Heinleining the Just in Time Research

While I was writing Impaler, I did a lot of research (no surprises here - Australian, never been to Europe, only seen snow a few times (courtesy Pennsylvania winters), and I'm writing a book set over six hundred years ago, in Eastern Europe, in winter, involving cultures I had never experienced except through reading books). The funny thing was, most of the research happened rather like modern inventory management - "just in time".

I'd been absorbing general books about the area and the time period for years, but that's not enough for the kind of specifics I was looking for. Things like "Okay, it's mid-winter. Snow - quite a lot of it for the most part - on the ground. Danube River frozen over to the extent that you can march an army across it. How far is that army going to get in a day?" (Not very, especially if they're dealing with unbroken snow). I learned a lot about logistics just dealing with that question.

Then there's the more interesting bits: Vlad is trying to get his army south without Sultan Mehmed II realizing what he's up to - preferably before Mehmed realizes the Wallachian crown has changed hands (again). He needs stealth. Moving several thousand men and horses doesn't correlate terribly well with "stealth" when you're marching them through the countryside - so Vlad comes up with the idea of taking out the enemy garrisons, and sharing the loot with the locals to buy their favor so they don't say anything.

To us, that's not a big issue - but in his time, it was unheard of. Similarly Vlad's decision to buy food rather than loot - despite the high cost (he makes the observation at one point that at this time of year food is worth more than gold) - was a total departure from the norms of the time. Knowing the norms of the time is general research, but the specifics, down to nuts and bolts sometimes, were things that typically I didn't realize I needed until I got to that part of the book.

So, just before the battle for Varna, I spent quite some time trying to find out what Varna's defenses looked like in 1477, as well as the likely impact of the 1444 battle (minimal, since the town itself wasn't directly involved), the architecture of the town, the layout of the governor's palace and where it was in relation to everything else, likely local culture, and so forth. This is not something that is readily available even to the best Google-fu. Google maps helps, interestingly enough. You get a good sense of terrain from that.

Ultimately, I ended up with guesses seeded with the very few pieces of hard data I managed to unearth - things like the old Roman baths still working and converted to Turkish-style, Roman ruins by the palace (which undoubtedly provided their own defensive layer, just by existing), and tried to give the impression of knowing a lot about the place when there was actually buggerall that I could find. Smoke and mirrors, the greatest art of the writer. Mostly I used a blend of known trends in better documented regions as close by as I could get them.

There were quite a few smaller research binges - working out what trees would be growing where, for instance, given that except in the more inaccessible parts of mountain ranges it's pretty unlikely the vegetation now is going to be much like the vegetation then. Phases of the moon in early 1477 was another critical aspect of the story - and that included the extra fun of figuring out whether the lunar calendars I was working from had made the conversion back to the Julian calendar, which was the only one being used in that region at the time (the Gregorian calendar wasn't devised until quite some time later). When various religious festivals occurred, Orthodox and Roman (at that stage, they were in synch - the combination of the Gregorian calendar and a revised method of calculating Easter shifted the Roman religious calendar relative to the Orthodox). I also needed to check and keep track of what, if any, major Jewish and Islamic festivals would be happening, and figure out the local forms of said festivals for the time frame I was working with.

It's much easier if you're writing fantasy - you can just make this stuff up. On the flip side, when you do make it up from the whole cloth, it tends not to be as richly detailed as something that's already got hundreds of years of history behind it. I suspect that's why PTerry uses Earth history and legend and twists it for the Discworld: he gets that richness without having to get all the fiddly little details right.

The big research binge - which took me a few weeks, to get everything I needed and build the right images in my head - was for Constantinople, of course. There, I was reading contemporary accounts of the fall of Constantinople in 1453 (eye openers all by themselves), whatever references I could find about repairs and new building in the nearly 25 years since the siege - including tidbits like the northern section of the walls hadn't been rebuilt, but the Golden Gate had been bricked up possibly due to a legend that stated a Christian savior would enter the city in triumph through the Golden Gate (Vlad's entrance isn't exactly "triumphal", but one suspects that little detail won't matter terribly much).

I even found not-quite-period maps, which were close enough to give me an idea of what the city looked like, detailed information about the walls (I was bringing them down, so I needed to know what that was going to take), as well as all the things a pyromaniac could do with a large supply of black powder.

