The History in Fiction

I recently found a channel on YouTube called Overly Sarcastic Productions. It's basically two people collaborating on some nice silly/serious summaries of myths and folklore, fiction tropes, story summaries ranging from modern fiction to classic tales, and history. The history is generally handled by the male partner, dubbed "Blue" in their introductory video.

As I was looking at his most recent video, which is a quarter-hour summary of the history of the Venetian Republic, and something struck me. When going through how the city of Venice evolved -- which I already knew quite a bit about due to my reading and watching the entirety of Francesco's Venice -- I saw how easy it was for writers to create a stunning fictional city and not bother with the nitty-gritty about how a certain city came to be.

Take an instance I'd have liked to see with a more detailed origin within the story. The city of Basel from the video game Resonance of Fate. It's an incredible steampunk city that is seemingly supported by a single pillar above a cancerous miasma cloaking the world. Controlled by a control system dubbed Zenith, it preserves humanity through a system of environment purification and limited lifespans to keep the population from expanding beyond control. But along with other aspects of the story, the construction and support of what looked like a gigantic spinning top held up by a pathetically thin pillar had me interested. Then left me giggling as it just looked like the common trope of creating a stunning location without bothering to do any fleshing out of how that location came to be. Similar to most of Pandora from Avatar. I mean, floating islands and marine-like lifeforms living in a jungle with suspiciously little rainfall? And they don't seem to have true jungle equipment, adjusted for alien environment or not. Seriously?

Now, I admit, I'm guilty of creating cities without actually thinking through what their origins were. The first time I did that with any detail was a sci-fi story that's currently in the works as its unique blend of cultural oddities and fusion of futuristic and Bourbon-like architecture. I haven't done the most thorough job of explaining it, but that's what rewrites are for. Now, I'm not saying someone should exhaustively tell it in dialogue or description. That's Kojima's trick, and makes the narrative more boring than entertaining. But some gradual hints and titbits scattered through the work can give something of the world's history to the reader. This makes it more than just set dressing.

The history of something goes beyond simple architectural elements, of course. How did it arrive here, where did it come from. That's an aspect of fiction I really enjoy, and when, say, a mystical system and obviously magical threat are introduced with barely any context through the whole story I feel slightly cheated. And, if there's a follow-up, and the reasons seem contrived or squeezed out using what was already there as an unsteady base (say, they're trying to pass off this clearly magical plague of darkness as a mutant malarial strain), I feel more than disappointed.

There are authors who've done it quite well, either over one book or several. Jonathan Stroud has four books to do it with his Bartimaeus cycle, so you get a very solid impression over those books about how the world works and the cyclic nature of magical rule. The Dragon Age universe has an entire canon of multimedia fiction to help with that, however untidily it does so. Sylvia Townsend Warner's short story anthology Kingdoms of Elfin is a great example of a culture gradually expanded over sixteen small narratives. To understand some aspects of The Lord of the Rings, you need that prose-based exposition, even if several elements stray into the realms of "THIS IS TOO MUCH!" or "GET ON WITH IT!".

There are also stories where uncertainty is needed. I would've liked to know who attacked first in the Starship Troopers universe, but know it would've crippled the book's narrative and pointed message. Creations such as Indiana Jones and the original Alien don't need additional context because it's not the point, and their medium of film doesn't take exposition well. Also, since they're more firmly grounded in type of stories were more complex histories are either superfluous or odd, they can drop them.

Both of those are things I've had to consider, or have already tried. Explanation during my Leviathan Chronicle duology is spread through personal explanation and dialogue across the two books. It lessens some of the info dumps that happen in a story that complex and wordy. And no, that doesn't mean I didn't resort to info dumps. Hey, I'm still young as a writer. As to the latter, I've had one or two ideas. Mainly the challenge is telling an involving story without it looking like I'm deliberately hiding anything, or just haven't thought about it.

Of course, there's the problem with multiple works being required for basic understanding, or a multimedia project where crucial story beats end up on another platform or format. But that's another article entirely.