K.J. Parker’s upcoming short novel Making History (Sept. 2, 128 pages) is cynical, darkly humorous, and extremely relevant to our times. It’s being marketed as a dark fantasy, but although it’s set in a secondary world, the only semi-speculative elements are the hyper-competence of one faction, if that’s what’s really happening, or the mutable nature of reality, if that’s what’s really happening. It’s a short, sharp, biting read, and thoroughly engrossing; I highly recommend it for lovers of history, linguistics, politics, intrigue, and truth.
The setup is that the tyrant of Aelia wants a pretext for invading another realm, so he summons a dozen of the kingdom’s best scholars and gives them to understand that they must create evidence of an ancient civilization previously invaded and destroyed by that other realm. Since their alternative is death, or possibly torture and then death, the scholars agree. So the protagonist and the other professors (geology, archaeology, architecture, art, literature, military history, natural history, etc.) get to work devising a coherent fake narrative, and the manufacture of fake evidence (e.g. site quarrying by “disposable” people) begins.
But as the fakery progresses, disturbing bits of outside validation begin to appear. Are the scholar-fakers somehow coincidentally recovering a real past, or actually changing the past and reality itself?
Making History has a lot to say about truth vs. objective reality, via the plot but also via the narrator/protagonist (first person, mostly past tense). He’s a linguist, and he loves tracing the evolutions of words and languages, but his job in the fakery project is to de-evolve the current Aelian language back a few millennia to a hypothetical proto-language, to write fake ancient inscriptions and tablets. He is aided in this task by his attitude that the permanence of history is a naive stance, as understandings of reality are constantly being rewritten anyway, by new evidence, new explanations and new theories.
This, of course, makes me think a lot about real life right now, in a post-“truthiness” world, as false talking points are repeated until they sink into people’s subconsciousness as fact, and as history museums are ordered to purge exhibits of elements that make certain people uncomfortable or angry. It also seems to be in conversation with a lot other books; my first thought is of George Orwell’s 1984, where Winston Smith’s job is to rewrite historical documents to match the Party’s version of the past, but I also am reminded of the recent All Roads Lead to Rome: Why We Think of the Roman Empire Daily by Dr. Rhiannon Garth Jones, in which she explores how various cultures after Rome have claimed to be the true heirs of some facet of it, while ignoring the inconvenient bits that don’t fit.
Anyway, the protagonist of Making History is a scholar; there’s real-world experience in his past, but he’s been in academia a long time. His mistress, a dancer turned courtesan turned exclusive, has a lot more street smarts than him, and some bright ideas about what to do in an increasingly untenable situation. So their relationship reminded me a lot of Simonides the poet/musician and Lyra the hetaira in Mary Renault’s novel The Praise Singer, at least initially.
(Making History also provides an interesting contrast to Simonides’ initial resistance to a project of writing down The Iliad; in The Praise Singer he came from the oral tradition of memorization, but was reconciled to writing when he hears some lines that had been dropped from the version of the Iliad that he’d learned. But we now know to our sorrow that text can be nearly as mutable as memory itself.)
I was also strongly reminded of various elements in Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon (2024), in which two working-class Syracusans decide to take advantage of the Athenian prisoners of war being worked to death in a quarry, during the Pelopponesian War, to put on a first-class play.
I haven’t read nearly as much K.J. Parker as I should, just the Engineer trilogy and the standalone Sharps. As I understand, Making History is set in the world of the Siege trilogy, which I haven’t read, but I didn’t have any trouble at all understanding Making History‘s setup, plot, characters, or themes. So any readers who have heard how great Parker is but are deterred by doorstoppers should strongly consider trying this little gem. Despite its short length, this book has a lot to say about people and truth, and says it very well indeed.
Content warnings: References to torture, executions, and suicide; plans for war and mass murder of prisoners and other laborers; oppression of lower classes; betrayal.
Comps: 1984 by George Orwell; The Praise Singer by Mary Renault; Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon.
Disclaimer: I received a free eARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley for review.
