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Discuss this interview with @SenatorChickpea here
one choice it's made is to tell is story about Catherine the Great- who came to power as a short, ordinary looking brown haired woman in early middle age- where the lead is played by a young and conventionally attractive blonde ... that choice also says something about who the writers, and the audience, think is worth of occupying our attention, and has nasty implications about our ability to take a 'historically accurate' Catherine seriously as an intelligent person and a sexual being.
Fatherland's backstory isn't that plausible, for example, but Robert Harris had a very clear idea about what he wanted to do- a noir detective story where the crime is the biggest in human history. The novel doesn't need a detailed examination of how the Nazis won, and wisely chooses to brush over it in a couple of paragraphs. The author knows what matters, and that's the emotional plausibility of the story, not the intellectual plausibility of the alternate history.
It's why I've soured on the various attempts to "fix" the Draka series, because they're trying to turn a soft setting into a harder one and it just feels like both going against the tone and like a square peg. And that's just one example.
Yeah. I don't like the Draka series- at all - but the attempts to fix it always reminded me of that old joke. You know, tourist asks for directions, local remarks 'Well, if I were you I wouldn't start from here.'
There's just no point to trying to bring historical plausibility to the Draka. It would be like trying to create hard sci-fi explanations for all the stuff in Star Wars.
Actually, people do try that. Their efforts speak for themselves.
Yeah. I can't remember who said it, but Stirling's idea about the Draka as a 'dark mirror' of the US is fundamentally silly. You don't need to leave the US to do it!
Which brings us neatly back to the piece and our back and forth about facing honestly up to living in imperial and colonial societies....
There's just no point to trying to bring historical plausibility to the Draka. It would be like trying to create hard sci-fi explanations for all the stuff in Star Wars.
Actually, people do try that. Their efforts speak for themselves.