The results of that deserve their own post, about medieval-style battle tactics - which I also learned way too much about. Of course, none of this (I hope) is lectured in the book. Hopefully it's all part of the background, so everything fits without being obtrusive.

Which leads of course to the question: aside from PTerry, who else does a really good job of Heinleining background information like this into their books?

Making the Foreign Familiar

One of the more interesting challenges I faced when I was writing Impaler is something that tends to happen to anyone writing historical fiction - although fantasy and science fiction suffer from it to a lesser extent. Basically, people have a tendency to assume that other times and places, real or imagined, are pretty much like they are now but with different clothes, magic, spaceships, or swords.

Heck, this is something that gets people into trouble now, with cultures as apparently similar as different regions in the USA, the USA and Australia, Canada and the USA, or New Zealand and Australia. It gets worse the more differences there are between where you're writing from (or reading from) and where/when the book is set.

Let's face it, fifteenth century Eastern Europe might as well be a different universe.

I know Sarah rants periodically about authors who'll have a servant buying baby-blue blankies in a medieval marketplace, and I really did not want to be on the receiving end of that rant. And that's really just the start.

Dave and Sarah know this, because I hammered them with all manner of weird questions early on, mostly about "stuff" - 15th century Wallachia wasn't a wealthy principality, and it had armies looting their way through the place on a pretty regular basis, so I needed to have a clear idea what kind of furniture there'd be, what the everyday plates and things would be made of compared to the best quality, what people of different ranks wore (fabrics and colors as well as styles), what would be considered the height of luxury at the time, and what kinds of food would be served at a regular meal compared to a feast. Not to mention what would be a treat for small children, and a whole host of other details.

Google got a heavy workout for a lot of this, and Dave and Sarah fielded more questions than any sane person should (thanks, by the way). There are no "Everyday life in 15th Century Wallachia" books out there, or I'd have bought them.

Mostly what I found were tidbits. Comments by bemused travelers of the period that even though Bucharest was ransacked and burned to the ground every few years the survivors rebuilt in wood (the place was in the middle of a huge forest at the time - wood was presumably the most accessible building material). The main streets 'paved' with wooden slabs where side roads were packed dirt. Somewhere else I found a mention that in winter everyone from the highest rank to the lowest wore sheepskin coats and boots for warmth. Information about what plants were native and what was introduced when. Domesticated animals (mostly sheep and pigs) and wild animals. When forks were introduced.

All the information went into a kind of mental map of what Vlad Dracula's world looked like, even though he's only in it for maybe a third of the book - and spends most of that time planning his southern campaign and carefully manipulating his boyars (the ones I mentioned in my blog spree - was it only 2 weeks ago? - as unscrupulous backstabbers with a well-known propensity for unseating princes and often murdering them as well) so that they're both afraid of finding themselves 'enjoying' the view from a stake and grateful for his generosity.

Then there's the culture. At that time, the culture was predominantly an honor-shame culture where appearances mattered. Vlad couldn't just be a fair, generous ruler - he had to show it as well. That meant calculated gestures of mercy, as well as placing himself at risk by not eliminating those he knows are traitors: instead, Vlad tries to arrange for those men to die in battle, which was considered an honorable death, and meant that he didn't need to make new enemies by executing the dead man's family as well - and gave him a chance of winning the loyalty of the dead man's heirs. Similarly, he had to show courage in battle despite the risk of getting himself killed (This doesn't seem to have been an issue: Vlad is reported to have led charges and taken the most dangerous role in more than a few of the battles he was in).

It was also a very male culture. Women fell mostly into the traditional roles - maiden, mother, whore and crone. In noble culture, women were effectively invisible: while they weren't sequestered the way they were in the Ottoman Empire, they had their part of the palace or manor where they and their servants did what was considered the female work.

To Vlad, the women's lives are an alien world - his last real encounter with female roles was when he left the nursery at the age of five and started training as a warrior and nobleman. Apart from his wife and his young sons' nurse, the women in the palace are irrelevant to him. It certainly never occurs to him to question this segregation - it's simply how things are. His decision to leave young Vlad in the nursery for longer than usual is one of his few unusual 'domestic' choices (He wants to protect his two young sons, and doesn't want to leave his sickly youngest boy with no company).

