Steampunk and Empire

[pjc50]

I'd been vaguely pondering nanowrimo this year, and had got as far as the basis of an idea for some steampunk:
Miniturised mechanical technology develops, with sapphire as the crucial material playing the role of "silicon" in contemporary technology. This leads to a project to build a rail link from London to India. The story itself plays out at a

Comments

[simont]

this applies a lot more widely, to historical fiction in general

Yes. Given the choice between period (or fantasy-themed-on-a-historical-period) fiction which works basically within the moral sense of the time, and period fiction which turns out to be a thinly veiled diatribe about how awful the moral sense of the time was by our modern enlightened liberal standards, I know which I prefer to read: the latter can be as right-on as you like but that doesn't stop it being tedious.

So monarchically oriented fiction concerned with seeing the Right rather than Wrong person on the throne gets a free pass on questions like 'where do you get off saying there's a Right person anyway?' or 'exactly where did you find someone who can be handed absolute power and yet be trusted to be incorruptible and benevolent?' or 'and furthermore, what are the chances that his firstborn son turns out fit to be the next one?' or 'are you sure strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is a basis for a system of government?'; fiction set in a slave-owning historical period is permitted to have the good guy set a slave free for exceptional service as proof of his good-guy-ness in spite of the fact that he still owns 47 other slaves and is not vigorously campaigning for abolition; in fiction where the death penalty is widely accepted and used, the good guys are allowed to deliver bad guys up to justice without more than a passing qualm.

Sure, you can have your good guys be the people who are one step closer to modern morals - the Roman who frees even one slave even if he doesn't reject the practice utterly or abolish it society-wide, the king who listens to the voice of the common people and is sympathetic to them even if he doesn't actually abdicate in favour of a parliament of them, etc - but to have the good guy be a totally anachronistic personification of modern morals is to throw suspension of disbelief out of the window, and causes the reader (at least when the reader is me) to decide that they're reading a polemic rather than a credible story. And to have the good guy win with that attitude and totally reform their period society (more common in fantasy or alternate history, without the 'but we know it didn't go that way!' problem) just smacks of Mary-Sue-ism.

Of course, the third option is not to write historical fiction at all, which is a fine and defensible decision; but it seems to me that the world would be the poorer without any of it.