teaching history through fiction essay

Seeking Truths through Fiction

Historians on Writing Historical Genre Fiction

Alix E. Harrow, Suzanne Marie Litrel, and Laury Silvers | Nov 16, 2021

H istorians jumping genres need not confine themselves to writing traditional historical fiction. Their training and diverse interests lead them to working in all genres, from fantasy to mystery, and to categories such as young adult. Perspectives invited three historians who have published novels to explain how they found their way to genre fiction.

There’s much to enjoy in genre fiction—and readers can find historical stories in all of them, from mystery to fantasy to romance.  Anne Lambelet

Telling the Truth, Slantwise

I grew up on stories, especially ones with magic. Before I could reliably point to Kentucky on a map, my mother’s bookshelves had given me a geography of make-believe: Narnia and Neverland, Middle-earth and Earthsea. I went to more than one midnight book release and played The Legend of Zelda on at least three consoles. In second grade, I carried around Edith Hamilton’s Mythology , and in middle school, I wrote an aggressively awful fantasy novel full of prophecies and unpronounceable names.

But by the time I left for college, I’d decided, with the crippling self-seriousness of adolescence, that I’d grown out of magic. I was always more of a Wendy than a Peter (“one of the kind who likes to grow up”), and the entire fantasy genre suddenly struck me as childish, an extended game of pretend for people who couldn’t face the real world. My mom gave me a brand-new set of my favorite space opera paperbacks as a going-away present. I hid them in the back of my dorm closet.

I majored in history. It was the anti-fantasy, I thought, a serious project of examining the world as it really was. Also, there were no math prerequisites, and a senior in my dorm told me it was “more reading than I could possibly imagine” in a badly misjudged effort to scare me off.

I turned out to be a somewhat erratic historian but a good enough writer to cover the gaps. I tended to skate over the actual labor of historical study: names and dates, material facts, the granular minutiae of the past. But I liked what historians did with those details. I liked the process by which disparate threads became a vast tapestry, a depiction of a time and place none of us had ever seen, and I very much liked arguing about the accuracy of that depiction. My professors called it the historical narrative ; now I think of it as a story.

I hadn’t tried to make up stories of my own since middle school—very few people are as brave at 20 as they were at 12—but in graduate school, I did the next best thing: I studied them. I built an MA thesis around late 19th- and early 20th-century British children’s literature. It felt like pulling off a low-stakes heist. I could indulge in pure fantasy but still have all those serious, important conversations I wanted to have (or at least be seen to have) about power and gender and environment. I could talk about the truth using nothing but lies. I could grow up but still go back to Neverland—at least for a visit.

I should have known I’d never be content with just a visit. One night in January—there is no month longer than a January in Vermont during your second year of grad school—I brought home an extra book from the library. It had nothing to do with my research—it was just a silly paperback fantasy I’d read as a kid. I didn’t remember much of the plot (wizard school? dragons?), but I remembered the soaring, lifting feeling it had left in my chest, and I missed it badly.

I could grow up but still go back to Neverland—at least for a visit.

So I reread A Wizard of Earthsea . And then The Tombs of Atuan  and  The Farthest Shore . They were, in fact, about wizards and dragons, and they did give me that familiar, nostalgic, almost melancholic ache in my chest. But they weren’t silly at all.

Ursula K. Le Guin was an academic before she was an author. Her Wikipedia page has all the most coveted keywords, the ones synonymous with sober, successful scholarship—Harvard, Phi Beta Kappa, Fulbright. But when she published Earthsea in 1968, it was largely ignored by sober scholars of the world, dismissed as children’s fantasy.

Which, of course, it is. But it’s also smart as hell. It’s about power and gender, environment and empathy. It’s a story about a world that never was, and it’s a reflection on the world as it actually is. It’s the truth but told slant. Reading Earthsea that January was the first time I understood fantasy and history not as opposites but as different approaches to the same frustrating, humbling, infinite work: making sense of the world, explaining it to ourselves. Telling stories.

I didn’t do anything dramatic, like quit school or write an instant New York Times best seller. But I felt a subtle shift in my trajectory, like a compass needle sliding away from true north. I started reading fantasy again, not for comfort or escapism but to learn.

Since then, I’ve written a dozen short stories, a couple of novellas, and two novels. They’re shelved differently in every bookstore I’ve seen so far: historical fiction, science fiction and fantasy, young adult, sometimes simply “fiction.” They range from fairy-tale retellings to epistolary adventure novels. But all of them are basically just lies assembled into stories. All of them are trying to tell the truth slantwise. And all of them, of course, have magic.

Alix E. Harrow is the Hugo Award–winning author of The Ten Thousand Doors of January , The Once and Future Witches , and A Spindle Splintered . She tweets @AlixEHarrow.

Time-Traveling Tales for Teens

As a teen, I disliked history. A lot. At my international school in São Paulo, Brazil, our World Civilizations teacher read to us from a textbook on European history. That made no sense. Neither did the fact that we copied prewritten notes from the blackboard and couldn’t ask questions. History was for bores, I decided then—those who memorized information about the dead and cared little for the living. I couldn’t imagine ever wanting to study, teach, or write about the past.

Historical fiction, on the other hand, offered an exciting escape from my tedious 10th-grade present. It also provided the unexpected bonus of exam prep. Long before my decidedly uncool teens, books had been my friends—but never more so than in World Civ. “We’ll start at the beginning, with the Greeks,” our teacher announced. I tuned out almost immediately but connected some of what he wrote to what I had read in Mary Renault’s The Persian Boy . As I took notes, I thought about Alexander’s true love, the Macedonian’s route to India, his disappointment with war-weary men, and his last laboring breaths. The story Renault wrote lent context, a place to park the facts my teacher shared. I could “remember” where I’d been with Alexander, even during exams.

Years later, I found my way to teaching 9th and 10th grade and realized that stories—real or imagined—encouraged my own students too. A few years in, I was assigned to teach AP World History. The course was known among high school teachers for its vast curriculum and subpar exam results, forcing me to retool my style. I began layering memoir and fiction into lessons to kick-start student engagement. Mindful of our 39-minute class periods, I chose pointed excerpts from memoirs and fiction that intersected with course content. These included scenes of China’s Cultural Revolution from Da Chen’s Colors of the Mountain . What emboldened a child to taunt and throw rocks at a former landlord—his own grandfather? We debated “turning points,” animated by Orson Scott Card’s Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus . Would preventing Columbus’s return voyage hold off European conquest in the Americas and impede the transatlantic slave trade? Such discussion helped plunge my students into the past. I stocked relevant fiction in my classroom, with more available in the school library, for extra-credit “book chats.” These made for rich reflection, spurring me and my students to further investigation. They did well on their AP exams, later confirming that stories helped them get past test anxiety and right into the essays.

Jackie Tempo has steered readers to new adventures in teaching and learning far beyond the classroom.

But what, I wondered, could help future high schoolers build historical context they would need? At home, my elementary-age son was drawn to Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House  books. In creating a series that led students through history, Osborne encouraged readers to connect to classroom studies. I wanted to do the same for teens, with the intention of layering in more complex themes and content for their studies. I decided to give novel writing a try.

By my second year of teaching AP World History, my son was in middle school. I wrote at a middle school level but with high school content in mind. I wanted to create an easy, quick read that would provide AP World History students content, context, or both. I began with less-familiar “tricky” topics that teachers tended to skirt but that were deeply embedded in the curriculum. Drawing from my years in Singapore, Brazil, and Taiwan, as well as my graduate work in Chinese studies, I created Jackie Tempo, a time-traveling teen who struggled in both history class and in life.

Jackie learns that books can take readers out of time and place—in her case, to Ming China, colonial Brazil, and 10th-century Dar al-Islam. She finds a magical tome that opens temporal gates and her own worldview. With it, Jackie tracks her missing parents across the centuries. She meets characters long gone and gets caught up in their hopes and fears. Hers is an improbable, dizzying journey, and for educators and historians, it’s a story of time travel perhaps not unlike our own.

Teachers and students have called me Jackie, and this isn’t far from the truth. Jackie Tempo and the Emperor’s Seal includes scenes from my postgrad backpacking trip through China; Jackie Tempo and the Ghost of  Zumbi partially reflects my encounters and experiences in Brazil. After an enriching field trip to a mosque, one 9th grader reflected on his initial hesitation to visit. This prompted me to highlight Abbasid-era culture and exchange in Jackie Tempo and the House of Wisdom . Some characters developed as I was writing, but I also introduced my own friends and mentors to readers. As they did for me, librarians and teachers offer Jackie refuge among books and an appreciation of past and present.

My readers have shared that the Jackie Tempo books steered them to new adventures in teaching and learning far beyond the classroom. At one author visit, a 9th-grade student who read The Emperor’s Seal for his English and social studies classes exclaimed, “I felt like I was actually in China!” In 2019, an early modernist told me she had read The Emperor’s Seal when she was unexpectedly assigned to teach a modern world survey. She had needed a crash course on 16th-century China, and she told me that it helped. And research for the next book prompted me to stop imagining overlooked voices and listen for them myself; I returned to graduate school and earned a PhD in history.

As a disaffected teen, I wanted out of my World Civ class. Historical fiction pointed the way. For some young readers, it shades in unfamiliar landscapes, adding texture to classroom studies. The genre personalizes the past for both students and the instructors who would take them there. After all, isn’t history—time travel—more fun when we have trusty companions by our side?

Suzanne Marie Litrel is the author of the Jackie Tempo novels and an educational consultant. She tweets @slitrel.

Sex & the Medieval Muslim Woman

Umberto Eco quipped that in every instance when critics accused him of anachronism in The Name of the Rose , he was quoting 14th-century texts. I get it. As a retired scholar of early medieval mystic Islam now writing historical mysteries set in 10th-century Baghdad, I, too, face ironic claims of anachronism in my Sufi Mysteries Quartet .

