'The Eagle and the Bluebird' review

[Gary Oswald]

Discuss this article by @SpanishSpy here

 

[Coiler]

What's interesting is that the "Kings and not peasants" problem is something I've found far more prominent in "AH as a genre" than anywhere else, including "AH as a setting" (where you tend to get a lot of low-level viewpoints) and even novels specifically about the rich and powerful.

 

[Thande]

What's interesting is that the "Kings and not peasants" problem is something I've found far more prominent in "AH as a genre" than anywhere else, including "AH as a setting" (where you tend to get a lot of low-level viewpoints) and even novels specifically about the rich and powerful.

I must admit, a relentless 90s-zeitgeist focus on social history and Ordinary People's Lives (They Were Just As Boring As Yours, But Without CD Players) is exactly what put me off history in school as a kid - I wanted to hear about kings and dates and battles.

Of course, both have their place; but a reaction against that is one reason why I tend towards big name foci in my AH fiction (with some exceptions such as Not An English Word).

 

[Alex Richards]

I must admit, a relentless 90s-zeitgeist focus on social history and Ordinary People's Lives (They Were Just As Boring As Yours, But Without CD Players) is exactly what put me off history in school as a kid - I wanted to hear about kings and dates and battles.

Of course, both have their place; but a reaction against that is one reason why I tend towards big name foci in my AH fiction (with some exceptions such as Not An English Word).

It's also something that sort of comes up for me with some of the modern push for more viewpoints on Country Houses when you go visit.

Thing is, each individual place does it fine. But when you've been to as many as I have you just get to the point where it's just 'yep maids start at 6, cleaning blah blah blah ooh this table service is just lovely'

Not to mention while there's some interesting behind the scenes things in places (early central heating or electricity is always good for this), kitchens are very rarely an example of it, and sculleries/butteries/wine cellars just... aren't.

 

[Thande]

It's also something that sort of comes up for me with some of the modern push for more viewpoints on Country Houses when you go visit.

Thing is, each individual place does it fine. But when you've been to as many as I have you just get to the point where it's just 'yep maids start at 6, cleaning blah blah blah ooh this table service is just lovely'

Not to mention while there's some interesting behind the scenes things in places (early central heating or electricity is always good for this), kitchens are very rarely an example of it, and sculleries/butteries/wine cellars just... aren't.

Yes. Of course, this is different to finding someone from a proletarian background who went on to have an interesting and unusual life, providing it's made clear that it was unusual and one shouldn't judge the state of the entire class by that.

 

[Alex Richards]

Yes. Of course, this is different to finding someone from a proletarian background who went on to have an interesting and unusual life, providing it's made clear that it was unusual and one shouldn't judge the state of the entire class by that.

Oh yeah. Scone Palace have, I think, pitched it perfectly with their displays about Dido Elizabeth Belle to tie into the famous painting of her and her cousin Elizabeth Murray they have there. 'Here's a lovely piece of art, and here's the story of slavery and colonialism that lies behind it'.

 

[SenatorChickpea]

While I'm pleased the 'peasants not kings' line resonated, it was certainly never meant to be proscriptive- I delight in some of the AH classics that focus on big names. I've written before about how Ed Thomas's works really charmed me.

The thing is, if your AH tale is about the actual changing of the timelines- the battle that went the other way, the assassination of the Queen et cetera- then yes, it makes sense to concentrate on the people at the top of society who have the most information about what's happening.

But if you want to actually feel the difference, then you're better off looking somewhere else on the social scale. If you want to explore how Britain is shaped by Empire surviving a few bloody decades longer, then I'd argue you'll get a lot more about exploring the lives of middle class families in Bristol and Bombay than looking at the highest echelons of the Colonial Office.

@Gary Oswald's wonderful analysis of Malê Rising a few weeks back nailed this point: the occasional shallowness of the research and slightly iffy political messages of the work aside, what makes that story a classic is that it tells a hundred human stories.

What I was trying to say, and I should stress that I by no means practice this myself, is that characters don't need to have power to be powerful characters. You can describe how the world has changed through a love story or a murder mystery or an argument at a family dinner.

 

[SpanishSpy]

It's also something that sort of comes up for me with some of the modern push for more viewpoints on Country Houses when you go visit.

Thing is, each individual place does it fine. But when you've been to as many as I have you just get to the point where it's just 'yep maids start at 6, cleaning blah blah blah ooh this table service is just lovely'

Not to mention while there's some interesting behind the scenes things in places (early central heating or electricity is always good for this), kitchens are very rarely an example of it, and sculleries/butteries/wine cellars just... aren't.

This is why, in my article on writing AH short stories, I'm big on characters in liminal positions in society - in other words, people who are usually powerless but find themselves in a position where, for one reason or another, they can make a difference, if only on a small scale, perhaps only to themselves. You can see a lot if you look at a society from the right viewpoint.

While I'm pleased the 'peasants not kings' line resonated, it was certainly never meant to be proscriptive- I delight in some of the AH classics that focus on big names. I've written before about how Ed Thomas's works really charmed me.

The thing is, if your AH tale is about the actual changing of the timelines- the battle that went the other way, the assassination of the Queen et cetera- then yes, it makes sense to concentrate on the people at the top of society who have the most information about what's happening.

