by S.M. Schmitz
When I was still teaching world history, each semester I
required my students to conduct original research on a topic of their choice
for a short paper. For most of my students, this was the first time they had to
locate a primary source or track down a reliable secondary source by a professional
in an academic field related to their thesis topic (e.g., historian,
sociologist, anthropologist).
Each semester, students asked me how they were supposed to get started on their research. In an age
where college students have grown up accessing information and misinformation
from the Internet, my forbidding them from using websites for their secondary
source proved particularly challenging for them.
As a result, I developed a fairly easy way for my students
to begin their journeys as amateur historians. Given that science-fiction and
fantasy writers often use history and mythology to build their fictional
worlds, this introduction to conducting historical research may be beneficial
to my fellow authors as well.
In order to illustrate how we will conduct our
beginner’s-guide-to-historical-research, I’ll use an example from the Classical
world. Greek history and mythology holds a particular appeal to writers of all
genres, so we’ll build our fictional world around the culture of the Spartans.
As an initial caveat, all of this advice supposes that your
subject matter is at least somewhat
well-known and established as a matter of historical interest.
1.
Love it or hate it, Amazon offers the widest
selection of online books I’ve found, so using their search engine will return numerous
sources that we can begin to plow through.
I entered “Spartan culture” as my
search term, which produced 375 titles in books. The top two choices are The Spartans: The World of the
Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece by Paul Cartledge and Spartans: a New History by Nigel M. Kennell.
First: check the publication date.
Books published over twenty years ago may be outdated as newer research can and
often does change the way historians think and write about a particular
subject. Both of our books are recent.
Second: click on the author’s name.
Paul Cartledge’s author page tells me he is a professor of Greek culture at
Cambridge. That’s a good sign. Let’s Google him.
a.
Why? Because having a PhD and working at a
university – even a distinguished one – doesn’t make a particular person or
book a reputable authority nor does it make their research and book a reliable
source of information. Example: Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners earned him widespread criticism from
the historical community, yet it became a New
York Times bestseller. Unfortunately, people outside of the profession had
no way of knowing the numerous problems associated with Goldhagen’s thesis and
research.
b.
A Google search of Paul Cartledge doesn’t reveal
any notable criticisms.
c.
Using your public library’s database (in the
U.S.), you can now access numerous scholarly (peer reviewed) articles. Search
for the particular book and author and see how the historical community
received this work. My search yielded peer reviews that are favorable, and
highlight a particular issue with primary sources we’ll address below.
2.
We now have a good secondary source that we can
begin reading to understand the world of the Spartans. It’s a good idea to
repeat the above process to find several secondary sources, and always resist the temptation to use a
website for your information (there are exceptions – particularly in the case
of accessing primary sources).
3.
Primary sources are those sources that offer us
firsthand accounts of a particular event or otherwise provide contemporary
information from the time period. Examples are journal entries, court records,
wills and other legal documents, plays and poems, etc.
How necessary is it for a
science-fiction author to access and interpret primary sources? In my opinion,
not very. In fact, it may do more harm than good. In our example, the Spartans
have very few primary sources written from their
perspective: much of what we know about them comes from the Athenians, and historians
have to be careful when interpreting those sources as there is an obvious bias
(the Spartans and Athenians were constant rivals).
If you would like to read some
primary sources from your chosen culture, check the bibliography of the
secondary sources you’ve selected. Historians will list the primary sources
they’ve used in their own research and this is the easiest way to find sources
for your own subject. Older writings that are not copyrighted are frequently
available on university websites. In the case of the Spartans, we can find
Herodotus’s and Plutarch’s accounts of the Battle of Thermopylae from numerous
universities. Since the translation of primary sources is an important factor
in their reliability, it’s a good idea to stick to university or library
websites.
Why is it so important to research the influence of our
fictional worlds before using it in our novels?
Because there are plenty of readers who will notice the similarities,
and if they notice the source of the influence, they will most likely know
whether or not we portrayed our fictional world in a way that is based on
actual history or popular misconceptions about that history.
Using
history and mythology can be interesting ways for the science-fiction writer to
offer social commentary or just draw parallels from an imaginary world to our
own. And now that you have a basic guide to getting started on historical
research for the science-fiction writer, I hope that you’ll be inspired to draw
on our past experiences and beliefs for your next novel.
© S.M.
Schmitz, 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Author Bio:
S.M. Schmitz has an M.A. in modern European history and is a
retired world history instructor. Her novels are infused with the same humorous
sarcasm that she employed frequently in the classroom. As a native of
Louisiana, she sets many of her scenes here, and like Dietrich in her Resurrected trilogy, she is also
convinced Louisiana has been cursed with mosquitoes much like Biblical Egypt
with its locusts.
Her prior novels include the
Resurrected trilogy, which are science-fiction romances,
The Immortals series, which are
heavily influenced by Middle Eastern mythology and world history,
The Golden Eagle, a dystopian
romantic suspense, and
Dreamwalkers, a paranormal psychological suspense.
If you’d like to get a free e-copy of
Resurrected just for signing up for her mailing list, you can claim
it
here.
When a mysterious spaceship appears above Cambria, Zoe
remains skeptical that it’s anything but an elaborate hoax. By the time the
first spaceship is joined by two others, Zoe reluctantly admits that Earth has
been invaded, even though it’s a pretty lame invasion: the aliens look
remarkably human and keep to themselves. From what humans are able to learn
about them, they seem incredibly arrogant and boring anyway.
After meeting Peyton, one of Earth’s newest residents, Zoe
feels an immediate attraction to him although she is reluctant to become
involved with someone who isn’t even human. But she soon discovers that these
aliens are far more dangerous than they’ve led everyone to believe, and the
secrets they are hiding may signal the destruction of her entire planet.