Most concerns arise over the women portrayed in my novels, especially Saliha, a free-spirited, sexy woman unwilling to let men control her. In our present era in which many assume that Muslim women desperately need saving, Saliha comes as a surprise. But as a specialist on women in this period, I can assure my readers that she is not a figment of my contemporary imagination.

I turned to writing mysteries after leaving the academy. I may have been done with academia, but I was not done doing history. The murder at the heart of each book arises from a historical question, and each red herring is a point of discussion on that question. The detailed personal story arcs, the sociopolitical settings, and even lushly described walks across Baghdad are parts of a larger argument I am making about the time and place. In short, I am grinding axes all over these books. I am saying straight-out what I could only hem and haw about in scholarly papers. And much of what I wanted to say was frank talk about the lives of early Muslim women.

All my characters are constructed on figures from the past. Using research in social history, I flesh out hints of women’s lives that come to us through mediated and often meager primary sources, and I bring them to life in my novels. For instance, in Ibn al-Jawzī’s Ṣifāt al-ṣafwa , a male transmitter describes a woman who starved herself for God as having once been “a fattened camel ready for sacrifice.” A woman denying men her body to sacrifice it for God got me thinking about women with the upper hand on male desire: not just ascetics but also those women who reveled in their alluring flesh, married or unmarried, noblewomen or washerwomen.

I may have been done with academia, but I was not done doing history.

I remembered Aisha bint Talha, the niece of one of the Prophet’s wives, who became the basis for Saliha’s character. Shocking stories of her behavior and beauty were widely shared. She refused to segregate herself from men and readily took part in their conversations. Aisha was fun loving, wild tempered, and hot blooded. She refused to cover her face, declaring that the world should know her superiority. This noblewoman was nothing but trouble for her husbands, and they thought she was worth it. In those early reports, she reads like a woman out of a noir movie. I could see Robert Mitchum leaning in to light her cigarette.

And so Aisha bint Talha became Saliha, written as an impoverished woman who escaped to Baghdad from a brutal marriage. A woman done with men except in the bedroom. Men want to protect her, and her refusal to marry spurs a story arc exploring medieval Muslim masculinities spanning three books. Saliha is her own woman, a loyal friend to amateur detective Zaytuna and a lover to Tein, a detective with the Grave Crimes Squad. She works hard, has ambition, and is good in a scrap when a case demands it.

Saliha spurns Tein’s pleas to marry, instead insisting on meeting him for trysts in the hidden doorways of ruined alleys. Women who worked in markets or fields or in the homes of the wealthy had few restrictions on their movements. A widow and a washerwoman like Saliha had opportunities to meet and flirt with men and even find a spot for a clandestine meeting. Unbelievable to some of my readers, yet these meetings happened. Sources such as marketplace inspector’s manuals and the observations of poets, scholars, and intellectuals like the famed al-Jāḥiẓ confirm these brief liaisons and even longer encounters.

But how realistic is Saliha’s insistence on sexual consent? Because married and enslaved women had no social or legal expectation of consent, a few (male) historians argue they did not consider forced sex as a violation. Yet medieval male transmitters passed on reports of free mystic women refusing to marry for this very reason. One account in al-Sulami’s Dhikr an-niswa al-muta ʿ abbidat al-sūfiyyāt describes a free married mystic woman speaking about forced sex in desperate terms, as a violation of her right to intimacy with God. A jurist’s account reveals that an enslaved woman brought her owner to court on charges of sexual brutality. My second novel in the series, The Jealous , addresses these very matters.

The historical axe I’m grinding with Saliha’s character is not to prove there were sexy, independent sidekicks back in the day. Maybe there were, but that is not my point. I am telling the story of a woman who refused to be controlled by men, with all the attendant risks, and, through her character, opening a door to the lives of urban medieval women of her class.

It is a maxim of historical fiction that the author must not “do history,” as it takes away from the story itself, but I have pinned my hopes on Eco’s example. It is possible to educate pleasurably through narrative. I think I succeeded. Well, at least, my novels are taught in university classrooms. Not the same as being an internationally renowned scholar and best-selling author, but it feels pretty darn good. And concerns about anachronisms? They educate too. Surprising readers with medieval Muslim women who demand a say over their bodies may open the reader up to new paths of thought about the Muslim past and the present.

Laury Silvers is a retired historian of early Islam and Sufism and the author of the  Sufi Mysteries Quartet . She tweets @waraqamusa.

Tags: Features Research Europe Global History Latin America Middle East Cultural History Teaching & Learning

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• Sep 26, 2022

Historical Fiction in Middle School: Making Connections and Deepening Understanding

Updated: Nov 30, 2022

Historical fiction...I've found this section of my library to be less frequented than most other sections. Truth be told, I don't ever read historical fiction for pleasure. However, now, more than ever, historical fiction is a great way to put history in context. It allows ELA teachers to sneak in history "lessons" into their daily routine.

Many users of reading workshop tend to do this unit in 5th grade, which is great! I like to revisit it again in 7th, when they can really start handling such mature topics.

Read about what I do with my 7th graders!

As per usual, I do refer to the Units of Study by Lucy Calkins for guidance, but I always add my own flair. The mentor texts in her book really didn't interest me at all and I knew I had to be interested in the topic if I was going to teach it . Either way, this gave me a stepping off point.

For all of my book club units, I provide my students with book lists . I let them choose their book club members (or I choose them depending on group dynamics) first, then they look at my book list. All books are under categories that represent groups of people not typically featured in books. The characters are usually marginalized or treated harshly in some manner. All books also focus on American history.

While this all sounds a bit depressing, well, history is not roses and rainbows, especially American history. I want students to see how we got here, what we overcome, and what we still need to do as a very young country.

The Mentor Texts

I've always been fascinated by Japanese internment. It is hardly every talked about in history books. To be honest, the most I ever heard about it was when I heard George Takei on the Howard Stern show! I love, love, love George Takei and I never knew he was in an internment camp.

So, I started digging around for some texts in this setting. First, I tried Paper Wishes by Lois Sepahban . This is a good choice for a less mature group or if you're doing this with 5th or 6th graders. I just felt it just needed more...feeling. Then, I found We Are Not Free by Traci Chee . Wow. What a book! Each chapter is told from the perspective of a teen in Japanese internment camps, so there is not one main character. However, the way Traci Chee weaves all their stories together is beautiful.

It is a very long text, so I definitely did not read aloud the whole book. I chose excerpts. It was very challenging to find the best ones, but I managed to pair them well with mini-lessons.

The Lessons

I start with building background knowledge . The students really need to know the history they are reading about. I don't go too crazy with this, because I feel a lot comes along with the story. I do get a bunch of books from the library on the time periods of focus. They spend a day or two reading about the time periods.

I also have them keep a slide in their digital notebooks where they can jot what they are learning as they read as well as historical terms that pop up. I felt like my students didn't really do this during their reading last year. I think just getting to the slide, loading it up...it was a hassle. This year, I think I will have them keep a sticky note or two in their texts instead.

Within this unit, I do a lot of standard fiction skills .I like to kick it off with some basic conflict skill (character vs. character, character vs. self, character vs. world). I also have them do character traits. From this, I go deeper, having them focus on how characters respond to trouble. Considering most historical fiction is steeped in conflict, I really like to have them elaborate on this. I also like giving them sentences for them to fill in. This gets them to focus on specific components.

A big part of this unit is getting students to put their stories in context of the times and "expectations" of certain groups of people in the setting. We do a lesson in which a character's internal traits clash with what is expected of them externally. For example, in We are Not Free , Bette, who is Japanese, tries to blend in with American white women, changing her hair, way of speech, etc. Since this is "expected" of her, she assimilates. However, all of this does not help her in the long run. It keeps her blind to what's going on around her. These are the types of thinking I want students to do with their texts, using evidence, of course, to prove their thinking.

Minor characters are a big deal in historical fiction as they have a direct influence on what characters do. Students look for scenes with three minor characters and discuss how THOSE character's perspectives affect the story. Why did the author include these moments? What impact does it have on the events of the story? Even though many of these perspectives are most definitely flawed, it is important to notice their significance.

In regards to setting , I came up with a quick one-pager for this. I have them compare the setting back then to now. They focus on four components: language/communication, physical environment, mood, and social/political/cultural. They do doodle notes comparing the two settings. This allows them to see how America has changed...for better or for worse.

Next up is making connections to history. This is so important. I start with getting the students to think about what is confusing them about their story so far. I know this is a big reason for why I steer away from historical fiction myself. If I am not into the time period, I am bored. I give them time to determine what they are learning about the history and how they could relate it to the text. I try to get them into primary sources, as well.

Making connections from the history to the fiction really allows them to comprehend the story at a higher level.

I do continue with perspective taking . We do a lesson on how perspectives during that timeframe clash. First, they analyze which perspective is dominant, which, most times, is the oppressor. They find text detail that shows each perspective and elaborate on how the powerful group is most usually not being fair.

Since many of these books follow tweens or teens during tumultuous historical periods, it's important to analyze how they come of age. In this case, they look for text detail in which a character had to make a choice . They discuss how their decision made them change. A big part of historical fiction analysis is to determine growth and change of characters, especially if the story features perspectives of oppressors.

Along with this, I have students create pressure maps of their main characters. I give them a template for this. They have to come up with four major pressures their characters face. Oftentimes these pressures are external, societal pressures. They also have internal pressures. They put these into the template. They then write text detail to support their thinking.

It gets them off the screen a bit and it's an artistic way to represent internal/external struggles of the characters.

I also have the students connect their histories to today's events . This is tough for them because not many are up on the times! So, I bring in a a bunch of newspapers. Students peruse the papers and see if they could make any connections. If anything, it's good for discussions.

Our last major lesson of the unit is theme . I have students find three major scenes from their entire book. They then have to highlight lines that connect and explain how they connect. Lastly, they build basic themes based on typical themes one would see in texts.

