By Joseph Guyer
The Neglected Read is Joseph Guyer’s side project. The views and opinions expressed are solely his own and do not necessarily reflect the official position or views of Inbound Books. You can find The Neglected Read on Substack.
Welcome to a very strange installment of The Neglected Read, where I read and discuss books that have been rotting in my house for, in some cases, decades.
It certainly feels like it’s been decades since my last post. In my defense, a couple of big things have been happening in my life: 1) some friends and I started an indie publishing company called Inbound Books, and we’ve been busy getting it off the ground, and 2) I’ve been rewriting a historical novel that’s been with me for more years than I care to admit. More on that in a bit.
This installment’s neglected read was Dan Simmons’s 1989 classic space opera, Hyperion, winner of the Hugo Award. Essentially a 28th-century retelling of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, with a healthy side of John Keats, Hyperion is dense as hell but so worth the effort. Its scope and breadth are comparable to other classic galaxy-spanning epics such as Dune and Foundation, but Simmons—who sadly passed away in February of this year—is a better wordsmith than either Herbert or Asimov. He gives us not just spaceships and aliens but also rich, finely drawn characters you’d expect to meet in a “serious” literary novel.
You’re probably wondering why I’m opening with science fiction when the title mentions historical fiction. The reason is Hyperion illustrates the whole point I want to make about the genre we call historical fiction.
Unfamiliarity Changes What We Notice
Below is an excerpt from chapter two of Hyperion, when our seven main characters arrive by spaceship at the capital of the planet Hyperion:
Toward evening, as the fray daylight was beginning to fade into gray twilight, a double sonic boom shook the town and then echoed from the single, sculpted peak to the south. The clouds glowed blue-white. Half a minute later, an ebony spacecraft broke through the overcast and descended carefully on a tail of fusion flame, its navigation lights blinking red and green against the gray.
At one thousand meters the craft’s landing beacons flared, and three beams of coherent light from the spaceport north of town locked the ship in a welcoming ruby tripod. The spacecraft hovered at three hundred meters, slipped sideways as smoothly as a mug sliding on a wet tabletop, and then settled weightlessly into a waiting blast pit.
High-pressure jets of water bathed the pit and the base of the ship, sending up billows of steam to blend with the curtains of drizzle blowing across the paved plain of the spaceport. When the water jets ceased, there was no noise except the whisper of rain and the random ticks and creaks of the cooling spaceship.
The writing is exquisite, first of all. I can see the beacons cutting through the drizzle, the ship slipping into the pit like a mug across a wet table, the jets hosing down the hull and the ticking as it cools.
But because I have to overthink everything, one question wouldn’t leave my mind…
Who’s watching?
All seven POV characters are inside the ship. There’s nobody on the ground—no mechanic squinting up through the rain, no dockworker loading supplies. The spaceport is effectively empty of anyone whose eyes we could be borrowing.
And yet somebody is watching very carefully. Somebody notes the colors of the nav lights against the gray. Somebody thinks the ship moves like a mug on a wet table.
That somebody is us. It’s a pair of incorporeal eyes the narrator set up for our benefit, standing in a spot where nobody in the novel is standing.
This is an example of what I’ve come to think of as the pilgrim point of view. It’s the stance of a narrator who knows a newcomer to this world is reading and builds them a platform to watch from, so to speak.
What do I mean by pilgrim? A pilgrim, of course, is someone who visits an unfamiliar place, and unfamiliarity changes what you notice. Think about it: we’ve all traveled to a new city or even another side of town we don’t know so well. We stare a little longer, and we crane our necks a little further out the window to soak in the New York skyline, or the world’s largest basket, or a weird Applebee’s we’ve never come across before. These are all things a native to the area walks right past without a second thought.
Notice that Simmons doesn’t actually explain anything in the passage. He never tells you what a blast pit is or how a fusion flame works. His vocabulary is entirely confident.
What gives away the pilgrim POV is the camera itself. The fact that it exists at all, and that it’s strategically positioned for an unfamiliar audience, is what makes this pilgrim-coded.
Before I go any further, I want to stress that this isn’t a criticism. Pilgrim-coding isn’t a synonym for bad writing or worldbuilding.