It's all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that women in that time would respond as a modern woman would to that environment when for them it was how things worked. As often as not the wife was independent in her domain, as well as managing the entire estate when her husband was away at war - a situation that was far from rare. Since most noble marriages were arranged and usually political as well, love wasn't common (and it was very common for the husband to keep one or more mistresses - and to some extent it was expected that a virile man would need a mistress or two). Try portraying that sympathetically in today's world!

I hope I got a good balance with the way I portrayed Vlad in Impaler, but I guess March will be when I find out.

A Myth of Humanity

*I am not actually late with this post. Okay, I am, but the reason is that, being rather sick, by nighttime I'm stumbling around in a fog, which means that I posted this not on MGC but on an OLD abandonned blog of mine on blogspot. ARGH*

Lately, partly because I’ve been trying to kick off whatever bug has got me since November – it keeps coming back – and because when I’m tired or sick I can’t read fiction, I’ve been reading books on the proto- Indo-European culture.

Now, you go back long enough and it’s like reading tea leaves. Oh, okay, not tea leaves. Horse’s teeth and grave sculptures. However, through all this, it is possible to get a picture – vague and confusing though it is – of our most distant ancestors.

I’m not going to play psychologist, but themes emerge from what we can salvage of the very oldest tales: sacrifice and loss, love – often not eros, but agape or family love – blood and death.

Pratchett in a lot of his books says if you go back far enough you find that almost all the old stories are about the blood. I’ll add to that. The oldest stories are about blood, death and rebirth.

I think this is part of the reason that vampires are so popular, but that’s a side line I cannot pursue right now.

One of the things that surprised me is how the themes that echoed through the oldest fragments of legends we can find are the same themes we find again and again in science fiction and fantasy: twins; quests; bringing something magical/healing back; finding who you are.

Part of this, I think, is that humans are not like other animals creatures that live in a certain way because of instinct. Humans are domesticated creatures, as much as our dogs or our cats, but we domesticate ourselves. We are at the same time Fluffy who wants to pee on the sofa and the human who stands over her and tells her no. Only the human is often embodied in a myth.

Of course a lot of us believers get a lot of our morality from religion. But that’s an overt morality. It declares itself. It says “this you shall do” and “this you shall not do” and “here you shall go” and “here you shall not.”

Useful, of course, but it’s rather like the choke chain or the owner literally standing over you to prevent you from going on the sofa. The other part is more important – you don’t go on the sofa because you know you shouldn’t. You know you shouldn’t, because you’ve internalized the experience.

I was thinking about this and it all got tied up with different generations of science fiction and fantasy. Our myths are very much part of what we think the world should be. And what we think the world should be is both fed by and feeds the myth in our head that keeps us acting the way we think humans should act.

As I said, you find a lot of the themes of our oldest myths in fantastic literature... Until, that is fantastic literature decided its more important part was not dreaming of the future – or fantastic lands – but the last part of its name “literature”. It decided its most important function was to astonish the world. In doing so, it lost track of that “what humanity should be” and of reaching back into the sense of what humanity – or our branch of it – was and has been since we’ve had words and long before we had writing.

And so the self sacrifice was lost, and the discovery, and the sense of wonder. Instead we got either purposeless rambles, or people telling us life was brutish and nasty and then you die.

This is I think, an attempt to “count coup”, i.e. to claim to be superior to the vast uncounted multitude of our ancestors who first clawed their way to civilization and to an idea that there might be something better hereafter. And I think in that attempt we – as writers and as a civilization – only make ourselves mental and moral midgets.

Do you ever get to the end of a short story – or worse, a novel – and go “and your point was?” Worse, do you ever get to the end of a short story – or worse a novel – and go “Uh... I followed these characters around for this long for you to either twist them beyond recognition and/or kill them? Do you ever get the impression the author veered away from the ending that could and should have been to go in search of a glitter in the weeds of disappointment and bitterness?
No, I’m not saying that happy endings or happy-go-lucky stories are the only ones worth telling. Why in heck would I? If you’ve read me, you know well that’s not my attitude. But even in the nastiest of settings it is possible to be caring, to be a hero, to fight on. Even in difficult – particularly in difficult situations – it is important to remind others of what it means to be human.
Why would a bad ending be considered more mature or deeper than a happy one, or one where the character acted honorably?