Bottom Line:

I was super hesitant to do historical fiction, mostly because it's one of my least favorite genres. I think the key to making a unit like this work is catering towards what students are interested in. If they like a certain time period, having them read books during that time period is key.

It truly is an enriching unit that encompasses more than just comprehension. It's super rigorous but rewarding.

You can get this entire unit here!

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Historical Fiction as a Teaching Tool

The youth I work with read almost exclusively nonfiction for school. In history class, their readings are often biographies that have been simplified and sanitized for childhood consumption and histories that focus only on the perspective of a particular individual or group. These readings leave out many historical figures and viewpoints. They also often list one fact after another and do little to nothing to humanize the participant(s). Not surprisingly, the youth don’t especially enjoy reading about history.

When my co-workers and I pull out historical fiction during the literacy part of our afterschool program, the youth are usually reluctant to pick up these books. They prefer to escape into the realms of Dork Diaries and Minecraft books and whatever other fiction is popular that semester. But, when we read to them from historical fiction—as I often do with small groups of fourth- and fifth-grade youth and less frequently with older youth—they want the story to continue. They want to know more about the individuals or time period. They want to know why history in class isn’t as interesting.

And to me, this is where historical fiction plays a critical role in education. It’s one accessible avenue through which youth can learn about parts of history—including people—who are underrepresented in most U.S. classrooms. They can recognize themselves in characters from the Dear America series or identify with young boys who joined in the American Revolution and the Civil War. They can relate to displaced children who don’t seem to belong to any single adult. They can begin to see that there’s a part of U.S. history that looks a little like them.

Here are some recommended readings:

Out of Darkness (2015) by Ashley Hope Pérez unfolds as a story of Romeo and Juliet, set in the late 1930s in the town of New London, East Texas. Naomi, a Mexican-American girl, and Wash, a black boy, fall in love—but the Jim Crow South forbids them to be together. Their narrative is complicated by the fact that Naomi has a white stepfather. The story climaxes with the New London School explosion, which results in many fatalities. Readers bear witness to myriad racial tensions, the restrictions imposed by Jim Crow and how intolerance leads to tragedy upon tragedy. Recommended for grades 9 and up.

Indian Captive: The Story of Mary Jemison (1941) by Lois Lenski tells the true story of a young white girl captured by Seneca tribe members in 1758. When she is given the chance to return to white settlers, she refuses as she’s found love and refuge in the arms of her adoptive family and no longer understands the ignorant cruelty and intolerance exhibited by settlers. The book is based strongly on Mary Jemison’s experience and her own writings. Recommended for grades 4-8.

The Book Thief (2005) by Markus Zusak is set in Germany in 1939. Death, as the narrator, depicts individuals who act with compassion and bravery during the horror of this time period. This book emphasizes the value of knowledge as an equalizing force in society and how groups that wish to forcefully take power can see knowledge as dangerous. Recommended for grades 6 and up.

Orphan Train (2013) by Christina Baker Kline is suitable for high schoolers who are strong readers. It depicts a forgotten portion of U.S. history: the orphan trains that began in the mid-19th century and transported “orphaned” children from the East Coast to the Midwest, where they often became something like indentured servants. The book depicts racism, growing up within the foster system and how to accept oneself. Recommended for grades 9 and up.

Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes (1977) by Eleanor Coerr highlights the short life of Sadako Sasaki, who developed leukemia as a result of the atomic bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima. It’s useful for peace education, in particular for talking about the unintended consequences of our actions. Recommended for grades 5 and up.

Bud, Not Buddy (1999) by Christopher Paul Curtis follows the story of an orphaned 10-year-old boy during the Great Depression and the Jazz age as he tries to find his father. Curtis addresses issues of homelessness, poverty, racism and cruelty. By doing so, Curtis allows readers to empathize with a person who is experiencing all of these things or to reflect on their own experiences.

There are, of course, so many beautiful works of historical fiction that can be used to help students understand history and to help them learn acceptance and compassion. What are some of your favorites? Please share them below in the comments section.

Clift works in an after-school program for youth and as the communications intern for the Colorado Coalition Against Sexual Assault.

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Traveling the Road to Freedom Through Research and Historical Fiction

• Resources & Preparation
• Instructional Plan
• Related Resources

In this lesson, middle-school students read historical fiction to gain an understanding of an important period in American history. Understanding the beliefs and motivations of people from the past helps students make sense of historical events and the circumstances leading up to these events. Students also have the opportunity to work together through online research (i.e., WebQuest) and book discussion groups to analyze different historical perspectives and to use this information to create a fictional character for an original piece of historical fiction.

From Theory to Practice

• Integrating literacy activities into a social and cultural context in the classroom positively influences a student's intellectual process.
• Literature should be an integral part of student's inquiry and meaning constructions of the world.
• Students can find little meaning in history unless they are helped to understand the point of view of a participant.

Common Core Standards

This resource has been aligned to the Common Core State Standards for states in which they have been adopted. If a state does not appear in the drop-down, CCSS alignments are forthcoming.

State Standards

This lesson has been aligned to standards in the following states. If a state does not appear in the drop-down, standard alignments are not currently available for that state.

NCTE/IRA National Standards for the English Language Arts

• 5. Students employ a wide range of strategies as they write and use different writing process elements appropriately to communicate with different audiences for a variety of purposes.
• 6. Students apply knowledge of language structure, language conventions (e.g., spelling and punctuation), media techniques, figurative language, and genre to create, critique, and discuss print and nonprint texts.
• 7. Students conduct research on issues and interests by generating ideas and questions, and by posing problems. They gather, evaluate, and synthesize data from a variety of sources (e.g., print and nonprint texts, artifacts, people) to communicate their discoveries in ways that suit their purpose and audience.
• 8. Students use a variety of technological and information resources (e.g., libraries, databases, computer networks, video) to gather and synthesize information and to create and communicate knowledge.
• 11. Students participate as knowledgeable, reflective, creative, and critical members of a variety of literacy communities.

Materials and Technology

• Escape North! The Story of Harriet Tubman by Monica Kulling (Random House, 2000)
• True North by Kathryn Lasky (Point Signature, 1998)
• Nightjohn by Gary Paulsen (Laurel Leaf, 1995)
• Chart paper
• Computers with Internet access
• Book Discussion Group Roles and Procedure
• Novel Discussion Questions
• Character Role: Graphic Organizer
• Character Motivation Brainstorming sheet
• Character Sketch Handout
• Road to Freedom WebQuest Rubric
• Historical Fiction Analysis Rubric
• Road to Freedom: Historical Background

Preparation

Student objectives.

Students will

• Analyze the character traits, motivations, and actions of a real and fictional historical figure
• Develop criteria for historical fiction and assess a novel for its ability to meet these criteria
• Evaluate a variety of historical perspectives and apply one of these perspectives to the creation of a fictional character
• Create a piece of historical fiction that incorporates mood and the required elements of fiction (i.e., setting, plot, and characterization)

Lesson 1 (Five 45-minute class sessions)

Lesson 2 (fifteen 45-minute class sessions), lesson 3 (five 45-minute class sessions depending on computer access), lesson 4 (five 45-minute class periods and work at home).

• Debate the sides of slavery in the roles of their characters.
• Have students write letters to Congress opposing or supporting Kansas as a slave state based on their research and the characters they created.
• Explore the use of quilts and spirituals in the Underground Railroad movement and create their own songs or quilts.
• Use the criteria for historical fiction to evaluate other period novels.
• Create a "fictional" biography of the character they developed.

Student Assessment / Reflections

• Review the completed Character Sketch Handout and Character Motivation Brainstorming sheet to ensure that students are able to use their online research to infer the perspectives of a character who may have lived during the time period.
• Assessment for the reading and initial research aspects of this unit will be determined through teacher observation and anecdotal notes based on class discussion and book discussion groups, as well as through final discussion of the process at the end of the unit (see Lesson 4).
• Use the Road to Freedom WebQuest Rubric to evaluate students' work on the Road to Freedom WebQuest and their written pieces of historical fiction.
• Have students prepare a written analysis of the historical novel they are reading based on the criteria they generated in Lesson 1 and include specific evidence or examples from the novel to support each of the criteria. Use the Historical Fiction Analysis Rubric to assess their analysis.
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Students write original short works of historical fiction in verse format, modeling the style Hesse used to write Out of the Dust .

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Build Your Stack: Preparing to Teach Historical Fiction

NCTE 09.18.18 Booklists

This blog post is part of Build Your Stack , ®  a new initiative focused exclusively on helping teachers build their book knowledge and their classroom libraries. It was written by NCTE member Anna J. Small Roseboro.

As a veteran teacher of over thirty years, I should have known better. But that first year, I was so excited about getting into the book, I forgot to prepare students to get through the book. I just didn’t think about how few contemporary students have the prior knowledge to understand subtleties in a work of historical fiction set in the United States and Vietnam of the 1970s and earlier. I just jumped right in and had to backtrack and start the unit again.

Prior knowledge, you’ll recall, is a combination of the preexisting attitudes, experiences, and knowledge students bring to their reading. We teachers sometimes have to provide that knowledge before teaching a specific piece of literature.

Early in the novel, the mother counsels her daughter, “Keep what you see behind your eyes, and save what you think under your tongue. Let your thoughts glow from within. Hide your true self” (41) My students were appalled. They found this advice deceptive. “How,” they wondered, “can a mother give this kind of advice to a child? She’s teaching her to be a phony!” They needed some social context to understand why the mother gives this advice.

This was just one of several social or cultural values and political issues easily explained with a couple of appropriate slides , so I quickly researched and created slides with maps, pictures of clothing, religious and television references, and political and historical issues of the time. I also conferred with the US history teacher, borrowed video, and showed clips from PBS documentaries on US involvement in Vietnam. That first year, I did it all myself.

However, I’ve stopped being the sole provider of background information, realizing how much better it is for students to develop prior knowledge than to be given it.