Hyperion is pilgrim-coded from page one, and it’s one of the best-written sci-fi novels I’ve ever read. Done badly, the pilgrim gives you the dreaded info-dump. We’ve all read books where one character explains the political situation to another character who already understands it. Done well, it gives you that spaceport in the rain. Consider Harry Potter. No one in the real world has actually visited Hogwarts. No one’s fought a mountain troll in the bathroom. Because no one’s done these things, J.K. Rowling gives us a newcomer to this world, Harry Potter, who acts as the reader’s eyes. If the novel were told from the POV of an insider like Albus Dumbledore, it would be a very different story.
From Pilgrim to Citizen
“But wait,” you might ask, “is it even possible to tell an immersive sci-fi or fantasy story without a pilgrim dynamic, or a significantly decreased one?”
Certainly. Look at Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries series, another entry in the sci-fi category. The passage below is the very first paragraph of All Systems Red (2017), the first in the series:
I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.
Murderbot, our cyborg narrator and main character, is not a pilgrim to this world. Judging by the casual way he talks about his “governor module” and the “company satellites,” it’s clear he’s what we’ll call a citizen. There’s no prologue, no summary of events leading up to the present. There’s no urgency to explain, well, anything. Because this is Murderbot’s personal log—we learn he’s narrating his story to Dr. Mensah, another citizen of this world—he rarely paints a scene for a newcomer. There’s no need to place a camera in the rain to catch the spaceship landing.
Wells drops you—plunk!—into a stream of events (indeed, a stream of consciousness) that ostensibly has been flowing for at least the past 35,000 hours, or roughly four years. It’s the moment when she finally drops you in the story that’s important.
Why? Because that’s the moment when something changes.
In the case of All Systems Red, that moment occurs on page two, when a giant alien creature attacks the crew, tearing Murderbot from his self-loathing thoughts.
Hyperion is a big book, just under 180,000 words. All Systems Red is roughly 40,000 words. Granted, a whole lot more happens in Hyperion—besides the frame story, we get six separate tales—but the change in the narrative dynamic, from pilgrim to citizen, also contributes to the difference in length. Murderbot describes his environment, but the brushstrokes are much broader than the Hyperion narrator’s. Less is explained. More is implied or hinted at. The assumption is that the reader, while never having been to space or attacked by an alien, is familiar enough with the sci-fi genre to fill in a lot of the “missing pieces” themselves.
Can We Please Start Talking About Historical Fiction Now?
If the pilgrim POV assumes the narrator and/or reader is new to a setting, state of mind, or experience—falling in love, coming into a lot of money, gaining superpowers—then the opposite is true of the citizen POV. The assumption is that the narrator and/or reader has seen the New York skyline ten thousand times before from the Q train. They can recite every fact about the world’s largest basket. And as for the weird Applebee’s, they’re the general manager. They don’t require all the details and window dressing.
Notice I’ve been saying assumption. That’s a characteristic of the narrator. Hyperion’s narrator assumes you’ve never seen a spaceship land. Murderbot assumes you have.
So how does this apply to historical fiction?
First, what exactly is historical fiction? Definitions differ, but there’s probably one “rule” everyone can agree on: it’s set in the past. The Historical Novel Society says it should be set at least 50 years before the novel is written, but that seems arbitrary to me.
There’s another element to historical fiction I think most people can agree on, which is that the setting matters to the story—more so than it matters, arguably, to other genres. If I set a novel in Russia during the Napoleonic Wars, the setting better have some bearing on the plot and characters. The novel doesn’t have to be “about” the Napoleonic Wars, but it should have something to say about life during this particular time and place that can’t be said as poignantly if it were set in Topeka, Kansas, in 1983.
Beyond that, there are no hard and fast rules, and this is where our discussion of pilgrims and citizens comes in.
I don’t believe historical fiction has to be pilgrim-coded. The assumption, in other words, doesn’t have to be that the reader is unfamiliar with the setting (even if they 100% are). You might be reading the Napoleonic Wars novel in San Antonio in the year 2026, but the characters believe they’re living in the year 1812.
I acknowledge that most historical fiction is pilgrim-coded, just as most sci-fi and fantasy novels are pilgrim-coded. But when the camera is adjusted in a certain way, the story becomes citizen-coded.
