Next panel is History and SF. Panelists are @ArkadyMartine, @effjayem, @bartlebett and @Ada_Palmer, with moderator @shaunduke!!! #zaliadoesworldcon

The real science of science fiction is history. Many great SF works get much of their strength because the history -- implicit or explicit -- behind the story feels real. How do writers manage this? How can real history be made to work in a story? What are some examples?

Q. When it comes to using history in fictional work, what impact does it have on the work itself?

Claire Bartlett (CB): Has used it as a great shortcut for worldbuilding. Debut novel We Rule the Night was based on story of the Russian Night Witches in WW2 - female pilots who

flew at night against German forced. It handed over a lot of plot, and a cultural realness. Leads to fantastic situations.

Ada Palmer (AP): History has more strange things than you would have thought of. Also trains you to think about consequences of events over time. When a new

tech arrived, how it disseminated over time. When a nation splits, how did that ripple through time. There's nothing more similar to the future than the past. Teaches you how to think about that so you think how your world got to be the way it is.

Arkady Martine (AM): Uses history as source material all the time, albeit in twisted and mutilated ways. Gives you plot seeds. Tends to think a lot about how complex an event actually is, and how little of an event is actually recorded. How few people see each aspect of it.

AM: Built plot of A Memory Called Empire by thinking about who wants to remember what, and why, and what gets written down?

Farah Mendlesohn (FM): The more history you use, the more you realise how few people think they have a destiny, and those who do usually end up dead.

FM: For example, Oliver Cromwell is not some machiavellian genius. He is just the last man standing. Realising how accidental and contingent things are is important for writers.

AP: In history you do get unsatisfyingly narrative new people showing up to continue the plot!

AP: This makes you think harder about how characters are introduced. To be a satisfying narrative you do have to set things up so you earn this, but it makes you think about when to introduce someone new.

AM: Humans love narrative - it's a fundamental function of humans to find patterns and make sense of them. The universe does not. The chance arrival of the Knight from Prague who is the most important character is going to be represented in narrative history - most history is

narrative even if it's claiming to just be statement of fact - will be woven into narrative. it's hard to write about history being random unless you want to specifically write about the randomness.

AP: With a historical source it's following something. The Knight from Prague

seems random when he shows up in Padua. It is less random when you read his family history and how it relates to Prague. If you've followed a storyline along, you can make the random character make sense. Can make characters seem destined to Be Important. This is something that

can contribute to impostor syndrome! We make people seem like they have destinies. The textbooks we grow up with show people who were Important from the start, and never had to do laundry for example. The people who change history never seem to resemble us. This is powerful when

we write characters who are mundane and have no destiny.

FM: This is a very US centric idea! YA fiction from the US does seem to push this idea. Less common in kid's fiction from the UK and Ireland. In the 1960s career books, they're all about finding out what you want to do

from a variety of options. From the 1970s, the books shift to be 'I always knew I wanted to be X'. Some of the most interesting books are written about minor characters who stay minor characters e.g. person just trying to keep family together during a revolution. We don't see

enough of this in SFF.

AM: I don't read or write YA, so is destinarianism as prevalent in SFF YA as when I was a kid 20 years ago?

CB: There is still a lot of that now. One of the big YA trends we're just emerging from is 'lets lead a revolution against the world'.

CB: But there are a lot more people who are thinking about this. A lot of authors want to say that you too can change the world, so in YA now people are trying to make the protags have some kind of ordinary motivation or connection.

CB: Still sometimes have issues of being the super specialist best at everything

FM: There are ways to do it; prophecy type is kind of dull. But characters who don't realise they don't have a destiny - characters who look back at their lives and write that destiny back into

their own story. Memory Called Empire is a good example of this! One of the characters is trying to create a narrative where he has already won, when the battle hasn't happened yet. Using history to write history that hasn't happened.

AM: Memory Called Empire is built out of middle history Byzantium, looking at how narrative creates legitimacy. need to be in control of narrative and history. No-one in the book is not a propagandist.