Overthrowing the Evil Tyrant

And why it's not quite as easy as it sounds.

We've all met them. Usually male, although the Evil Empress or Queen occasionally gets a look-in, the Evil Overlord, whether the CEO of Evil Inc. or the Emperor of the Galaxy, or a petty prince of some forgotten nation in Fantasyland, is something of a staple in science fiction and fantasy. Usually he, she or it exists mostly to be overthrown.

When you come down to it, it's usually pretty easy. Not necessarily easy at the "toss a trinket into a volcano" level (yes, I know I'm oversimplifying. Shut up.), but there's a big Final Battle of some description, the Evil Overlord dies, and all is happiness, sweetness and light. As often as not, the Evil Overlord is some kind of kludged-up metaphor for the hero's journey to some kind of enlightenment (something the hordes of Tolkien-imitators usually fail to notice is that Frodo did not gain 'enlightenment' per se. He was irreparably wounded by the trials of his journey, and ultimately unable to remain in/on Middle Earth. There was a happy ending, but it wasn't for him.).

So why do tyrannies in the real world last so long?

Leaving aside the obvious "they're not really that bad" answer that I'm sure people are thinking (if you are, you're wrong. Read on MacDuff), the most atrocious regimes of all political flavors have lasted a long time for reasons that can be illustrated by two things.

First a recent news report about the execution of a North Korean man for - officially - revealing state secrets. The state secrets in question? Work conditions at his factory, and the price of food. Who he revealed them to? A South Korean friend. Let's just consider that for a moment. How often do you bitch about your job, or about how much things cost? Has it ever occurred to you that you could be executed for that? Me either. What kind of a regime does that? A horribly abusive one, obviously, but more to the point, one that keeps very close tabs on its people, leading us neatly to the second thing.

After the Berlin Wall went down and people got access to the secret police files, they found out that in the worst regimes - East Germany and Romania are particularly notable here - something like one person in four was reporting to the secret police. Applied here, that would mean about 15 of our followers were spying on the rest of us, and one or two of your Mad Genius hosts was doing the same (technically, one and three-quarters, but I don't see any volunteers for 3/4 of a person). More than three people in your family? Odds are, one of them is working for the secret police.

Since I'd be prepared to guarantee that very few people here have lived in that kind of environment, I think it's safe to say most of us don't have the mental toolset to understand the kind of environment a tyranny always begets. We're all accustomed to a relatively free and open society where you don't face execution for bitching about the cost of food.

How does that kind of situation develop? It's remarkably simple. In every tyranny, regardless of ideology, the way to ensure your safety and by extension that of your loved ones, is to be a Loyal Citizen. If a theology, you go to church and make sure you're the first in, the last out, and you know every hymn and your scripture - and never, ever contradict the priests (even, or perhaps especially when they contradict scripture). If you're in Onepartystan, you join the Party, go to every meeting, and so forth. But the easiest, quickest, and apparently least costly way to show your loyalty is to offer to pass information on to the authorities.

So, you do that. It's only little things, you think, and it's not going to make you a bad person. And at first, that's how it works. You might mention the co-worker you detest complaining about the cost of food, or the crazy old guy down the street who's muttering "Dear Leader my ass", but it's not like they're actually traitors or anything, and nothing bad is going to happen. Then the person you report to drops a few hints that make it obvious you're being watched as well. So when Grandma mentions that these newfangled collective farmy things are a waste of time and she never went hungry before they did this, you feel like you have to tell them, in case someone else has already passed it on and you'll be in trouble if you don't say anything. You try to downplay it, but you still tell them. And some time later, you go to visit Grandma, and she's not there, and the young family who live there now don't have any idea who used to live there - they're just happy they have a home.

You tell yourself Grandma is in a nice retirement village somewhere, but you know, deep down, that she isn't. And that you, personally, probably turned her in as a malcontent, or a traitor, or whatever the official buzzword is.