This doesn’t mean crucial details are left unsaid. It simply means the narrator is more strategic about revealing them. They unfold more organically and purposefully throughout the narrative.
Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is an excellent example. Published in 2009, it’s about Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power in Henry VIII’s court. The novel is set mostly in the 1530s, yet Cromwell doesn’t experience the Tudor court as a historical period you learn about in high school. As a citizen of this world, he isn’t aware he’s living in The Past or that this is a costume drama. Events are happening now, not 500 years ago. There’s no camera in the rain pointed at the castles. Nobody stops to explain the Act of Supremacy. Cromwell wrote it! Like Murderbot and the giant alien, the narrator assumes the reader is already familiar with the historical details, and if they’re not, the internet’s right there.
So what does this look like in practice? Below are the first few paragraphs:
“So now get up.”
Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen; knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard. His head turns sideways; his eyes are turned toward the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out. One blow, properly placed, could kill him now.
Blood from the gash on his head—which was his father’s first effort—is trickling across his face. Add to this, his left eye is blinded; but if he squints sideways, with his right eye he can see that the stitching of his father’s boot is unraveling. The twine has sprung clear of the leather, and a hard knot in it has caught his eyebrow and opened another cut.
Like Murderbot, we’re thrown into the deep end of the pool and have to paddle to stay afloat. Except for the note that opens the chapter—PUTNEY, 1500—there’s little about this passage (or, indeed, the next several pages) that gives the setting away. We know there are cobbles in the yard, that the father wears leather boots, but that’s it. The camera is fixed not on a tower, where we can see everything, but behind a young Cromwell’s eyes (or a single eye, since he’s been blinded in his left). That’s all we know of this world.
Mantel has written about her experience writing Wolf Hall. The novel, she says, “attempts to duplicate not the historian’s chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.” While writing it, she felt as if the novel’s events “were happening now, in the present tense, unfolding as I watched,” while Cromwell “seemed to be occupying the same physical space as me.”
She acknowledges that this narrative style challenged readers’ expectations of what constitutes a historical novel and even made some unhappy. Her decision to have the narrator refer to Cromwell not by his name but by the simple pronoun he led to some complaints.
Despite this, Wolf Hall was a massive bestseller, moving more than a million copies on both sides of the Atlantic. It won the U.K.’s Booker Prize—in fact, it was the fastest-selling Booker Prize winner in history at the time—and the National Book Critics Circle Award in the U.S. By any measure, it was a triumph, and I believe Mantel’s emphasis on the citizen contributed to its success. It made it different and compelling, setting it apart from other novels set during the same period.
Among those other works is Phillipa Gregory’s bestseller, The Other Boleyn Girl (2001). A few sentences from the start of the novel tell you immediately if the pilgrim or the citizen has the mic:
I could see the condemned man, accompanied by his priest, walk slowly from the Tower toward the green where the wooden platform was waiting, the block of wood placed center stage, the executioner dressed all ready for work in his shirtsleeves with a black hood over his head. It looked more like a masque than a real event, and I watched it as if it were a court entertainment. The king, seated on his throne, looked distracted, as if he was running through his speech of forgiveness in his head. Behind him stood my husband of one year, William Carey, my brother, George, and my father, Sir Thomas Boleyn, all looking grave. I wriggled my toes inside my silk slippers and wished the king would hurry up and grant clemency so that we could all go to breakfast.
As is the case in Wolf Hall, the POV is limited to a single character, a young Mary Boleyn, yet the details come in sharper relief. More is noticed. The scaffold is described, as are the executioner’s clothes. Mary not only names the people she sees but identifies her relationship to them. We’re even told what material her slippers are made out of.
What I’m Not Arguing
I’m not suggesting one narrative style is better than the other, or that citizen-coded fiction is better than pilgrim-coded. They’re both valid, and in the case of Wolf Hall and The Other Boleyn Girl, they both qualify as historical fiction under its loosey-goosey definition.
Others have gone much further than me, arguing that historical fiction doesn’t actually exist. The Irish historical fiction author Paul Lynch, also a Booker Prize winner, said in a 2017 article titled “There’s No Such Thing as Historical Fiction” that no one can write truthfully about any era but their own. The writer’s consciousness is shaped by the pressures of the time they actually live in, so an “authentic” past on the page is just sleight of hand, not unlike modern actors putting on wigs and stockings to appear in a period piece. His conclusion is that “historical fiction is contemporary fiction and cannot be anything else.”
