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#HistFicThursdays - Time, time, time...

This week, we finally managed to install our new (not new ) item of furniture - a mid-18th Century grandfather clock. It's not bright and shiny like more modern ones, but a dark oak with a warm patina which the beeswax polish is drawing out. In order to set it up, we had to do a certain amount of research - how to hang the pendulum, where the weight went on the endless chain - and it got me thinking... where and when did certain divisions of time come from? The time periods which I have written either had household clocks or didn't, I have not written novels from the time of their invention. Clocks have been around for a long time, and the obsession with measuring time in an ordered fashion dates back to at least  the ancient Sumerians. It was they who established a circular reading of time and, I imagine, the sixty seconds/minutes came about as much because it was an easy way to divide a circle as anything else. But it wasn't until much later that the precision of seconds ...
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#HistFicThursdays - Breaking the Mould: a (very short) argument for combining Historical and Science Fiction

The Gathering Storm
~ the galloping advancement of technology is nothing new

 I am privileged enough to be the editor for the Crowvus Hooded journal, which is now advancing into the realms of being a genre-specific anthology. This season's genre is Science Fiction.

What does this have to do with Historical Fiction..? Let me explain.

A small number of years ago, I read one publisher's definition of science fiction as being about as yet unobtained scientific knowledge set in the future. This, I decided, was rather more restrictive than Science Fiction should be. In fact, I love the premise of having Science Fiction set in the past, like Doctor Who or Chris de Burgh's classic A Spaceman Came Travelling.

If time travel became a reality, I suspect most of us would chose a point in history to visit rather than a time in the future. After all, that's why we wrap ourselves up in the historical tales anyway! Inserting a scientific advancement, something we have as yet not discovered, into a historical setting is an exciting prospect. History is full of unexplained mysteries. You do not need to look far to find tales absorbed into folklore simply because they were beyond the realm of believability.

Suppose the Green Children of Woolpit were really aliens, or the Round Table was a form of spaceship. Of course, science fiction is not only about space. Consider evolution, a new superior intelligence which is bred or manufactured, and humanity's combat against it. And what about witchcraft and alchemy? Was is really just hocus pocus, or undiscovered science?

I'd love to hear your local mysteries resolved and explained through undiscovered science. You'd be surprised just how readily science fiction can slot into history!

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