This is why people don't rise up and overthrow the Evil Overlord unless an extraordinary event triggers some kind of spontaneous outpouring of repressed rage, grief and guilt. The Evil Overlord already has them trapped in chains they've made themselves, link by little link. If you're writing a story where overthrowing the Evil Overlord is involved, you need to remember that your characters can't chat about it in the local pub. Anyone could be a spy for the Overlord. They can't even trust their own group - remember that one in four ratio? The worse the Evil Overlord is, the more likely it is he's got that many people spying for him.

That doesn't make rebellion impossible - but it makes it a whole lot harder than Lord of the Rings and its multifarious imitators (or, for that matter Star Wars and any number of space operas) would have you think. The people you're trying to liberate don't trust you because they can damn near guarantee that anyone they don't know is spying for the Overlord (why else would a stranger come here?), and you can't trust them because you know some of them are spying for the Overlord. They're going to be suspicious, unfriendly, and arrange unpleasant, deniable "accidents" for you, especially if they suspect that they're likely to be on the wrong end of a purge because of you.

They're not going to welcome their new freedom when you win, either - after as little as a generation of tyranny, people mostly expect that the new overlord will be just like the old one, maybe with different words to wrap around the same basic reality. More often than not, they're right. We're wired to follow someone who leads. It's what kept little tribelets of our ancestors alive in a dangerous world.

The fact that good leaders are a whole lot rarer than bad ones and freedom is a lot of work is something that adds depth to your writing and world-building when it's there - and if anyone doubts this, I strongly recommend a closer look at Sarah's Darkship Thieves. Athena's paranoia is perfectly justifiable and sane in the world she's raised in - and her Daddy Dearest is very much an Evil Overlord. Yes, she is the Evil Overlord's beautiful daughter. And yes, she does manage to more or less kick off rebellion. It's nowhere near as easy as George Lucas would have you think, either.

Any other examples? Thoughts? "Someone shut that madwoman up" messages?

Ye Merrie Olde Wars

We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace. ~Jeane J. Kirkpatrick

Because fiction thrives on conflict, and the biggest, baddest conflict anything has to offer is war, there's an awful lot of it in fiction. Historical fiction has subgenres for pretty much every major war and quite a few not so major ones - although "major" is something of a misnomer when it's happening to you.

Of course, historical and modern fiction have to content themselves with actual wars. We get to make them up.

Funnily enough, with all that wonderful material in history about weird ways wars have been started (okay, they were usually an excuse to go after someone) fantasy and science fiction seems to excel at the "traditional enemies who fight forever and have no idea what the actual war is about". Fantasy is worse than science fiction for this, despite there being all sorts of interesting reasons for two - or more - countries to be at war.

There's the basics - EasyBeats have to defend themselves against RagingAggressors or they cease to exist, BreedLikeRabbits need more space or they'll starve so they invade the neighbors, RuggedMountaineers (who seem to be related to the Horse People from Diana Wynne Jones Tough Guide to Fantasyland) raid SoftFlatlanders because those mountains don't let you grow shite.

Then there's the more sophisticated set - SnottyProtocolers offended by RoughButHonest and war gets going, no-one actually knows who owns that prime parcel of land but by deity it better be them, They (insert verb here) differently than We do so They must be evil.

I'm not going to rant here about unrealistic battle scenes - suffice to say that the reason streams get renamed things like Bloody Run is not because someone had the trots. A truly descriptive battle scene would have readers racing for the porcelain to expel their most recent meal at speed - and yes, that applies to modern war as well. I'm even going to be nice and not rant about authors who go on about what a wonderful leader SoAndSo is, then have him (and it usually is a him) do something that is so phenomenally dumb you wonder where the heck he left those wonderful brains that day.

Instead, here's a quickie sample of some of the better fantasy depictions of the logistics and strategy of war.

PTerry. Jingo (based on a historical incident. Really), Thud!, Small Gods (the amount of history stuffed into this book should have made it explode).

Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, more for the brief thumbnails of Sauron's preparations than anything else - it's bloody difficult to make war waged by existential evil work and Tolkein wasn't writing "fantasy" per se, he was writing "legends" which tend to skip all that detail stuff anyway.

Um. It would be so much easier to list bad examples, but I really don't want to do that. Over to you folks - which fantasy authors get their wars right?

The Fantasy Economy - What do you mean lifestyle matters?

And no, I don't mean the one politicians of all kinds are always making noises about.