But if you want to actually feel the difference, then you're better off looking somewhere else on the social scale. If you want to explore how Britain is shaped by Empire surviving a few bloody decades longer, then I'd argue you'll get a lot more about exploring the lives of middle class families in Bristol and Bombay than looking at the highest echelons of the Colonial Office.

@Gary Oswald's wonderful analysis of Malê Rising a few weeks back nailed this point: the occasional shallowness of the research and slightly iffy political messages of the work aside, what makes that story a classic is that it tells a hundred human stories.

What I was trying to say, and I should stress that I by no means practice this myself, is that characters don't need to have power to be powerful characters. You can describe how the world has changed through a love story or a murder mystery or an argument at a family dinner.

Nail. Head. Hit.

If you want to show what changes, then a top-down look is needed. If you want to show what the changes involve, then you need to get closer to the coal face of where those changes are happening.

What Liam and David talk about is the opposite of what I view as the opposite of the 'trinketization' (to use @Coiler's term) that I rail so much against. A trinketized work is one where facts are only abstract things used to prove a point.

The opposite, which I think what a good 'peasants not kings' work does, is show the real implications of big events. In my POV article, I used the phrase "Kings make policy, peasants suffer policy." More often than not, power is an insulator from consequences. Choosing someone lower on the pecking order shows you the real implications of a bill passed or an order signed or what have you.

For example - I'm reading a book on the genocide of the indigenous peoples of California in the mid-19th century. To legislators in Sacramento or Washington, voting to pass a bill funding the various militias in the state at the time is an abstract, peaceful act. To a Modoc or a Wintu or a Tolowa, it is something upon which the survival of everything they hold dear rests.

 

[Charles EP M.]

It's the core of local level politics. A bus service shortens, a bank branch closes, a library shuts, all probably minor stuff up top but potentially hugely disruptive for the people using it. And that's normal day-to-day stuff, not "bank branch shuts because the new revolutionary authority has nationalised banks and 'rationalised' the number of branches for MiniMoney"

 

[SenatorChickpea]

It's like how the game 'Papers, Please' builds an entire picture in your mind of the grotty dictatorship you live in- all done through the view of a customs officer.

You could do a story about the disruptions sweeping Europe set entirely in the life of a family in Brooklyn- dad works at Ellis Island, mum's a nurse, kids go to classes filling up with immigrant kids. It would probably be more interesting than yet another take on a Great War with mixed up alliances.

 

[Coiler]

This is why, in my article on writing AH short stories, I'm big on characters in liminal positions in society - in other words, people who are usually powerless but find themselves in a position where, for one reason or another, they can make a difference, if only on a small scale, perhaps only to themselves. You can see a lot if you look at a society from the right viewpoint.

I've actually considered making a full post on this (On my own blog and/or here) based on examples from both fiction and history books. For fiction, I've actually thought that the Lee/Caudell viewpoint characters in Guns of The South was very well done. You get to see a guy at the top and a guy at the (near) bottom, and it flows well while showing different sides of things.

(As an aside, GOTS is interesting in that what it does well it does very well, like that, and what it does badly, like its antagonists and the uncomfortable Confederate apologism, it does very badly)

But the historical examples that struck for me are Andrew Gordon focusing on Hugh Evan Thomas in The Rules of the Game and Troy Rondinone focusing on Gaspar Ortega in The Friday Night Fighter. Evan-Thomas was a rear admiral commanding only a few ships (albeit the newest and best) at Jutland, but Gordon could use him to show how Royal Navy officers developed in ways that he couldn't with Jellicoe and Beatty (although he did talk about them too). Ortega was what we'd now call a "Fringe contender" in boxing, with a few title shots but none victorious. This gives you more than a basic boxer while still being a different perspective from a well-known super-champion.

 

[Thande]

I've actually considered making a full post on this (On my own blog and/or here) based on examples from both fiction and history books. For fiction, I've actually thought that the Lee/Caudell viewpoint characters in Guns of The South was very well done. You get to see a guy at the top and a guy at the (near) bottom, and it flows well while showing different sides of things.

(As an aside, GOTS is interesting in that what it does well it does very well, like that, and what it does badly, like its antagonists and the uncomfortable Confederate apologism, it does very badly)

But the historical examples that struck for me are Andrew Gordon focusing on Hugh Evan Thomas in The Rules of the Game and Troy Rondinone focusing on Gaspar Ortega in The Friday Night Fighter. Evan-Thomas was a rear admiral commanding only a few ships (albeit the newest and best) at Jutland, but Gordon could use him to show how Royal Navy officers developed in ways that he couldn't with Jellicoe and Beatty (although he did talk about them too). Ortega was what we'd now call a "Fringe contender" in boxing, with a few title shots but none victorious. This gives you more than a basic boxer while still being a different perspective from a well-known super-champion.

I would tend to agree on the Lee/Caudell thing in GOTS - in stark contrast to Turtledove's usual habit of overloading us with viewpoint characters (though I know he's trying to show multiple fronts of a bigger conflict etc), the constant back-and-forth between big picture leadership and ordinary bloke at the coalface worked very well.