Authors Electric

Picture credit: laobc, via openclipart.org If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my life, it’s that it just doesn’t do to rely too much on technology. Just when you get to that point at which everything depends on a gadget, invention or app, what happens? Why, the blasted thing fails to work, of course! Our regular poster on the 26 th , Ruby Barnes, has very recently found this out to his cost. A combination of computer woes and travel plans have made it impossible for him to publish his regular post, so I’ve stepped in at the last minute. And, ironically enough, my replacement post will, after a fashion, concern technology. Two things have, of late, been taking up my meagre mental resources: firstly, the Authors Electric newsletter, of which I am the administrator; and secondly, my favourite festival, the fast-approaching Hallowe’en. I’m at that age where I should regard All Hallows’ Eve as a bit of fun for kids, but come this time of year I’m often to be found car...

Consider these three different scenarios: 1. The hero of a Regency romance stalks into a drawing-room and greets his bewildered valet with the words ‘What’s up, dude?’ 2. A generally well-researched novel set in Mediaeval Europe has a scene in which the protagonist gets out of bed and puts on his underpants. (Underpants, so I’m told, were not commonly worn in the Mediaevael era.)  3. An author deliberately and knowingly introduces anachronisms, such as spaceships or the internet, into a novel set in Tudor England. Which of these scenarios is worst, or best? Do all of them set your teeth on edge, or just some? Do anachronisms wreck historical fiction, or not? How much difference is there between an anachronism that is introduced by design, and one that is the result of shoddy research?  Historical fiction often (but not always) strives to be realistic, and this realism sometimes extends to a horror of anachronism. The argument seems to be that readers...

One thing that I’ve always appreciated in fiction is a fully realised sense of place: a writer’s ability to bring a real or imagined landscape to life on the page or screen. Not too long ago, I read Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Café , and found that it made the American Deep South – an area with which I’m actually unfamiliar – seem absolutely real and immediate. By the time I’d turned the last page, I felt that I’d just paid a visit to the Georgia town in which it was set. And, to McCullers’ credit, I hadn’t felt like a gormless tourist once, but almost like a local. Putting the book down, I was surprised to find myself back in Northern Italy on a chilly autumn night. Many of my favourite books share this quality: they allow the reader to immerse him- or herself in the world in which the story occurs. In the hands of a skilled author, the reader can move quite easily through an unfamiliar place, and never feel like a stranger. Place. It’s more than just a geographi...