Today, if I were teaching historical fiction in a school setting with ready access to the Internet, I would plan a two-day in-class assignment for students to do research themselves. I would create prompts to guide pairs/triads or small groups to prepare 3-4 slides each on various topics to show to the class.

Creating their own background knowledge would enhance the study of the book while offering the opportunity to hone myriad other English language arts skills required in that course like research, oral presentation, collaborative learning, and, eventually, critiquing and evaluating texts.

You’ll find your students, too, will have more buy-in to reading when they see how their research fits with that done by their classmates, and they all will better understand the novel when they get to the parts related to their own research.

Here are three ideas to get into, through, and beyond this or other works of historical fiction.

1. GETTING INTO THE BOOK: Researching for Prior Knowledge .

Three-class-period assignment practicing and presenting with low-tech media and visuals. Create a list of key people, places, and events that help shape the historical fiction book you are teaching.

• Class period 1: Small groups research a person, a place, and an event.
• Class period 2: Students create three to five slides to share what they’ve learned in a 6-7 minute presentation during which each member speaks.
• Class period 3: Students share what they learned in their research. (Have groups meet at the start of the class meeting to review their roles and upload their slides on the class computer.)

2. GETTING THROUGH THE BOOK: Connecting to Current Events .

Once students have met the main characters in the historical fiction book you’re teaching, invite them to choose one character and decide what current event that character would be interested in. They should be prepared to explain what they’ve learned about their chosen character and reasons why the current event would interest that character. See a sample assignment here .

3. GETTING BEYOND THE BOOK: Considering Poetry as Response to Historical Fiction.

Reading poetry will help students understand varied responses to the Vietnam War, or to the historical fiction work you’re teaching. See examples from the Poetry Foundation . Set up four groups in which students work together to first read the introductory paragraph for each historical period and then select three poems to share with the class in a 5-6 minute dramatic reading. Or have students write their own individual or group poem in the form of a pantoum to focus on a person, place, or event they’ve learned about in the historical fiction book they’ve just read. Learn more about pantoum poems here .

Have an idea for a Build Your Stack blog post? We’re now accepting submissions from NCTE members! Learn more and submit  a post today.

Anna J. Small Roseboro, a National Board Certified Teacher, has over four decades experience teaching in public and private schools, mentoring early career educators, and facilitating leadership institutes. She received Distinguished Service Awards from the California Association of Teachers of English (2009) and the National Council of Teachers of English (2016).

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Teach History Through Fiction

History has always been a source of inspiration for novelists – so why not use their stories to awaken new enthusiasm for the subject in your students, asks Lynn Brittney…

Teaching history can be hard at the best of times. It has become an undervalued subject in the curriculum, fuelled by the fact that (possibly at least in part due to the emphasis placed on English and maths for accountability measures) primary schools seem to have marginalised it so much that secondary schools are having to play catch up in Years 7 and 8. How to awaken interest, then, in a subject barely covered in the early years of a child’s education?

This brings me neatly to the value of historical fiction in the teaching of history – and books, perhaps, to be recommended to pupils to awaken an interest in a particular topic. There are, to my mind, two types of historical fiction to consider.

One is where an author has taken real characters from history and ‘fictionalised’ their thoughts and motivations in a specific period. The second is where a writer has created a fictional character or characters and gets them to live through a real moment in history.

Real characters

Let’s look at the first one – real characters in history. Possibly the greatest author in this field is Jean Plaidy, my personal favourite. She wrote an astonishing number of books during her life, of which 91 were historical novels. She covered virtually every period of British history and some European.

The research for her novels was extensive and, unusually, her early editions carried a bibliography in the back of all the works by eminent historians that she had consulted. Her stories are vivid and compelling, and the perfect fuel for imagination.

Another author with this talent is Philippa Gregory. In 2013, Helen Brown of The Telegraph wrote that ‘Gregory has made an impressive career out of breathing passionate, independent life into the historical noblewomen… remembered only as diplomatic currency and broodmares.”

However, much as I admire the two authors above, they tend to excel, mostly, in writing female characters, which does not necessarily help when trying to coax boys into an appreciation of history.

When we move into novels in which fictional characters live through real moments in history, we perhaps fare better.

Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon novels, in which a fictional warrior called Uhtred becomes involved in the making of England under the leadership of Alfred the Great, have been brilliantly translated into The Last Kingdom series for TV.

The books are bloodthirsty, no doubt, but a powerful depiction of life in Anglo Saxon/Viking England, which was indeed often brutal.

Another of Bernard Cornwell’s strong fictional male characters is Captain Richard Sharpe, the hero of the many Sharpe books (and the TV series) set mostly during the Peninsular War (1807-1814).

Ordinary struggles

But it doesn’t have to be just swordplay that entices boys into reading historical novels. A recently published book, The Malinovsky Papers , by H Jones, has as its hero a teenage boy who lives through the Russian Revolution and the fate of the Imperial family.

It has been praised for its detailed account of what the Revolution was like for ordinary people, and the moving story of a young man struggling to come to terms with tragedy. And perhaps we should not forget the novels of Mary Renault, set in Ancient Greece.

They have been praised, in their time, for their accuracy in depicting the life and times of the Greeks, but also for a sympathetic portrayal of male homosexuality.

Sometimes, it can seem difficult to find historical novels that might appeal to both boys and girls; but it’s not impossible.

Geoffrey Trease, for example, wrote over 100 historical novels for children and deliberately set out to appeal to both sexes by always writing a strong female character into the plot as well as an appealing hero.

In my own Nathan Fox trilogy, about the Elizabethan boy actor trained as a spy, he is always joined in his adventure, much to his chagrin, by his feisty and skilled older sister.

Bernard Cornwell probably says it best, on his own website: “One of the joys of historical fiction is that it leads people to reading the ‘real’ history – the non-fiction books.”

Lynn Brittney ( @LynnBrittney2 ) is a novelist and playwright. The Nathan Fox trilogy, an Elizabethan spy series for readers aged 9+, is published by Iris Books .

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History and Speculative Fiction pp 1–25 Cite as

Introduction to History and Speculative Fiction: Essays in Honor of Gunlög Fur

• John L. Hennessey 2  
• Open Access
• First Online: 15 December 2023

890 Accesses

This introductory chapter makes the case that despite different epistemological starting points, history and speculative fiction are both arguably “literatures of cognitive estrangement.” Both can help expose invisible problematic aspects of their authors’ and readers’ societies and suggest possible solutions or futures. Summarizing relevant existing literature and theoretical perspectives, the chapter suggests the usefulness of the postcolonial concept of concurrences for both modes and different possible ways to define the two. It also investigates the relationship that history and speculative fiction have to colonial ideology and ecocriticism, as well as presenting the structure of the book.

You have full access to this open access chapter,  Download chapter PDF

Anyone can identify what seems odd or false in the mental habits of an alien “somewhere.” But if something is the very texture of any insider’s thought, anywhere, it is the work of genius, not of ordinary men and women, to think that one’s thought is wrong. That is why I suggest that it is important to complement… [the] strategy of making the strange familiar, with the opposite one of making the familiar strange. (Fields and Fields 2012 , 223)

History and speculative fiction have different epistemological starting points; simply put, history is based on fact and speculative fiction, as manifested by both parts of its name, is not. Nevertheless, when at their best, the two perform similar work in “making the strange familiar” and “making the familiar strange” by taking their readers on journeys through space and time. Excellent history, like excellent speculative fiction, should cause us to reconsider crucial aspects of our society that we normally overlook or else help us to break free of such discursive constraints through the process of familiarizing ourselves with radically different forms of social organization, whether in the factual past or the fictional future (or past or present). This applies especially to the subtle structures of power that organize our own societies, whether through notions of gender, race, coloniality, or others that we do not so readily imagine. These structures become most apparent in liminal spaces between cultures or in contacts between societies, a phenomenon that Gunlög Fur has explored through the concept of concurrences . As will be described in more detail below, concurrences describes separate, parallel worlds or cultures that operate according to different internal logics, but come into contact, generating complicated relations of agreement and/or competition (Brydon et al. 2017a ).

How varied can the organization of human society be, and what are the common denominators between different cultures and lifeways? How do we define the “human” and imagine its relationship to what we accordingly define as “non-human”? Are the different societies imagined by the authors of speculative fiction viable in real life (whatever that means) or too “inhuman” to be plausible? To what extent are historians able to immerse themselves in and understand the world of past individuals who lived in vastly different social arrangements, and to what extent are they limited in this endeavor by their own cultural baggage?

These questions pose great challenges, but working through them also holds the promise of exposing unjust and discriminatory power structures within societies, promoting understanding between societies and maybe even preparing humanity to cope with crises, whether pandemics, climate change, or currently unimaginable future issues. In this, history and speculative fiction, which have hitherto seldom been considered together (at least from the history side), may be able to learn from each other and even become allies. Despite their different premises, is the knowledge generated by each somehow compatible or complementary? How might historians become better equipped to study the past through a consideration of fictional societies, and how might authors of speculative fiction write better works with more nuanced understandings of history? How might a more profound understanding of historical approaches help literary scholars in their work?

With contributions from a variety of disciplinary perspectives that consider diverse examples of speculative fiction and historical encounters, this volume provides a robust opening to a serious discussion of these questions. At a time that the discipline of history has been described as being in deep crisis even as historical claims are increasingly mobilized in the service of political battles and identity creation (Bessner 2023 ), a productive engagement with speculative fiction may provide one avenue for reinvigorating the discipline and creatively addressing future challenges. The authors of this volume hope in any case that this book will be a fitting tribute to 30 years of groundbreaking scholarship and conscientious teaching by our colleague, mentor, and friend Gunlög Fur, not least through new applications of the concept of concurrences .