What I'm talking about here is something that just about everyone gets wrong - usually because most of us are so used to the way things have worked since the Industrial Revolution that it's invisible. The changes the Industrial Revolution kicked into overdrive had already been happening, but in the space of fifty to a hundred years they went from upper class only to ubiquitous, and rearranged European society in the process. The other thing about the Industrial Revolution is that most of the changes were economic. The industry side was the means, not the end.

I'm going to start by reduction: it's easier to see the differences this way. Besides, we've all got a more or less reasonable idea of how "the economy" works nowadays. We know you earn money at a job or selling stuff and spend it on the things you need and want, hopefully in that approximate order.

The screamingly obvious first. Say goodbye to electricity, piped gas, and the car. For light, you're using either candles (expensive) or some form of oil/fat/grease light. More often than not, you're going to bed when it gets dark and getting up when it's light. Anything happening at night probably involves a full or at least three-quarter moon because that way there's a decent amount of light out. Cooking means a fire, which you've got to watch constantly and makes things miserable in summer. No cars means everything perishable is coming from close by, if you didn't grow it yourself. You're not going anywhere that's not in walking distance unless you can afford and have space for horses or there's a coach service. For most people, the effective 'range' is three to five miles for general errands, maybe ten miles if you're going somewhere and staying there, and if you've got access to good horses, fifty miles is a day's journey, more or less. Oh, and you're getting water from a well - yours if you're lucky, otherwise it's by bucket from a communal well, and the quality can be pretty iffy since there's no sewage system either. A bath means heating water bucket by bucket and pouring it into a tub as it boils. By the time you've filled the tub what you've got is - hopefully - warm water. If you're in a large family, everyone uses the tub water and the poor sod who goes last gets cold, dirty water to wash in.

Now get rid of mass-produced furniture and whatnot. Your dishes are probably wood, because for those all you have to do is cut down a tree and make it yourself. Nails are expensive because a blacksmith has to make them, individually. The old joke about granddad's axe isn't a joke any more - everything you own gets used, re-used and repaired endlessly. Your roof is probably shingle or thatch because you can do that yourself with local material, and you have to fix it constantly. Furniture-wise, you've got maybe a bed a table, and some stools or benches. Unless you're wealthy - which usually means you own a lot of land - you made it all yourself, or someone in your family did. If you're doing well, you've got some chickens and pigs, maybe even some cows or sheep. You don't usually see money at all: instead, you barter with whatever you have surplus or your skills. Money is for the wealthy. Even your taxes get paid in kind rather than in money. That's life for most people.

If you're one of the relative few who lives in the (rather small by our standards) cities, you probably still keep chickens and possibly pigs, and you might have a small garden that keeps you in vegetables. For flour, honey and such, you go to the markets. Also for cloth, since you haven't got space to grow flax or hemp or raise sheep. Cotton is rare and expensive because it's a sub-tropical crop and needs a lot of intensive labor. Mostly what you buy is some version of linen or hemp cloth or wool. There is no such thing as ready-made. You or your family make it yourself. You probably have two sets of clothing: one for everyday, and one for Sunday. Washing your clothes means dunking them in boiling water and beating the dirt out of them - soap hasn't been invented yet.

Trade means non-perishable goods - high quality fabrics, metals, gemstones, wood, dyes, spices (which are typically dried and will keep for a long time unless they get wet), lace (hand made by skilled artisans), and such. It's all expensive - your family might own one lace collar, which the lady of the house wears to church on Sundays and treats with extreme care. If you're a trader, chances are you live on the edge because travel any distance is dangerous and you could lose a fortune if your goods are stolen or the ship sinks. You probably specialize in one type of trade because of the specialized knowledge you need for it. If you're a skilled artisan, you're selling mostly to the relatively few wealthy people, or to traders, and you're probably fairly well off yourself (unless you're a blacksmith, in which case how wealthy you are depends a lot on where you're working and how specialized you are - a really good swordsmith or armorer makes a lot more than a village smith). Jobs as we understand them don't exist: most people are basically subsistence farmers or managing a little above that. People who are 'employed' are generally servants or slaves who live in their master's homes, or they're apprenticed to a merchant or artisan and learning their trade. There were a few 'open' trades - keeping an inn or tavern (which generally was done as an extra by someone who was a bit better off than his neighbors), prostitution, and hired muscle of all flavors. One of the things that kept this structure relatively static was a variety of laws that banned moving above the class you were born to.

