History is like science fiction. No, really.

[hawkwing_lb]

So, here's a thought I had while trudging through my reams of notes and books by people you've never heard of: an academic history book is like science fiction.

No, really. It is.

I assume anyone reading this journal has cracked the spine of a history book more than once. Probably, you're aware of the distinctions between the ones directed at a scholarly audience, and the ones directed more broadly. Popular (or introductory: although the handful of Actual Textbooks I have had the misfortune to encounter have all been written in the most graceless style and prose) books are careful not to give you more information than you can expect to digest: they simplify, sometimes appallingly, and very often they fail to engage with the fundamental arguments that inform modern scholarship at anything more than the most superficial level.

Books for a scholarly audience, on the other hand…

Not so very long ago, I read Marcus Rediker's Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, a history of the maritime world between 1700 and 1750. It's a very solid work of history, but I came to it cold, with no background in the area, and found myself in the midst of an ongoing conversation which was clearly engaging not only with its subject, but with other work done in the field, and so I feel damn sure that I lost half of what that book was saying through not being able to follow the references.

A couple of days ago, I was reading a chapter from - oh, it must have been The Villages of Roman Britain, a tiny wee book, no more than fifty pages long. But it assumed a level of knowledge and engagement in the conversation - familiarity with, at least, Wacher's work on the towns and "small towns" of Roman Britain, and the Iron Age background, and how that informs scholarly discussion of villages and agriculture and "villas", and why the terms in inverted commas are in inverted commas. And I had sufficient level of knowledge to follow the conversation, if not, quite, to make my own points.

And so it occurred to me that history is like science fiction. There are books that throw you in the deep end, to sink or to swim, to follow a bewildering array of connections and references and terms and characters, concerned with a world that is entirely alien. To follow academic history in its native environment requires many of the same reading protocols one uses to infer sense and meaning in the background of a science fiction or fantasy novel: the ability to fill in the gaps with inference and extrapolation; to read meaning into widely-scattered signs and symbols, and crack one's brain open to attempt to understand alien ways of looking at the world.

And there are books that downplay the strangeness, and go steadily forward, neither inspired nor disappointing, but lacking a certain depth and scope.

So this is the extent of my thought. Yours?

Comments

[stillnotbored.livejournal.com]

I think you are exactly right.

There are novels, stories and poems that I love that leave other people baffled. These other people are just as smart as I am, often more educated in some ways, but they don't have the background and grounding in mythology or fantasy that I do. They don't share a common language with the author, so a great deal of what is going on--the crunch bits and the nuance--flies right past them.

The same is so very true of history. You have to have that background, that common language, to really take part in some of the conversations.

Cool observation. *g*

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

And there are different levels of conversation within both, and different areas, like those little nested doll-things that come inside of each other.

And you can follow a conversation that you don't have the background on, or at least part of one - but it's much harder to engage with.

[katallen.livejournal.com]

Yes.

Something to ponder.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Yep.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I read the title of this post and thought it was going to be about the other-world aspect of both, which I think is true and part of the draw. But I think this is true, too, though I do think that the more accessible books are not necessarily doomed to lack of inspiration and scope, and that it's but a short step from in conversation to incestuousness...

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

There's accessible, and then there's attempting to lead one's readers around by the nose and not providing two or three sides of the argument because that might 'complicate' things. (Where complicate = conflict with the author's idea of how things work. I find this in space opera SF a lot: it's all often very black and white.)

This annoyed me wrt history especially in my biblical and theological studies moderatorship, which - I give thanks - is now over forever. I do not think inspired is necessarily the right word, but scope - or at least depth - definitely is: I don't mind coming to a conversation and having to scramble to keep up, but a good author can make the scrambling itself interesting and enjoyable. (There are not many good authors, it seems to me, in biblical and theological studies. Another reason I give thanks I am done with it.)

But I take your point about incestuousness.