Concurrences

To see and name emergent patterns of globalization, and to look again at the histories that have brought the world to this place, requires experimental methodologies that proceed from fresh assumptions about modes of knowing and value. (Brydon et al. 2017a , 30)

The present volume shares the same overarching concern expressed here by Diana Brydon, Peter Forsgren, and Gunlög Fur in finding creative new methods to understand human societies. The method that these two literary scholars and one historian argue for in the anthology from which this quote is taken, Concurrent Imaginaries, Postcolonial Worlds: Toward Revised Histories ( 2017b ), is Gunlög Fur’s postcolonial concept/methodology of concurrences . One of the key aims of History and Speculative Fiction , both here and in the chapters that follow, is to demonstrate that concurrences and speculative fiction are especially productive in combination, in several different ways. Both center around the meeting and evaluation of different cultures, languages, and ways of life. As described in more detail below, science fiction has strong ties to historical colonialism and, like the postcolonial concept of concurrences, is unusually well-suited to critique its legacies. Moreover, history and speculative fiction can be understood as concurrent modes of exploring the human condition and shaping our view of possible futures. Perhaps most importantly, speculative fiction is an especially apt tool for helping us to understand the meaning and significance of concurrences and explore its potential, while concurrences as a critical historical method offers the possibility of enriching and overcoming the colonial tropes that still shape much science fiction.

But first it is necessary to better explain what concurrences is. As Brydon, Forsgren, and Fur themselves admit ( 2017b , 15), concurrences can be challenging to understand abstractly. The concept was developed to better explain the meeting of two different cultures, epistemologies, or value systems, a situation that frequently arose historically in the context of colonialism. Such meetings were particularly frequent and important in the early modern contact between Europeans and Native Americans, Fur’s primary area of expertise. As Fur herself explains,

“Concurrences”… refers to disparate spheres of existence and meaning that are interlinked but do not necessarily overlap and are not organized hierarchically—even though asymmetrical power-nexuses will influence these relations. The nature and evolution of these power-relations, however, are questions of historical study and context, not an organic or essential (or theoretically predictable, or even predestined) aspect of these relations. (2017, 54)

Concurrences seeks to understand this contact between different “spheres of existence and meaning” without privileging one or the other, but also without naïvely ignoring the presence of the very real unequal power relations that such meetings often involve. As an approach, it does not view these inequalities as inevitable or reflecting the essence of either sphere, however; to do so would risk perpetuating colonial tropes like that of the “dying race” (see, for example, Brantlinger 2003 ) or the superiority of certain forms of “civilization.” “To think in terms of concurrences is to reject both binary models of opposition and absolute models of relativism,” as Brydon, Forsgren, and Fur put it ( 2017b , 11). Concurrences aims therefore to complicate our view of the world by bringing in multiple perspectives, while not falling victim to either absolute relativism or conceiving of these meetings on an idealistic plane outside of real-life power differentials on the one hand, or oversimplified, stereotypical, or Manichean views of cultural difference on the other.

Concurrences is not about a meeting on “neutral ground,” but often involves competing claims, or what Fur frequently refers to as “jurisdictions”:

It is not the multiplicity of histories per se that interests me but the way in which they become entangled, ensnared by their competing jurisdictions. Concurrences points to those zones of entanglement where simultaneous presence in time and space reveals not only separate claims on jurisdiction but also how people deal with difference and similarity, closeness and distance, in ways that belie simplistic categorizations and predetermined hierarchies. (Fur 2017 , 46)

As such, the notion of place or spatiality is central to concurrences, both in terms of the real-world situatedness of such encounters and in the importance of the place from which the scholar is researching and writing. Like many postcolonial approaches, concurrences argues that researchers should pay especially close attention to their own specific baggage and remain humble to the fact that they will only be able to see an incomplete picture of the phenomena they are studying (Fur 2017 , 40). This applies to all of the different epistemological positions, “worlds,” or “cultures” involved in concurrent meetings; echoing Donna Haraway, Fur makes sure to point out that it is a mistake to romanticize “the other” or succumb to the temptation of “uncritically favouring subjugated or subaltern perspectives” (2017, 49).

Fur chose the term concurrences because it contained a richness of meaning, with different connotations that capture the different perspectives and approaches described above. Besides the most common present-day meaning of “simultaneous,” concurrence can signify both agreement or (in its archaic English form or current Swedish form) competition, reflecting the different possible results of contact between different worlds.

A term such as concurrences , then, contains in its bag of meanings both agreement and competition, entanglement and incompatibility as it slides uneasily across time (“archaic” noun-forms) and space (different languages). It signals contestations over interpretations and harbours different, diverging, and at times competing claims that will inflect studies of things such as home, travelling, subjectivity-identity, voice, and space. (Fur 2017 , 40)

Like much speculative fiction, Fur’s concept of concurrences suggests that understanding other cultures, lifeways, languages, and epistemologies that one comes into contact with is difficult, but possible (within certain limits set by one’s own cultural baggage), and above all, important.

Many works of speculative fiction dramatize the meeting of mutually incomprehensible societies or worlds described by concurrences . In science fiction, difference is typically represented by alien species, as effectively demonstrated by Ella Andrén in her chapter on Star Trek . Even if Babel fish or universal translators are a frequent convenience in science fiction that allows authors to circumvent, instead of exploring, the difficulties of translation and epistemology involved in concurrent encounters, there are still countless examples in which these very difficulties form the crux of the story. This is a central theme in Charlie Jane Anders’ novel The City in the Middle of the Night ( 2019 ), explored in Karen Ordahl Kupperman’s chapter, which draws insightful parallels between the regimented colonial society of the planet January, that depicted in Harry Martinson’s Aniara (1956) and that of colonial Jamestown. Children of Time ( 2015 ) and Children of Ruin ( 2019 ) by Adrian Tchaikovsky, the Binti stories by Nnedi Okorafor ( 2015 ), and A Memory Called Empire ( 2019 ) and A Desolation Called Peace ( 2021 ) by Arkady Martine are only a few other recent examples that come to mind. Even Star Trek: The Next Generation , with its heavy reliance on universal translators, dramatized the difficulty of understanding a completely different way of communication (however implausible) in the episode Darmok (1991) . These examples mostly have happy endings in which some form of mutual understanding is established, but there is also a tradition in science fiction that emphasizes the impossibility of understanding alien others. This is true of Stanisław Lem’s Solaris ( 1961 ), Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama ( 1973 ; at least before the sequels were written), and Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic (1972) [ 2012 ]), all of which involve encounters with extremely powerful, but completely inscrutable aliens.

I would argue that one of the best dramatizations of concurrences in speculative fiction, and one that can help us to better understand and reflect on the term itself, is Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life ( 2002 , originally published in 1998). This award-winning novella was the basis of the film Arrival ( 2016 ), but the original story has certain key differences. In a few dozen pages, the story richly connects profound reflections on linguistics, parenthood, the nature of time, and epistemology. But it is the contact between two previously isolated species or civilizations and their worldviews that is the most relevant for a discussion of concurrences. In the story, humanity is unexpectedly visited by an advanced alien race, which they call “heptopods.” The heptopods remain in orbit around Earth but send down 112 “looking glasses”—a kind of two-way audiovisual communication device through which they come into contact with humanity. The story centers on the narrator, Louise Banks, a linguist, and Gary Donnelly, a physicist with whom she is paired in order to establish communication with and study the heptopods, under the command of the U.S. Military. The military officers and other representatives of the U.S. Federal Government represent a narrow-minded, binary approach to otherness. They are completely flummoxed by the intentions of the heptopods, whom they perceive first as a military threat and later, greedily, as a potential source of advanced technology. Frustrated by the government’s lack of flexibility and creativity in this first human contact with an alien species, the researchers, who are driven primarily by a will to understand the heptopods, come to a far deeper, though still incomplete, understanding of these visitors.

As Louise slowly comes to comprehend the heptopods’ significantly different language, one of Gary’s physicist colleagues finally makes a breakthrough after weeks of being unable to communicate about physics concepts when the heptopods react with understanding to a description of Fermat’s principle. The resulting physics discussion is (predictably) omitted in the Hollywood movie but is arguably essential to the plot of the story. In discussing Fermat’s principle, which describes how light always “chooses” the fastest path between two points, even when traveling through different, refracting, mediums, a key difference between human and heptopod epistemology comes to light. Donnelly explains that laws of physics are typically expressed in causal terms, but that mathematically, it is just as correct to describe them in other terms, as variational principles: “The thing is, while the common formulation of physical laws is causal, a variational principle like Fermat’s is purposive, almost teleological” (124). As stated even more clearly later,

The physical universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one causal and the other teleological, both valid, neither one disqualifiable no matter how much context was available. (133)

It dawns on Louise that the heptopods’ language and physics reflect an entirely different epistemology and way of relating to time: humans have a “sequential mode of awareness” and heptopods a “simultaneous mode of awareness” (134).

As Louise increasingly masters their written language, she begins to think like the heptopods and suddenly has access to her own “memories” from the future. Unlike in the movie, however, Louise realizes that she cannot use her knowledge of future events to affect them:

Freedom isn’t an illusion; it’s perfectly real in the context of sequential consciousness. Within the context of simultaneous consciousness, freedom is not meaningful, but neither is coercion; it’s simply a different context, no more or less valid than the other… But you can’t see both at the same time. Similarly, knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future… (137)

In the story, this is not a “gift” from the heptopods, per se, but a result of Louise understanding their worldview, albeit one that she cannot completely share. A mutual exchange does play a role in the story, however. At the insistence of the researchers, the government decides to eschew attempts at trade and instead engage in mutual “gift-giving” with the heptopods. In the movie, the heptopods intentionally “gift” humans the ability to see into the future as a kind of quid pro quo arrangement (so that humanity will be able to help the heptopods in the future), but in the story, the gift giving is much freer, more whimsical, and of less perceived value to the U.S. government. In the end, the heptopods leave as mysteriously as they arrived; Louise has gained new perspectives on the universe but still does not fully understand the heptopods or their motives.

