Kassia is a thief and a soon-to-be oath breaker. Armed with only a reckless wit and sheer bravado, seventeen-year-old Kassia barely scrapes out a life with her older sister in a back-alley of the market district of the Imperial city of Corium. When a stranger shows up at her market stall, offering her work for which she is utterly unqualified, Kassia cautiously takes him on. Very soon however, she finds herself embroiled in a mystery involving a usurped foreign throne
and a vengeful nobleman.
When Fantasy Could Be Historical Fiction but Isn’t
Genre
is a funny thing. While the lines
delineating genre have probably been around for as long as books have existed,
it is really in the most recent generations that the explosion of the subgenre
has occurred. Books used to just be
books. Now a reader walking into the
nearest bookstore can order a book like one would order off the Starbucks menu:
‘I’d like a fiction, mystery, half-romance / half-paranormal, with a shot of
psychological thriller, please! Oh, and
I’d like it to go.’
When
I was a child I was drawn to fairy tales and mythic history, to stories that
lived somewhere in that realm where truth and legend collide, where the real
things are tinged with the fantastical.
One of the earliest books to capture my imagination was In the Hall of the Dragon King, by
Stephen Lawhead, followed a close second by his Song of Albion trilogy.
The Song of Albion
trilogy is considered mythic fantasy.
Set in a real, concrete world, it focuses on the Celtic legend of Llew
Silver Hand. Like other legends of old,
mythic fantasy is based on heroes of tradition.
Was
Llew Silver Hand real? How about King
Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table?
Beowulf? Likely all of these men
were real. Their immortalization came
from the performance of a heroic feat or from the completion of a task of such
great immediate importance that the peers of these men perceived what they had
done as something superhuman, even mystical.
So overwhelmed by the amazing exploit, tales were told, quickly taking
on a sort of sentient life. Songs were
sung around home fires and were thusly handed down and passed around from people
group to people group throughout the ages.
As with all good oral cultures, the story grew in the telling, evolving
with each repetition, over and over throughout the centuries. It’s in this crossing of real and history, in
the ever-growing mythos, that we have the beginnings of fantasy.
Mention
the fantasy genre to most people, and immediately the mind will directly
conjure images of wizards, witches, unicorns, dragons and magic in
fairytale-like worlds where the impossible is possible, and a wand-wielding protagonist
saves the day. Harry Potter, The Hobbit
and The Lord of the Rings, The Game of Thrones -- these are undoubtedly
fantasy. The worlds are imaginary, the
people fictitious, there is magic and fantastical beasts, but the feel of the
books echo the historical.
And
yet what if fantasy lacks the magical or even the fantastical? This is the place I found myself when I wrote
The Scribe’s Daughter. My first love is
history and historical fiction, but I knew when I set off to write a book that
I would not write historical fiction.
Instead, I used a sort of cultural familiarity, the world of historical
fiction, as the foundation for my own world building. The world I created in Mercoria has no
fantastical aspects. It is fantasy only
in that the world came from my imagination.
It is like historical fiction in that it echoes historical
realities. My world reflects real,
historical people, places, and cultures even though they never existed. As award-winning historical fiction author
Elizabeth Chadwick said of The Scribe’s
Daughter, “It felt historical without containing any actual history.”
To
me, this is the best of both worlds. My
version of fantasy has the heart of historical fiction without requiring the
constant devotion to exacting research. And
since my characters are fictitious, their timelines were mine to control. They can continue to pretend to be real even
if I’ve never had the heart to tell them they are imaginary! But unlike fantasy, I didn’t have to remain
true to any rules governing the use of magic since there is none.
If
you enjoy historical novels but don’t necessarily need the history, I invite
you to try out the world I have created in my novels The Scribe’s Daughter and The
King’s Daughter, fantasy that reads like historical fiction.
Stephanie Churchill
Stephanie Churchill grew up in the American Midwest, and after school moved to Washington, D.C. to
work as a paralegal, moving to the Minneapolis metro area when she married. She says, 'One
day while on my lunch break from work, I visited a nearby bookstore and
happened upon a book by author Sharon Kay Penman. I’d never heard of her
before, but the book looked interesting, so I bought it. Immediately I
become a rabid fan of her work. I discovered that Ms.
Penman had fan club and that she happened to interact there frequently.
As a result of a casual comment she made about how writers generally don’t get
detailed feedback from readers, I wrote her an embarrassingly long review of
her latest book, Lionheart. As a result of that review, she
asked me what would become the most life-changing question: “Have you ever
thought about writing?” And The Scribe’s Daughter was
born.'
Find out more at Stephanie's website www.stephaniechurchillauthor.com and find her on Facebook and Twitter @WriterChurchill.
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