A year before him, the Canadian novelist Janna G. Noelle said that “the problem with historical fiction is that it’s not actually genre.” Unlike other genres, historical fiction has no conventions. Romance has certain beats. So does mystery. So do thrillers. Historical fiction has… a date. She argues it’s a setting rather than a distinct form of storytelling, which is why you’ll rarely find it on its own shelf at Barnes & Noble. The books get absorbed into literary, romance, military, and mystery instead.
Again, I’m not going to that extreme. Historical fiction is a real thing.
However, when it’s written with a citizen stance as opposed to a pilgrim stance, it starts to sound less like a historical novel and more like… just a novel.
And that brings me to the book I’ve been working on.
Killing the Tour Guide
The Word of Luz Divina is set in Spain in the early 1960s, during the Francisco Franco dictatorship. Below is a passage from the first chapter as it stood in an old draft, narrated by Miguel as an old man looking back:
Early in the next century, a mutation in the LRRK2 gene—responsible for making a protein called dardarin, from the Basque word dadara, or “tremor”—was implicated as a contributor to [Parkinson’s]. I bring the last part up only because the mutation, for reasons unknown, occurs at much higher rates in people from the Basque region of Spain than elsewhere in the world.
Obviously I knew none of this in the early 1960s when I was still finishing up school, and I likely wouldn’t know it today if not for the fact that I led the study that discovered the relationship between the mutation and Parkinson’s.
Two pages later, Miguel walks you past ramparts and a Moorish bridge and the Roman road underneath it. He mentions that nobody agrees anymore on what al-Andalus (where Andalusia gets its name) even means.
It’s not badly written. The problem is that it’s a Rick Steves tour of Spain, and that’s not the story I wanted to tell.
Here’s how the chapter opens now:
Miguel worried he’d brought the wrong pastries. He’d gone with an order of tartas locas when, in hindsight, the crumbly polvorón seemed more likely to make a grand impression. It was too late now, he told himself as he approached Luz Divina’s front door. He’d have to make up for the negligence with irreproachable manners and charm.
The gene is gone. Nobody explains what a polvorón is. But the missing footnotes aren’t the point. The point is that Miguel now wants something on page one, whereas before, we were watching a History Channel program.
I couldn’t keep the tour guide and give Miguel agency, because the tour guide already knew how it turns out. He told you on page two that his Parkinson’s-addled father would walk again. He was reporting from a safe distance on a life that had finished happening.
This exercise has also taught me that a narrator can be a stranger to the place and still own the story. Harry is a pilgrim at Hogwarts, but it’s his book. Daenerys is a pilgrim in Essos, but no one would call her a bystander. The newness isn’t necessarily the variable.
Whose arc it is… that’s the variable. Harry may be a stranger at Hogwarts, but he’s a citizen of his own life. He has wants and goals. The book belongs to him.
The same can’t be said of Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby. He’s 100% a pilgrim in Gatsby’s world, and it’s Gatsby’s book.
My old Miguel was Nick, and I didn’t want that. He wasn’t a stranger in Spain, but he was a stranger in Luz’s story, standing at the window, describing the weather, telling you about a girl.
Killing the tour guide didn’t make the book any less historical. But it did elevate Miguel to protagonist level alongside Luz Divina.
One final thought. When I started this rewrite four months ago, I assumed the hard part would be making the 1960s feel far enough away. Historical enough.
It turned out to be the opposite problem. My research into Franco’s hyper-nationalist Spain kept sounding like the news. The same thing that was happening then is happening now. IYKYK.
I get what Mantel means when she says Cromwell was occupying the same space as her. Miguel and Luz are opposed to Franco’s fascist regime, but I believe they would be just as opposed to the current U.S. administration. The two time periods—Miguel’s and ours—overlap. They rhyme. The present, after all, is governed by very old forces. Power against weakness, for example, or truth against falsehood.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped wanting to hand the microphone to the pilgrim. Miguel doesn’t know he’s living in a historical novel, and I decided the reader didn’t need to know it either.
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