All of this added up to a finely tuned economy that mostly excluded the majority of people. Farms and villages had their own micro-economies based on barter, with occasional luxuries like blankets being brought in by traveling peddlers and usually bartered. National economies relied heavily on how much precious metal could be mined or traded for, and on taxing trade (other taxes generally got paid in kind). Nations that were foolish enough to debase their coinage with base metals suffered inflation and lost trade. Standing armies were rare. More typically, a monarch had a small personal guard, and raised an army from the populace with promises of loot and easy victory. They only did this when they needed to - or thought they could win quickly or cheaply - because once they took people away from their normal livelihood they had to pay them. A long war could cripple a country's finances.

I'm not touching what magic does to this kind of system, because it depends on what kind of magic and what it can do. Similarly, I'm not getting specific anywhere - but pretty much all pre-Industrial cultures fit this general model, although late pre-Industrial you start having factory production and hugely uneven changes in social standing, wealth, and customs (which can and often did destabilize things). The assorted 'Daily Life in...' books offer a decent thumbnail guide to get started with. After that, I'd recommend good translations of material from, and preferably about, the period your setting is most like. Archaeological reproductions help too, as do re-enactor materials. The basic idea with this is to get the general feel of how things worked, dig out enough specifics that you can include the corroborating details (things like peeing in a bucket for your launderer tend to be more effective for Heinleining than things like the exotic carpet in Lord Sonso's manor because they illustrate the differences in everyday life).

Oh, and if you want a really good insight into war, politics (and underlying it, economics) read Machiavelli. Start with The Prince, then the Discourses to get perspectives on absolute vs republican rule in ancient and medieval times, then move to the Art of War. For double bonus points, start estimating how familiar your favorite authors are with Machiavelli. Heck, for modern war all you really need to do with Machiavelli is update the weaponry.

Dracula Was Framed

Or: The Importance of Good PR

Quite a few of you know that I'm something of a Dracula geek, and that I've spent a good chunk of time researching both the 15th century Wallachian prince and the vampire mythos that's grown mostly from Stoker's novel. Given the popularity of the undead porn subgenre, I don't think there's any need to discuss PR for vampires, but Vlad III Dracula, "the Impaler", definitely suffered from bad PR.

Okay, I can hear people thinking "Yeah, right. They didn't call him "the Impaler" because he was a nice guy.", and yes, you do have a point. Vlad was not a saint by anyone's standards. But - and there's a message in here for us, now - if you look at him and his life without looking at the context of the era and his contemporaries, you get a very distorted picture.

Perhaps the main source of information today on the kind of man Vlad was are the Dracula stories. The problem with using these to judge him is that the Dracula pamphlets and the Russian chronicles were written by his enemies. The Russians regarded him as apostate for converting to Catholicism (something he did because it was the only way he was going to regain anything resembling freedom). The writer of the German/Saxon pamphlets was financially dependent on the King of Hungary and the Germanic merchant families in Transylvania, both of whom had reasons to want Vlad portrayed as an evil monster. Even the name by which he is mostly known today - "the Impaler" - was coined by the Ottoman Turks, who were probably his bitterest enemies.

Possibly the only sympathetic sources are the Romanian peasant legends, which portray him as harsh but just, and have a subtext that he needed to take drastic action to restore a country which today would be considered a failed state.

Now to his contemporaries. One of the best insights I got into the mindset of Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II, "the Conquerer", came from translations of contemporary accounts of the siege and fall of Constantinople. All three accounts I found, two from the defenders perspective and one from the besiegers, agreed closely on the events. The short-short version is that Mehmed besieged the city while building an immense cannon to bombard the walls, and carried his ships around the chain stretched across the mouth of the Golden Horn to position them where he could attack the weaker sea-walls. Even so, he might still have failed if not for the good fortune of a small gate left open (or possibly deliberately opened) through which he was able to send forces and get one of the larger gates opened, after which his armies went on a rampage of rape and slaughter (which Mehmed had encouraged - and that information comes from the sympathetic source).

