“What are your thoughts on historical fantasy? Do you enjoy authors adding magic to real events/people or do you think they should stick to using the time setting in general as inspiration? Does historical accuracy matter to you, or are you up for anything if the plot is interesting?”
The first series that I thought of that put magic in real events was The Extraordinaries series by Melissa McShane.
This series imagined that England and France used magic when fighting the Napoleonic Wars. Eventually towards the end of the series Napoleon himself is a character. I wasn’t a fan of that. I don’t like real historical people as characters in my historical fiction. It just comes across as rather rude to me to be putting thoughts and words in real peoples’ mouths.
I do like magic set in historical fiction though. Emily Larkin does historical romance with a magical twist in her Baleful Godmother and related series. I loved these series too.
I’m not a big stickler for historical accuracy as long as the author can justify the changes that they make. I will get techy though if there seems to be things that are just mistakes. Don’t get something about horses wrong. I’ll be bothered the entire book. (Side note – I get really mad when authors talk about sidesaddle riding being so precarious. I’ve done both. Once I got the hang of it, I felt so much more secure riding sidesaddle. That’s sort of the point of it.)
Anyway, you can have the American colonies never rebel because the English have magic and the Americans don’t in the Rebel Mechanics series. That messes with historical accuracy all over the place and it doesn’t bother me because it serves the plot.
What do you think? Do you like historical fantasy and if so how accurate do you want it to be?