CB: The ancient Egyptians were the same. They were expects at manipulating

history. There are periods where there were more kings who were actually women but their names have been erased.

FM: During the English Civil War, questions about who is defending which religion. The Stuarts re-wrote history, blaming Cromwell for Stuart policy.

AP: History of Florence, war between Florence and Milan, but Florence defeats them and they run away. The Duke of Milan read it and said that the battle never happened. But everyone believed the written version. Duke of Milan hired other writers to change history back!

AM: Relatively obscure battle in 1021 when Basil II had to put down a rebellion. There's a history which tells a story in which 1 individual is involved in betraying Basil II and then recants etc. And there's an Armenian account of the same events, which matches up to the

identity of the 1 individual. There are beheadings.

FM: Regarding the sensibilities of history - We forget that before 1950 large numbers of people can't see very well. The world looks different in the past. The world sounds different in the past. A good writer can use this

to create the world.

AM: Rare to see how those senses perceive the world in human characters - different senses usually reserved for aliens.

FM: The Masqueraders - a man dresses up as a woman and people insisted that everyone would be able to see. But at that time a lot of

people wouldn't have been able to see. People who still knew people in old fashioned wars talk about PTSD and other consequences of war, but use different languages. No maps in the civil war - how did the armies find each other? They mostly didn't! It was chasing each other round

fields. This can be used!

SD: How do you actually use this and incorporate it into your writing, especially in SF with more advanced tech?

CB: Real about real life events and transpose them to far future. Would love to read a humour story where armies are running around not

managing to find each other.

FM: It really was like that. You send scouts out but mainly you hope you find the enemy before they find you. Understand also that people truly believed in what they were doing.

AP: People in the past are truly living in a different world. Their

ethics will be different, their concept of truth, their logic. A human from 1020 would be more alien than any Star Trek alien.

AM: Useful methodology in constructing historically minded SFF; the way we understand the nation-state and the family are profoundly different to those

in the past, and disrupting your own understanding of those can help to build some alien societies. Wanted to make gender fairly neutral in Memory Called Empire. had to consider pregnancy, and who counts as family? Who is the heir to the empire? What would it matter if someone

had a baby with their own body, as opposed to outside it?

FM: Big shift in 1800s regarding servants and family from one where servants are part of the household, to one where servants are very much employees. Evidence suggest that servants pushed for this change

FM: Servants pushed for pay rates and to live out, and saw familial relationship as exploitative. Before civil war most household servants were male, only became mainly female because all the men were dead. Yet fantasy novels usually have servants be female.

CB: Often we tend to make SF cultures a monolith. Every planet is 1 society. In the US family is a Big thing - everyone related to you is a cousin and close. In Denmark anyone beyond 1st cousins is not really seen as related to you.

Q. How do you choose how much history to include? How do you do it without being distracting?

AM: You know more than the reader needs like any other worldbuilding.

MF: I just got distracted and wrote 3 other books.

Q. When you do start to do the research, where do you go? What is your process?

AP: Find a book, read the footnotes, and see where they lead! Look at index to see what the book is about and whether it is worth it!

FM: Then you discover the piece of research you need doesn't exist and have to do it yourself. This is why historians love Chicago and hate MLA.

AP: Go to the wikipedia page, go to the other language wikipedia pages for the same topic and use google translate

AP: often the other language page will have much more info than the English page, and this will help you find useful terms and people to do more research on.

CB: The wiki page is good for an overview, and the references can be really useful

Q. Extrapolating history and do you think SF should try to predict future history?

AM: It isn't possible. You can use SF to outline ideas about where the world might go. Malka Older's Infomocracy series is great at this! But it isn't a prediction.

AM: You can't do it with any degree of accuracy in fiction or really in non fiction.

AP: The value is that you speculate about contingencies to occur and plan for them. Before we got cloning we already knew bad things that we should not do with cloning

AP: SF is an incredible tool for helping choose better.

Thank you to all of the panelists and the moderator!!! #zaliadoesworldcon