Some of the side excursions proved most illuminating. While the great cannon (also known as the Great Turkish Bombard) was being built, Mehmed took a smaller force to one of the ancillary fortresses, where he besieged it, bombarded it with cannon fire and threw men at it until the garrison surrendered - after which he took the men who surrendered back to Constantinople and impaled them outside the walls of the city. Oh, and standard operating procedure for the Ottoman customs forts further up the Bosphorus Straits? If a ship tried to evade them, sink the ship and impale the survivors.

Mehmed is - mostly - remembered today as a sophisticated, cosmopolitan man who oversaw the restoration of Constantinople to a major trade and cultural center. What's forgotten is that he had his infant brother drowned while the child's mother was congratulating him on his succession to the Imperial Ottoman throne. His harem of attractive young boys and boyish young men is also mostly forgotten - although some of the braver clerics of the time condemned that particular habit. Then there's the known fact that he was precocious in matters of intrigue and murder, and is suspected of arranging the murder of at least one of his older brothers. I've never seen any suggestions that he was involved in his father's short illness and death, but the illness is curiously unspecified.

Then there's the hero of Hungary and his father the White Knight - King Matthias of Hungary, and his father John Hunyadi. Hunyadi's efforts included attempting to negotiate a truce with the Ottoman Sultan while he was organizing a war alliance against the Ottomans. Matthias went one better - he received a good deal of money from the Pope to finance a campaign against Mehmed II, and used the money to ransom the Hungarian crown from Poland. The leader of that campaign? Vlad Dracula. Matthias arrested Dracula on obviously false charges to deflect questions about his lack of action - and his employee produced the first of the Dracula pamphlets shortly afterwards. Perhaps not surprisingly, the pamphlets depict Dracula as a bloodthirsty madman.

So... Filtering the various Dracula stories through that lens (as well as the knowledge that there is simply not enough space in his castles and palaces for him to have impaled hundreds there)... The Dracula 'atrocities' fall into three broad categories. First, there's the law and order set. Remember, he was ruling a failed state. In order to shut down rampant crime, fast, he opted for severe penalties for pretty much everything. Given that he started from a culture where mutilation for minor crime was the norm, he didn't go that much further. Then there are the politically motivated executions. Those were done to break the power base of the Wallachian Boyar class - not least because they were quite willing to swear life-long loyalty to a man, then murder him a couple of months later to install someone else on the throne. The notorious "Forest of the Impaled" falls into this category as well - it was calculated to terrify Mehmed, because Dracula didn't have the numbers to defeat Mehmed in battle. It worked: Mehmed remained terrified of Dracula despite the disparity of power between the two men, and never attempted to directly attack him again. The third category was perhaps Dracula's biggest weakness. He was prone to insane rages that resembled berserk fits. The only Dracula stories that involve him doing something clearly counterproductive show him in one of these rages.

On the positive side: he was the only one of his contemporaries who never broke an oath. The evidence I could find suggests that while he initially paid the tribute required by the Ottomans, he didn't actually swear loyalty to them and never considered himself a vassal of the Sultan. He remained loyal to the Hungarian King despite Matthias's lack of support and later betrayal. He risked his life to help one of his few friends, Mihaly Szilagy (who was later sawn in two by the Ottomans) and helped his cousin Stephen of Moldavia (known today as St Stephen the Great) to claim the Moldavian throne. He appears to have belived in honor and duty, and maintained both to the best of his ability all his life. He was also acutely aware of his failings, if his time praying and the large amounts he donated to various churches are any guide.

Complicated? Hell yes. Easy to find? Not bloody likely. To find out more about Dracula the man, I spent a lot of time digging through obscure legends, translations of primary documents that would leave you cross-eyed, and a whole lot of international politics in 15th century Eastern Europe. The point, of course, being that ultimately what gets remembered is what other people say about you, not why they said it.

I should probably apologize for inflicting so much Dracula geekery on you, but I'm not going to because it illustrates something particularly useful to us as writers - good PR matters. None of us are likely to be remembered as one of history's greatest villains, but we writers do work in an industry largely driven by gossip, and gossip is basically viral PR. If we don't control it and seed the rumors that help us, we will be controlled by it and not in a good way.

What other historical figures got really bad PR? Conversely, who's been unfairly glorified? And what tactics can be used to seed helpful rumors for the gossip mill?