{"id":9593,"date":"2018-03-16T14:20:37","date_gmt":"2018-03-16T14:20:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.howardandrewjones.com\/?p=9593"},"modified":"2018-03-16T14:20:37","modified_gmt":"2018-03-16T14:20:37","slug":"how-captain-kirk-led-me-to-historical-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.howardandrewjones.com\/heroic-fiction\/how-captain-kirk-led-me-to-historical-fiction","title":{"rendered":"How Captain Kirk Led Me to Historical Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.howardandrewjones.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/kirk-and-communicator.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-1199\" src=\"http:\/\/www.howardandrewjones.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/kirk-and-communicator.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"205\" height=\"246\" \/><\/a>It was\u00a0<em>Star Trek<\/em>\u00a0that got me interested in historical fiction. Not because I\u2019d been watching the crew interact with historical figures on the holodeck\u2014the Next Generation didn\u2019t exist when I was a kid. And it wasn\u2019t because Kirk and Spock once met a simulacrum of Abraham Lincoln. It was because,\u00a0<em>Star Trek\u00a0<\/em>nerd that I was, I\u2019d read that\u00a0<em>Star Trek<\/em>\u2019s creator Gene Roddenberry had modeled Captain Kirk after some guy named Horatio Hornblower. I didn\u2019t think I\u2019d like history stories, but I sure liked\u00a0<em>Star Trek<\/em>, so I decided to take a chance. Once I rode my bicycle to the library and saw how many books about Hornblower there were, I figured I\u2019d be enjoying a whole lot of sailing age\u00a0<em>Star Trek<\/em>\u00a0fiction for a long time to come.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.howardandrewjones.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/hornblower.jpeg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-9597\" src=\"http:\/\/www.howardandrewjones.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/hornblower.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"225\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.howardandrewjones.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/hornblower.jpeg 225w, http:\/\/www.howardandrewjones.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/hornblower-150x150.jpeg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px\" \/><\/a>Of course, it didn\u2019t turn out quite like that. Hornblower wasn\u2019t exactly like Kirk, and his exploits weren\u2019t that much like those shared by the crew of the <em>Enterprise<\/em>, but they were cracking good adventures. Thanks to my own curiosity but mostly to the prose of the talented C.S. Forester, my tastes had suddenly, and accidentally, broadened beyond science fiction. I\u2019d learned that other flavors of storytelling tasted just as good.<\/p>\n<p>I no longer thought of historical fiction as a strange, untouchable world, and as I grew older I tried more and more of it, sometimes because a period interested me and sometimes just because I liked a cover or a title. That\u2019s how I found the work of Cecilia Holland, and it\u2019s why I wasn\u2019t afraid to try out a book by Harold Lamb titled\u00a0<em>The Curved Saber<\/em>\u00a0after I was spellbound by Lamb\u2019s biography of Hannibal, the great Carthaginian general. (I\u2019d read it for a high school research paper.) I\u2019d read Fritz Leiber\u2019s Lankhmar stories by then, and recognized Harold Lamb\u2019s Cossack tales were a related animal. In an introduction to one of Harold Lamb\u2019s books, L. Sprague de Camp mentioned dozens of Lamb\u2019s stories had never been reprinted. I never forgot that statement, although it was years before I decided to look into the matter. After all, if no one had bothered to collect them, how good could they be?<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.howardandrewjones.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/lamb-2.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-4627\" src=\"http:\/\/www.howardandrewjones.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/lamb-2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"123\" height=\"180\" \/><\/a>Really good, as it turned out. So good that my hunt for them felt a little like a search for lost artifacts, difficult to obtain, but gleaming with promise. Lamb\u2019s stories were hard to find because they existed only in rare, yellowing pulp magazines, owned only by collectors or a handful of libraries scattered over the United States. The more of Lamb\u2019s stories I read, the more interested I became not only in his fiction, but in the pulp historicals in general. Maybe it shouldn\u2019t have surprised me that the kind of heroic fantasy fiction I\u2019d come to love sounded so much like the best of the pulp era historicals. These were the stories in the magazines when sword-and-sorcery founders Howard, Leiber, Moore, and Kuttner were coming of age. We know from Robert E. Howard\u2019s letters that he purchased the most prestigious of these historical pulp mags,\u00a0<em>Adventure<\/em>, regularly, and that he loved the work of a number of authors who were printed regularly in its pages.<\/p>\n<p>After years of research I came to conclude something that was obvious in retrospect: fantasy and historical writers had been cross-pollinating for a long time. More recently, authors like Guy Gavriel Kay and George R.R. Martin have been writing acclaimed works at least partially inspired by real world cultures and events. And some writers have been blending fantasy and history. We don\u2019t have to look too much further than Howard\u2019s stories of Solomon Kane or C.L. Moore\u2019s tales of <em>Jirel of Joiry<\/em> to see that genre mash-ups have been going on for a half century, but we can journey even further back to Beckford\u2019s <em>Vathek<\/em> or even into the mythlogized cultural history of the Persian Book of Kings (the\u00a0<em>Shahnameh<\/em>) or the\u00a0<em>Iliad<\/em>\u00a0and the\u00a0<em>Odyssey<\/em>\u00a0and see that genre divisions didn\u2019t used to exist.<\/p>\n<p>Our society\u2019s currently experiencing a resurgence of interest in historical movies, and I can\u2019t help noting that films like\u00a0<em>The Centurion<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0<em>The Eagle<\/em>\u00a0were marketed very much like fantasy action movies; few would argue that\u00a0<em>300<\/em>\u00a0was targeted to hit the same demographic that had enjoyed the battle sequences from the\u00a0<em>Lord of the Rings<\/em>\u00a0trilogy. It might be that today\u2019s audiences are more savvy than I was as a young man, and that the blending of genres we\u2019ve seen over the last decade has broken down the barriers that once kept historical fiction readers apart from fantasy readers apart from science fiction readers and so on. I\u2019d certainly like to think so. Maybe none of us, readers, writers, or viewers, are as worried about the boundaries any more so long as the story takes us to strange new places.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><em>This article originally <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tor.com\/2011\/03\/16\/how-captain-kirk-led-me-to-historical-fiction\/\">appeared at TOR.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It was\u00a0Star Trek\u00a0that got me interested in historical fiction. Not because I\u2019d been watching the crew interact with historical figures on the holodeck\u2014the Next Generation didn\u2019t exist when I was a kid. And it wasn\u2019t because Kirk and Spock once met a simulacrum of Abraham Lincoln. It was because,\u00a0Star Trek\u00a0nerd that I was, I\u2019d read [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-heroic-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.howardandrewjones.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.howardandrewjones.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.howardandrewjones.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.howardandrewjones.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.howardandrewjones.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9593"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.howardandrewjones.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9601,"href":"http:\/\/www.howardandrewjones.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9593\/revisions\/9601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.howardandrewjones.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.howardandrewjones.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.howardandrewjones.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}