon Bonaparte himself! Yes, THAT Napoleon, so you can bet that this is a bit of a unique book.

Turns out in his youth the guy wanted to be an author and wrote the short story we’re about to dissect. Granted, it’s a story he never finished and was apparently extremely embarrassed about it later (I can relate to that), so this is the second reason why this particular review is going to be a unique one. I don’t think we ever had anything unfinished as a topic.

Anyway, you might be asking yourself how exactly I found out about Napoleon’s writing in the first place. For that I have to thank one of the Neighbors, @tairin , who first brought up his writings in conversation long ago. Luckily, the unfinished drafts were published in English in 2009, so translation is available for those who don’t know French. HOORAY!

Unfortunately, the book is a bitch to find online but a website called archive.org came to my rescue like the proverbial cavalry. You do need to make an account there but afterwards it’s possible to borrow this book for 14 days like you would do in a library and read it free of charge. That’s how I read the book, considering the fact that negative reviews of my mutuals made me unwilling to pay money for an ebook or a physical copy.

Is it that bad though? Let’s find out.

This review is dedicated to @tairin , @theravenclawrevolutionary and @michel-feuilly .

Okay, let’s begin!

2. The Summary

The book tells a tragic love story of, well, Clisson and Eugénie. So it’s a romance novel. Also, apparently, a self insert fic with Clisson standing in for Napoleon himself. I have no idea who Eugénie might be though.

People who already know my preferences might remember that romance is my least favorite genre, but I still decided to give the story a chance, so let’s talk about how that decision turned out.

3. The Story

Honestly, it has a lot of romance clichés so the story just wasn’t for me. I didn’t detest it or anything, but I didn’t like it either.

I did, however, appreciate the beginning which shows us Clisson as a talented soldier who is tired of combat and looking for something else in life. It made the narrative just a tad more relatable, in my opinion.

Another point in favor of the story is the fact that Clisson and Eugénie don’t fall in love at first sight and the story takes time for them to develop proper chemistry. I’m not the biggest fan of the “love at first sight” trope so yay for avoiding it!

As for the ending… a bit depressing and anticlimactic but, as someone battling depression, I could relate to Clisson as I had moments where I was close to the headspace he has in the ending. Funny how depression has changed my opinion on some melodramatic moments in media…

4. The Characters

The characters are a bit flat, but not as much as in works of some beginner authors. Since it’s a short story, I’ll only focus on the main characters.

I honestly expected Clisson to be more of a Gary Stu, but I didn’t really get those vibes and could even relate to him towards the end. He has a more gentle, vulnerable side that few people get to see and, at the end of the day, simply craves love and happiness. He is more than just a hero obsessed with war.

Eugénie… I don’t like her and don’t care about her reasoning. I don’t like cheaters. End of story. But I like the fact that she fucked up this way and we didn’t get a blameless perfect love interest. She’s more than that.

Trust me, my first attempts at creating characters were much worse than what we have here.

5. The Setting

I liked some descriptions in the book and, for a short story, Napoleon managed to create settings in a way that’s not bad. Not excellent, but not bad either.

6. The Writing

Personally I don’t really like the writing style, but I tend to have that problem with many works of the past. There’s just too much purple prose for me, but I know that some people appreciate it so hey, you do you.

7. The Conclusion

Overall, maybe I just had really low expectations but… I didn’t hate the story, nor did I like it. Romance genre is just not for me and I’m the absolute last person who should review romance novels.

I went in fully expecting to hate the story, but I don’t. Maybe I just have more patience for beginner authors, maybe I’m just in a good mood. Either way, I can’t quite recommend the book, but I still think it’s an interesting read, if only to get a glimpse into a facet of Napoleon that isn’t talked about much.

On that note, let us finish today’s meeting. Stay tuned for updates, Citizens!

Love,

Citizen Green Pixel