Another novella set in Parker's mainline secondary universe, about a group of academics tasked with a seemingly impossible task by a tyrant.
And so Gyges formulates a plan so that a few lead scholars, including our narrator, are to manufacture a false history of Aelis, complete with recently discovered artifacts and ruins, that will justify Aelia going after Ana Strasoe with a willing and eager populace. Gyges’ plan is as mad and grand as you might imagine--manufacturing a whole lost city and civilization that can be “discovered” and used as reason for the war to happen to recover lost glory. It has to be a bulletproof, fully documentable manufactured lost history.
This, needless to say, does not go to plan...
This is the story of the novella Making History.
Making History is set in the secondary world that Parker has, with often contradictory and twisty worldbuilding, been building for quite some time. Call it the Saloninus-verse, for the character he has alluded to, mentioned and referenced and written about the most. Or Parkerland, since that is what the author calls it. It’s a world based on areas of antiquity and medieval Europe from roughly the Mediterranean all the way to Central Asia, with lots of countries, polities and ideas that resonate with our world but aren’t quite our own. You can see the echoes and Parker has a lot of fun with that. The Sashan are very much in the mold of the Parthian or Sassanian Empire, except even more powerful. The Robur, who do not feature in this book, are the Roman stand-ins. And so on.
Parker’s trick and devilry for a reader who wants an organized timeline and the like is that his references are contradictory, mixed and tangled at best. Just where anything is in relation to anything else is often unclear, and when things occur in relation to other books is pretty dire to try and figure out, and that’s part of Parker’s joy. I’ve seen proposed maps and some time frames but they are all very speculative.
So figuring out when and where Making History takes place in this verse is tricky. We do have Aelia, and the Sashan and Anticyrene, so we have some basic ideas on when it occurs in the verse. It doesn’t actually matter when it occurs in the timeline and where. You don’t have to have to have read any previous Parker in order to enjoy this. Where it fits in a history that is unclear, contradictory and unclear doesn’t really matter to enjoy the novella.
And yet it does somewhat, given the plot of the story. The academics are trying to manufacture a history from scratch, a history that didn’t exist. They know the truth, mostly about where Aelia came from. They did not come from a fallen civilization that straddled the border of Aelia and the Ana Strasoe. They know that what Gyges wants is completely manufactured and unreal.
And yet they have to do it. The work is split up among these academics. Our narrator is tasked with an interesting problem, and that of language. A fair amount of the novella is concerned with our protagonist trying to reverse engineer a language that could be plausibly be seen as the ancestor of Aelian¹. Parker goes into a deep dive into a real historical subject but in a fictional context, something that he is awfully fond of doing. In this case, we get how to reverse engineer not only a plausible proto language that a high fallen civilization might have produced, but also its writing system as well. It’s a brilliant bit of worldbuilding backwards and forwards, which is ironic given Parker’s disinterest in presenting a coherent set of worldbuilding for his world.
In that way, Making History is Parker being self aware of what he is done in the universe, and having the opening of the plot having academics being tasked with making an articulate (if false) history of Aelia and making it all make sense and stand up to scrutiny and rigor. Is it a “take that” at the whole project of making consistent worldbuilding? Perhaps, because as the plot unfolds, the narrator and the other academics start to see echoes of their created past crop up in the present day, inexplicably. Artifacts that are clearly fake--they have to be, they weren’t made for the unearthed site but they are in the style. And then there are people speaking the language our narrator created. And documents as well...
And how and what is going on, unfolds the main plot of the novel. In classic style, Parker makes it clear that there are multiple answers as to what could be going on. The more fun and much more unlikely answer is the Borges answer. The academics hypothesize, that while their primary guess as to what is happening (redacted for spoilery reasons) is probably what is really happening, their alternate guess is even more fun and I will spoil that here: They think that by manufacturing such a large volume
Have you read Borges’ Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius? That is a short story where entries and information regarding a strange and seemingly fictional place start cropping up in the real world, and slowly and surely become real. It’s a horror story, in a way, that history and reality could be so weirdly warped as to have a fictional volume of an encyclopedia of a place that doesn’t exist start to intrude on reality and start to influence reality. In that story, artifacts from the titular Tlön, just like in Making History, start to appear. The false reality of Tlön becomes, in effect, real. The academics as their backup low-probability explanation think that the large force of their efforts to make a false history does, in fact, change the past and make it real.
And once again, it goes back to the theme I’ve looked at this novella through the lens with--the inconsistent and not defined worldbuilding of Parker in his Parkerland universe. There is no bible, no one set history of his world and the very act of him writing another book upsets and changes that applecart and the calculations of what has come before, all the more. It is all stone mirrors, all strange and invented languages, all Tlön.
The other book to tie this to is a book I’ve looked at over in Skiffy and Fanty, and that is All Roads Lead to Rome: Why We Think of the Roman Empire Daily by Rhiannon Garth-Jones. That book is a non-fictional look at the legacy and responses to Rome by successor civilizations and how they change and take slices of that history and run with it. And in so doing, often distort or change aspects of that history, culture and society for their own ends. Just as one example, have you noticed that the Neoclassical style, so seen in Washington D.C, is all white marble? That’s a misinterpretation of the originals, the paint on Greek and Roman buildings being long gone. The actual originals, in the time of Plato, or Cicero, or Emperor Trajan, would have been polychromatic, even gaudy, by modern eyes.Were any of them transported to the modern day, they would take one look at the Capitol building and wonder what happened to all the color.
There is much more richness and discussion and thought in the novella, about the nature of truth, information, society and history. There is the classic dark humor and biting wit that Parker’s work features. It’s a thinking piece in many ways, much along the shorter works in his oeuvre, as opposed to direct action. But I do think it gives a very good entry point into how Parker writes, especially in the shorter vein, when he truly allows his nerdery and deep interest in subjects come to the fore. In some ways, I think Parker’s efforts in novels aren’t quite as sharp, or strong or rich as novellas and stories such as Making History.
About the only thing missing from the book is not even a jot of a mention of Salonicus. Is it set before him, then? Unclear! (see above).
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Highlights:
- What is truth, anyway and can you manufacture it?
- Deep nerdery dives, a classic of shorter Parker work.
- Biting, dark humor.
- No Salonicus references in this one.
POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.
¹Given Parker’s strong interest in engineering, going into this novella, I had completely expected that it would be focused on the engineering aspects of the story. If you are going to have a lost city, it’s not as easy as burying a city and then, voila, uncovering it. There are some concerns that our narrator discusses with one of his colleagues tasked with that part of the project, but it is not the focus of this novella that I thought it might be.
