Historical fiction can be fun in that every author will get something just a little bit wrong and some nerd out there is going to find the issue that may cause things to come into question. Most of us have words and species and tools that we take for granted how they may not have existed a hundred years ago. And even then we only have records that we have.
My rabbit hole of nerdiness came when I ran into the word "Pavlovian" in the B-Plot Green Fairy by Kyell Gold.
The A-Plot takes place in the modern day, but the B-Plot follows a historical figure named Henri who is found in the A-Plot to have lived up until approximately 1901 (Pg.156). The word comes up in a conversation on page 168 where it is utilized by Henri.
The issue here is that, should Henri have actually died around 1901 then the experiments, which were done in the 1890s would have probably have been too close to have the word established in vernacular. According to the etymology encyclopedia, the word would not be formed as an adjective until 1931.
1931, from the theories, experiments, and methods of Russian physiologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849-1936), especially in connection with the conditioned salivary reflexes of dogs in response to the mental stimulus of the sound of a bell (attested from 1911, in Pavloff [sic] method).
-https://www.etymonline.com/word/pavlovian
I know when I wrote my Pulp work In "PULP! Two-Pawed Tales of Adventure" I knew I wanted the conflict to be on a train, and that train's destination was Darwin, Australia before the attack on it that lead to Australia getting involved in WW2. That would leave me down a rabbit hole of history of the rail lines, which lead me to having to make the starting point a mining town Pine Creek to the south. It was crazy to me how disconnected that would have made Darwin from the other parts of the country, that had only just established a main train line to the rest of Australia named after Steve Irwin.
This few hours of research became two lines in the story.
As I continued on I noticed I was heading into the Northern Territory. Very untamed country, an will probably be for quite some time
History, when you really go into it give you an appreciation for how much things we take for granted these days just didn't exist even but a few decades ago, and how much knowledge exists today that just wasn't common knowledge but 100 years ago.
Historical fiction can be fun in that every author will get something just a little bit wrong and some nerd out there is going to find the issue that may cause things to come into question. Most of us have words and species and tools that we take for granted how they may not have existed a hundred years ago. And even then we only have records that we have.
My rabbit hole of nerdiness came when I ran into the word "Pavlovian" in the B-Plot Green Fairy by Kyell Gold.
The A-Plot takes place in the modern day, but the B-Plot follows a historical figure named Henri who is found in the A-Plot to have lived up until approximately 1901 (Pg.156). The word comes up in a conversation on page 168 where it is utilized by Henri.
The issue here is that, should Henri have actually died around 1901 then the experiments, which were done in the 1890s would have probably have been too close to have the word established in vernacular. According to the etymology encyclopedia, the word would not be formed as an adjective until 1931.
I know when I wrote my Pulp work In "PULP! Two-Pawed Tales of Adventure" I knew I wanted the conflict to be on a train, and that train's destination was Darwin, Australia before the attack on it that lead to Australia getting involved in WW2. That would leave me down a rabbit hole of history of the rail lines, which lead me to having to make the starting point a mining town Pine Creek to the south. It was crazy to me how disconnected that would have made Darwin from the other parts of the country, that had only just established a main train line to the rest of Australia named after Steve Irwin.
This few hours of research became two lines in the story.
History, when you really go into it give you an appreciation for how much things we take for granted these days just didn't exist even but a few decades ago, and how much knowledge exists today that just wasn't common knowledge but 100 years ago.