In many ways, Chiang’s story demonstrates the concept of concurrences . The heptopods consistently resist human governments’ attempts to place them into predefined categories or understand them according to human cultural logic; it is only through curiosity, openness, and a cognizance of their own subject positions and cultural embodiments that researchers like Louise are able to come to a greater understanding of them. The gift-giving paradigm that the heptopods positively respond to is also emphasized in the theorization of concurrences. Based on calls from indigenous scholars, gift-giving is highlighted as “a proper stance for academic intercourse”—the free exchange of stories and knowledge (Fur 2017 , 41). Most interestingly, Chiang’s story, like much of his work, can be characterized as “hard science fiction,” engaging in an informed way with physics, linguistics, and mathematics. And yet, Story of Your Life still embraces the possibility of multiple but equally “true” worldviews, even when it comes to fundamental scientific principles. The story therefore not only illustrates concurrences in a particularly nuanced and striking way but also demonstrates how multiple epistemologies or worldviews need not be merely the fantasies of “soft” subjects within the humanities and social sciences but that the social construction of even the “reality” of the universe may be mathematically plausible. Explicitly or implicitly, the rest of the chapters of this volume explore the productive synergies between history and speculative fiction through the lens of concurrences.

Distinguishing Between “History” and “Speculative Fiction”

Concurrences , then, is arguably a productive way of conceiving of the relationship between history and speculative fiction, but implies that they are separate logics or fields that can intersect in complex ways. Such a sharp distinction, however, is not uncontroversial. The difference between history and fiction has been the subject of debate for centuries, although the attempt to make history a more “scientific” discipline in the nineteenth century is generally seen as a turning point, with the creation of a sharper boundary between the two (see, for example, Burke 2012 ). More recently, the debate flared up and became the subject of countless articles and books in the final decades of the twentieth century, with Hayden White as a major figure of controversy. As David Carr has pointed out, both the positivist defenders of historical “objectivity” and many critics, like White, who argue that history is inherently more literary than these positivists would like to admit, share the same assumption that “creative” or “literary” elements in historical studies are suspect and that fiction is analogous to falsification or deception ( 2004 ). In fact, as Carr astutely argues, novelists are hardly deceptive, as it is clear from the context in which their works are read that they are not intended to be taken as “true.” Nor does the use of literary elements automatically invalidate historical research; the distinction is rather one of the intentions. Both history and fiction can use similar techniques, but history is characterized by its production of “assertions, theories, predictions, and in some cases narratives, about how the world really is, or will be, or was,” while fiction is not—a distinction which, according to Carr, nearly all readers understand ( 2004 , 255).

Despite the massive literature on the relationship between history and literature, or fiction, in general, speculative fiction or related categorizations such as science fiction and fantasy have received virtually no consideration in the context of historical methodology or epistemology. Since speculative fiction cannot be mistaken for a factual account of the world, it has been overlooked in the aforementioned discussions of history and literature (for a rare exception, see Liedl 2015 ). Nevertheless, as Carr contends, such discussions have largely missed the point of how both history and literature can shed light on the human experience in different, often complementary, ways. Speculative fiction’s unrealistic nature can actually make it particularly useful for understanding the nature of historical truth and why scholars believe in certain facts. As Brian Attebery has argued for the fantasy genre, “Because fantasy has those irreducible elements of the impossible, the unreal, the extremely extraordinary, it helps us understand better what’s the possible, what’s the real, what’s the true” ( 2022 ). The essays in this volume provide clear examples of the productive synergies between academic history and speculative fiction that can enhance historians’ research and teaching.

Speculative fiction can be broadly defined as literature of the fantastic, using clearly unrealistic elements to explore hypothetical scenarios or bring aspects of the reader’s world into sharp relief. It overlaps to a great degree with science fiction but can also be considered a broader, umbrella category that includes fantasy literature, which does not have the same focus on technology that typically characterizes science fiction. Science is often, but not always, the main focus of speculative fiction, and many creative stories take place in low-technology societies in the distant past or future that are at least as thought-provoking as literature involving high technology. In her exploration of postcolonialism and science fiction, Jessica Langer argues against the term “speculative fiction” in favor of “science fiction,” which she feels better highlights the dark sides of scientific “progress” and its “conflict” with indigenous epistemologies that are often criticized in postcolonial scholarship ( 2011 , 9). This is a valid point in the context of Langer’s book, but even though much of the present anthology discusses colonialism, it is not limited to this topic, and I contend that “speculative fiction” is more useful when discussing synergies between this kind of literature and history-writing in general.

The emphasis on literature that is speculative highlights the intellectual, contemplative dimension of the best of this literature. In my view, “science fiction” is too-closely associated in everyday speech with space opera. I find it difficult to categorize works like Star Wars as “speculative” or engaging with important questions of how society is organized. For such “science fiction,” spaceships, lasers, robots, and other high technology are mostly exotic scenery that could easily be swapped for sailing ships, castles, and horses. In speculative fiction, however, the fantastic elements form a crucial part of the plot and its raison d’être , making it perhaps a more serious (though not always less fun) type of fiction. For these reasons, this book will use both “speculative fiction” and “science fiction,” but the former is preferred when discussing this kind of literature and its relationship to history in a more general way. In addition, the diverse chapters that follow are not limited to print literature, but explore different media used to convey creative speculation.

Reflecting the close affinity between these genres or modes of writing, two literary critics’ explanations of what science fiction is apply equally well to speculative fiction. David Seed describes science fiction as “an embodied thought experiment whereby aspects of our familiar reality are transformed or suspended” ( 2011 , 2). Darko Suvin has similarly characterized science fiction as “literature of cognitive estrangement,” in which rigorous coherence in world-building according to fantastic premises is paramount (Suvin 1979, quoted in Rieder 2011, 62). This last definition of science fiction is particularly useful for the present discussion of science- or speculative fiction’s connections to history, for cannot history also be described as a “literature of cognitive estrangement”? The great challenge for historians is becoming so immersed in the language and culture of the “foreign country” of the past as to be able to understand its obscure references and oblique jokes. Failure to properly do so could have disastrous consequences, with historians completely misunderstanding and misconstruing key texts, events, and processes.

I often try to explain to my students that the people of the past were not stupider than we are, even if they were ignorant of later developments and even though their worldviews can seem laughably wrong in our eyes. The deeply engrained narrative of explosive technological progress on which our modern identity rests tends to obscure the many things that the people of the past knew but that have now largely been lost. Myriad philosophical and religious ideas, once-canonical texts, social norms, and even basic knowledge of agriculture, nature, or the uses of various tools that were common knowledge in specific times and places have now fallen into obscurity.

Though this insight can be gained through the detailed study of a historical period, it is quickly and usefully dramatized in a great many time travel stories within science fiction. The time traveler, wary of being uncovered as an imposter and burned as a witch, or worse, must become extremely well-versed in the local language and culture, almost like a spy. This is particularly skillfully executed in the time-travel novels and short stories of Connie Willis, in whose universe time travel is the domain of academic historians conducting fieldwork, since the inability to alter the timeline has made it unprofitable and therefore uninteresting to commercial actors. In Willis’ different stories, the theme of past alterity is depicted in varying registers, whether in the somber account of the struggles of a time traveler stuck in the Bubonic Plague in Doomsday Book ( 1992 ) or the comedy of errors that ensues from the protagonist’s inadequate preparation for his mission to Victorian England in To Say Nothing of the Dog ( 1997 ). Infiltrating the society of the past in time travel narratives like Willis’ not only forms an exciting narrative but also exposes the richness of the past and all that has been lost in a particularly vivid way. Even later historians’ (or archaeologists’) errors of interpretation are the subject of works like A Canticle for Leibowitz (Miller 1959 ) or Motel of the Mysteries (Macaulay 1979 ). In the former, a twentieth-century mechanic’s shopping list becomes venerated centuries later as a holy relic. In the latter, a lampoon of the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, a future archaeologist completely misunderstands the purpose of the everyday objects he excavates from a twentieth-century motel room.

The confusing mix of familiarity and radical alterity in the past in many ways mirrors the construction of fantastical worlds in speculative fiction. In both historical sources and speculative fiction, the present-day reader can be lured into a sense of security by familiar cultural or material elements that both their own society and the society they are reading about hold in common before being jarred by an unexpected difference that reveals the similarities to be mostly superficial. Insight into the complexity and distinct internal logic of other societies and the ability to convey some of this through a richness of detail in world-excavation or world-building are what mark both high-quality history and speculative fiction. History aspires to the analysis and interpretation of the past made possible by a deep knowledge of its innumerable contextual minutiae, whereas speculative fiction attempts the creation of an imaginary world that involves fantastic elements, but with a consistency and complexity that makes it seem plausible. Both involve a large degree of “cognitive estrangement” from their author’s internalized assumptions about how the world and society are.

After the postmodern turn, most historians have been increasingly wary of their ability to set aside their own cultural biases when evaluating source material and writing history. The historian’s attempt at “cognitive estrangement” will always be imperfect, limited by their own culturally- and linguistically-determined cognition. Similarly, virtually all works of speculative fiction can be criticized for logical or internal inconsistencies, or the seeming implausibility of the world that they create, distracting from their intended message. But as incomplete or imperfect as they inevitably are, history and speculative fiction still both offer unique possibilities to question the seeming inevitability of aspects of our current society, our current world.

Counterfactual Speculation

There is little research into the possible creative synergies between history and speculative fiction in general, but a great deal has been written about more specific types of speculative fiction or from other perspectives that shed light on this topic in useful ways. There are naturally many literary histories of science or speculative fiction, which often provide useful insights into the origins of certain conventions that have shaped these overlapping modes (see, for example, Seed 2011 ; Luckhurst 2018 ). This is particularly true of colonialism, whose special relationship to science fiction requires its own section later on.

