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#HistFicThursdays - Nero and Sporus by SP Somtow - Book Excerpt

 Today for #HistFicThursdays, I am delighted to once again be teaming up with  The Coffee Pot Book Club , this time to share an excerpt from  SP Somtow 's fantastic new book  Nero and Sporus ! First of all, let's meet the book... Finally available in one volume! The decadence of Imperial Rome comes to life in S.P. Somtow's Literary Titan Award-winning novel about one of ancient history's wildest characters. The historian Suetonius tells us that the Emperor Nero emasculated and married his slave Sporus, the spitting image of murdered Empress Poppaea. But history has more tidbits about Sporus, who went from "puer delicatus" to Empress to one Emperor and concubine to another, and ended up being sentenced to play the Earth-Goddess in the arena. Nero and Sporus  is available on #KindleUnlimited via  this  link . And here's an excerpt to whet your appetite: I suppose we were anxious to see who the surprise competitor would be, but no one was as surprise...
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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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