More directly, although it only represents one subcategory of speculative fiction, a body of literature has arisen around the study of counterfactual history. This has become an increasingly popular and influential literary subgenre and one with clear implications for the study of history (see, for example, Rosenfeld 2005 ; Evans 2013 ). In one of the most important recent studies of the counterfactual, Catherine Gallagher argues that although counterfactual history has existed for centuries, it has become widespread and a significant political tool only comparatively recently. Starting in the 1970s, counterfactual methodologies became the object of serious discussion in both the historical and legal professions, the latter to address issues of restitution for historical crimes. In literature, Gallagher contends that counterfactual history went from being a science fiction subgenre to a mainstream literary mode in the first decade of the twenty-first century, in part thanks to the popularity of simulated historical battles in the gaming world whose outcome was open to change ( 2018 , 1). Indeed, as this book demonstrates, especially Piia Posti’s and Cecilia Trenter’s chapters on romance fiction, this development has not been limited to realistic historical fiction, but counterfactual, fantastic, or speculative elements that were previously limited to science fiction have increasingly been used within other genres, further transgressing the already blurry boundaries of speculative fiction.

Gallagher’s timeline demonstrates that interest in counterfactual speculation grew concurrently in different fields, including academic history, law, and literature. Historians have a long history of skepticism towards counterfactual speculation, but as Gallagher notes, many have come to see this as a possible supplementary tool for the profession. The counterfactual is a useful tool for considering issues such as “the role of human agency and responsibility in history, the possibilities of historical justice and repair, and the coherence of identity—of individuals, nations, and peoples—through time” ( 2018 , 4). Just as this anthology argues for speculative fiction in general, counterfactuals can provide a useful means for reflecting on some of the core issues that make history meaningful.

While counterfactual history is of obvious relevance to the historical profession, it is only one of many types of speculative fiction. As I discuss in my chapter on what I label counterphysical fiction, the dominant form of merely changing the outcome of a battle or other historical turning point does not go very far in challenging our established ways of thinking about the world or how society could be. This anthology seeks to move beyond this narrow focus of much existing research and explore how other fantastic or speculative elements can enrich the writing of history and vice versa.

Colonialism and Postcolonialism

It should be apparent to anyone familiar with the pervasive science fiction tropes of galactic empires, (alien) race warfare, and the settlement of other worlds that science fiction has a close relationship to and is often directly inspired by real-life colonialism. This has been the subject of several major studies that, while not having the same focus on history-writing as this volume, discuss many of the same issues and theories explored here. Perhaps the most important study of the relationship between science fiction and colonial ideology is John Rieder’s Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction ( 2008 ). Rieder, like a majority of literary scholars, argues that the height of European colonial expansionism in the late nineteenth century was also, not coincidentally, the formative period for the most familiar aspects of modern science fiction (2). As a result, early science fiction is deeply infused with colonial themes and ideology, characteristics which have tended to persist over time. As Janne Lahti’s chapter in this volume demonstrates, even recent science fiction blockbuster films in many ways reflect and perpetuate settler colonial ideology.

Rieder identifies several “powerful ideological fantasies” that characterize both colonialism and much science fiction. The first of these is the “discoverer’s fantasy” of the terra nullius that is actually inhabited by indigenous peoples. Rieder defines a “missionary fantasy” as the attitude that “Although we know that our arrival disrupts and destroys the traditional way of life here, we believe that it fulfills the deep needs and desires of all right-thinking natives.” The “anthropologist’s fantasy” temporally displaces contemporaneous indigenous peoples by considering them as living in the past, “in fact, to be our own past” (31–32). Finally, there is the colonial fantasy that limited natural resources are actually unlimited, highlighting the close relationship between colonialism, capitalism, and environmental destruction (37). While not discussed explicitly by Rieder, his very use of the term “fantasy” points to yet another telling link between colonial history and speculative fiction: colonial ventures were in many ways based on speculation (in both senses of the term) about the profitability or usefulness of foreign lands, speculation that was very often inflated by a lack of reliable information and greed-induced delusions (Varnava 2015 ). In this way, a great deal of real-life colonial history was in fact based on fantasy and speculation more than reality, even though the terrible consequences of colonial expansionism were very real.

Rieder’s ideological fantasies of colonialism and science fiction reflect many of the main colonial ideologies exposed by leading postcolonial theorists. Mary Louise Pratt’s classic Imperial Eyes ( 1992 ), for example, presents a detailed analysis of the “discoverer’s fantasy,” which she describes in terms of the titular “imperial eyes” that see what they want to see and envision a concrete domination of the colonized landscape. The “anthropologist’s fantasy,” as the core of the colonial worldview, is discussed by a great deal of postcolonial scholarship, but perhaps most notably in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000), with its insightful discussions of the use of historical time by colonial ideology. Chakrabarty famously argues that European colonial ideology “consigned Indians, Africans, and other ‘rude’ nations to an imaginary waiting room of history” (8) while attacking the strange, atemporal “universalism” claimed by Europeans.

For Rieder, the centrality of time to colonial ideology is strongly related to its prevalence and importance as a motif in science fiction. This is particularly true of the common time travel motif. For those who accepted colonial notions of “civilization” and progress, travel in space was often understood as a kind of time travel (76). Early European travelers to Japan, for example, saw in Japanese society a mirror of Europe’s Middle Ages. Those who visited a variety of so-called “primitive” cultures around the world frequently described them as “Stone Age people.” Indeed, the idea that we can learn about, or from, “our primitive ancestors” by studying present-day human groups who have been isolated from globalized modern culture is still extremely prevalent today. The leap from spatial to time travel in science fiction, therefore, was not so great in the late nineteenth century and arguably facilitated by colonial ideology.

Since colonized “Others” were often considered to be not only culturally different but the colonial explorer’s own past , both anthropology and science fiction often investigate “to what extent the limitations and weaknesses of contemporary humankind are effects of social organization rather than qualities intrinsic to the species” (Rieder 2008 , 77). In my view, this is exactly the kind of difficult question that both history and speculative fiction should be jointly contributing to answering. Both types of writing remain unavoidably bound to their authors’ preexisting worldview but can to some extent break out of these constraints, albeit in different ways: history by exploring the artifacts of different cultures and modes of social organization that actually existed in the past, and speculative fiction by using or constructing a rationally operating, consistent, but unreal, world in which to test such ideas. Despite its colonial legacies, then, (and, perhaps, despite history’s Eurocentric and nationalist legacies) speculative fiction has the potential to productively challenge existing hegemonic ways of seeing the world in ways that can help to address current and future problems.

Indeed, while emphasizing science fiction’s colonial origins, Rieder points out that from its very beginnings in the late nineteenth century, it was used both to reinforce and to question, critique, and destabilize colonial ideology (10). Nineteenth-century protagonists of science fiction stories were often the weaker party in a cross-cultural/cross-temporal colonial encounter, as travelers to the distant future were awed by its awesome technology in much the same way as colonial subjects visiting the metropole were supposed to be. As in many other contemporaneous empires, Japanese colonial authorities, for example, arranged “sightseeing tours” of Japanese cities for leaders of anti-colonial resistance in Japan’s empire in an attempt to overwhelm and intimidate them into submission (Matsuda 2003 , 48–49; Hennessey 2018 , 228). Even more dramatically, the recurrent trope of the invasion of Earth by technologically superior aliens closely mirrored actual (and often contemporaneous) colonial conquest but placed familiar, “modern,” or “civilized” characters in the position of the victim with whom the reader was intended to sympathize.

Catastrophes are indeed often central to speculative fiction, which frequently makes use of the related mode of dystopia. Kristín Loftsdóttir’s chapter astutely discusses different ways that such imaginative works are linked to real-world “crisis-talk,” intervening in current political debates. Discussing the motif of catastrophe in science fiction that undermines technological and civilizational optimism, Rieder importantly argues that

such logical or emotional inversion of the fantasies of appropriation is not just an imaginary effect. Environmental devastation, species extinction, enslavement, plague, and genocide following in the wake of invasion by an alien civilization with vastly superior technology—all of these are not merely nightmares morbidly fixed upon by science fiction writers and readers, but are rather the bare historical record of what happened to non-European people and lands after being “discovered” by Europeans and integrated into Europe’s economic and political arrangements from the fifteenth century to the present. (124)

In this way, the “fantastic” or “speculative” elements of literature involving futuristic alien invasions or similar plots are actually startlingly real. This is in fact the very theme of the research project “Surviving the Unthinkable: Ecological Destruction and Indigenous Survivance in North America and the Nordic Countries, 1600–2022,” initiated by Gunlög Fur shortly before this book went to press. The project will study whether humanity as a whole can learn from the experience of resilience after devastation experienced by a great many indigenous peoples around the world to be able to better cope with the devastation wreaked by climate change (Olsson 2022 ).

Based on Rieder’s observation, much early science fiction could be said to reflect colonialists’ fears of falling victim to their own methods or perhaps even, in some cases, their guilty conscience. Indeed, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were characterized by an obsession with alien invasion and other forms of race warfare not only in science fiction but in non-fictional and even “scientific” works warning of a decline in white manliness or virility as a result of “over-civilization” (the Eloi in H. G. Wells’ 1895 The Time Machine come to mind) or even outright “race suicide” in the face of an invasion by non-white masses (Bederman 1995 ; Painter 2010 ). This particular discourse has in fact recently been reinvigorated by the anti-immigration extreme-right in many European and European-settler countries, who use the language of “invasion” or “replacement” and, explicitly or not, fear that non-whites will in some way repeat the colonial crimes historically committed by Europeans (Bracke and Aguilar 2020 ). Adopting the position of the colonized victim in science fiction, then, does not necessarily lead to greater empathy with the historical victims of colonialism, but such fantasies can actually strengthen an “eat or be eaten” sense of being threatened by the Other and provide a more socially acceptable setting in which to explore such fears.

Besides the colonial origins of many classic science fiction tropes, the genre is also frequently criticized for its strong links to Eurocentrism and normative “whiteness” (see, for example, Carrington 2016 ). Ashleigh Harris’ chapter explores how globally circulating views of science and science fiction produced in Europe and America could reinforce notions of whiteness in apartheid South Africa. Fortunately, the last several years have witnessed an upsurge of interest in postcolonial speculative fiction that uses the mode’s various tools to creatively undermine persistent colonial ideology. In the afterword to a pioneering collection from 2004 , So Long Been Dreaming , Uppinder Mehan argues that speculative fiction is a necessary complement to critical history in order to complete the work of decolonization:

postcolonial writing has for the most part been intensely focused on examining contemporary reality as a legacy of a crippling colonial past but rarely has it pondered that strange land of the future. Visions of the future imagine how life might be otherwise. If we do not imagine our futures, postcolonial peoples risk being condemned to be spoken about and for again. (270)

This is likewise the focus of the increasingly salient literary movement Afrofuturism, which seeks to ensure that Black people have a prominent place in imagined futures that have long been predominantly white and reflect a homogenized Western culture (Carrington 2016 ; Lavender 2019 ). Such postcolonial speculative fiction contests persistent colonial tropes of the “inevitable” extinction or assimilation of non-dominant languages, cultures, and peoples.

In her 2011 book Postcolonialism and Science Fiction , Jessica Langer argues that science fiction need not necessarily be colonial, in spite of its origins, but in fact has characteristics that can be especially useful for overcoming the corrosive legacies of colonialism in postcolonial societies. One such characteristic is the capacity of science fiction to explore and dramatize otherness in particularly striking ways, whether through alien encounters or, as Rieder notes, cyborgs (Langer 2011 , 85; Rieder 2008 , 111). “In science fiction,” Langer points out, “otherness is often conceptualized corporeally, as a physical difference that either signposts or causes an essential difference, in a constant echo of zero-world [real world] racialization” (82). As discussed above, tropes of alien invasion can, in their simplest forms, simply be a thin veneer for racist fears of immigration and “replacement,” but they can also problematize real-world stereotypes through their critical examination of what the “human” consists of in contrast to actual aliens. Langer sees postcolonial science fiction’s subversive potential to lie in a productive use of the hybridity theorized by postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha:

Rather than shying away from these colonial tropes [of the Stranger and the Strange Land]… postcolonial science fiction hybridizes them, parodies them and/or mimics them against the grain in a play of Bhabhaian masquerade… Their very power, their situation at the centre of the colonial imagination as simultaneous desire and nightmare, is turned back in on itself. (4)

The violence of the colonial encounter cannot be undone, but science fiction is one way to turn its own tropes against it and expose its injustices.

Langer also makes the important point that the study of science fiction needs to move away from the dominance of Euro-American and English-language works by highlighting literature from other languages and cultures (11). Langer does so in her book by discussing Japanese science fiction, much of which has never been translated and therefore has received little attention in English-language scholarship. As she points out, even postcolonial studies’ predominant focus on the former British and French Empires, particularly India, “fails utterly to take into account the diversity of postcolonial experiences” (11). While this volume also does not completely overcome this bias, Martin van der Linden’s, Anna Höglund’s, and Cecilia Trenter’s chapters treat Japanese, Korean, and Nordic speculative fiction, respectively, and, importantly, Hans Hägerdal’s chapter takes up “the inclusion of Europeans in legendary and even fantastic contexts” by historical Southeast Asians, reversing the colonial gaze. That chapter in particular can hopefully serve as inspiration for future studies of speculative fiction from non-Western perspectives.

Eco-criticism

As one of the defining issues of our time, climate change has naturally been the subject of a great deal of recent speculative fiction and related literary scholarship. Speculative fiction was something of a forerunner in this regard, and Johan Höglund’s chapter in this volume argues that Ursula LeGuin’s 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven presciently registers the violence done to ecology by colonial/capitalist society. Science fiction has been especially well-suited to exploring a future climate calamity, not only because of its focus on the future but because it has a long tradition of focusing on catastrophes and post-apocalyptic worlds. As Johan Höglund’s chapter shows especially clearly, climate change is inextricably linked to both colonialism and capitalism (themselves closely intertwined), a connection that much critical speculative fiction has dramatized in particularly striking ways. Climate change or ecological devastation are therefore not separate phenomena but ones that are closely related to other forms of colonial destruction. The obliteration of people, ecosystems, lifeways, and epistemologies go hand in hand in the totalizing, chauvinist logic of colonialism.

As we have already seen, Rieder argues that colonial “history haunts science fiction’s visions of catastrophe,” which often works through the actual destruction of cultures and peoples in a futuristic, exotic setting ( 2008 , 124). This not only reflects subconscious processes but often involves a deliberate identification between colonial and speculative genocide and other crimes. As Rieder points out, H. G. Wells quite explicitly draws parallels between the Martian invasion and the Tasmanian genocide in The War of the Worlds , for example ( 1898 ; Rieder 2008 , 132). With catastrophe being as strong a motif in classic science fiction as technological optimism, Rieder argues that

visions of catastrophe appear in large part to be the symmetrical opposites of colonial ideology’s fantasies of appropriation, so much so that the lexicon of science-fictional catastrophes might be considered profitably as the obverse of the celebratory narratives of exploration and discovery, the progress of civilization, the advance of science, and the unfolding of racial destiny that formed the Official Story of colonialism. (123–124)

Science fiction, then, from its nineteenth-century beginnings was at least as frequently characterized by technological skepticism as enthusiasm, reflecting the major reconsideration of technology driven by present-day climate change.

Though science fiction is typically associated with shiny spaceships and complex machinery, a great many modern examples of eco-critical speculative fiction use more of a natural idiom. Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s 2019 novel This is How You Lose the Time War takes place amidst a temporal war across history between two sides with different visions of the future that they fiercely defend. The two sides or futures can be seen as metaphors or perhaps actual embodiments of the nature-technology (or perhaps, more fundamentally, nature-culture) divide, with one being characterized by a mechanical/cyborg/networked intelligence style while the other, Garden, is characterized by natural imagery (though equally ferocious as its opponent and able to manipulate time and genetics in staggeringly advanced ways). The latter, with its depiction of natural elements as both immensely powerful and open to a different kind of high technology than the nuts-and-bolts kind most associated with science fiction, has become an increasingly common mode as genetics has taken a more prominent place at the forefront of humanity’s scientific imagination. Monsters, instead of invading from other worlds, increasingly are the result of twisted genetic experiments or else come to symbolize the reaction of a personified Nature against human overexploitation. Two of the essays in this collection, by Anna Höglund and Martin van der Linden, take up these themes, both coincidentally involving boars as symbolic, destructive forces in Asian cinema.

Speculative fiction has played a crucial role in helping contemporary society imagine the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change in a near future. As the depth and seriousness of the situation becomes increasingly well-recognized, however, many commentators have questioned whether doomsday scenarios do more harm than good by sapping people of the hope and optimism that they require to effectively tackle the problem. In what could amount to a paradigm shift in the subgenre, Kim Stanley Robinson has attempted to restore some sense of optimism with his 2020 novel The Ministry of the Future . This novel depicts a potentially realistic (as in, not relying on “miracle” technologies) future in which humanity manages to bring down carbon emissions fast enough to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, even while suffering several massive catastrophes. It is unusual for speculative fiction to be so detailed and practically oriented, as a kind of a potential road map for overcoming climate change, blurring the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, but the success of Robinson’s novel may herald more such works in the near future. Though using more fantastic elements, this anthology’s final contribution, an original short story by David Belden, similarly explores how humanity can productively work towards a more hopeful future.

“Free Your Mind”?

The imperative to “free your mind,” as expressed by Morpheus in The Matrix ( 1999 ), is a common one in both critical academic history and speculative fiction. This introduction has argued that the two genres, fields, or modes of writing have much in common and stand to mutually profit through a deeper and more deliberate dialogue. Both offer the potential, using different strategies, to reach alternative understandings of human society through creatively engaging with the past and possible futures. How have humans lived before, and how might they live in the future? But the obvious related question, “How should humans live?” is a harder one, and one that academic history has often shied away from, in spite of the normative nature of much critical theory. In much the same way as envisioned by discourse theorists, examining the past and imagining the future can help us to break free of the epistemological, cultural, and cognitive limitations to which we all inevitably belong, if not completely so.

But what exactly is freedom? We live in an age often characterized as “neo-liberal,” literally of “new freedom,” and the well-off among us have unprecedented freedom to travel, consume, and mold our own identities. And yet, the unsustainability of our lifestyles has increasingly called into question the desirability of this form of freedom. Might it be that a knowledge of alternatives opens up for a new kind of freedom or desirable way of life? Just as Louise in Story of Your Life discovers that “knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will,” could such alternative ways of thinking involve new responsibilities or burdens? Acknowledging climate change and the evils of colonialism is indeed a burden, but perhaps an awareness of alternate lifeways, whether from human history or speculation, can provide us with some degree of agency in shaping a desirable future as our present form of social organization becomes increasingly untenable.

The remainder of this book is divided into four sections. The first, “Colonialism, Oppression and Concurrences,” directly addresses colonial and other forms of injustice as depicted or engaged with in speculative fiction, drawing heavily on the concept of concurrences . The second, “Alternative Histories, Alternative Realities,” looks at the particularly direct engagement between history and speculative fiction through the counterfactual, or counterphysical. The third, “Defining and Defying the Boundaries of Cultures and the Human,” investigates eco-critical speculative fiction with historical themes and the concurrent, uneasy relationship between the realms of nature and human culture, along with works that investigate the very nature and limits of what humanity is. The final section, “History, Speculative Fiction and Real-World Social Change,” investigates how history and speculative fiction can be tools of activism in the present-day, real world. The final chapter in that section, and the book, is an original short story by science fiction author David Belden, highlighting how both types of writing can productively engage with one another.

We would like to express our deep gratitude to Gunlög Fur for her inspiration, generosity, and friendship over many years, and hope she will enjoy this book.

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Hennessey, J.L. (2024). Introduction to History and Speculative Fiction: Essays in Honor of Gunlög Fur. In: Hennessey, J.L. (eds) History and Speculative Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42235-5_1

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