A historical novellist of my acquaintance reckons that the way to handle this is with an extended afternote and lots of primary source references.
It won't help the people who bale out after chapter 1 because they prefer their vision of the world to yours, and people will probably quibble with the afternote - but at least that way you stand a fighting chance of it not being completely dismissed as fanciful.
I think some writers manage to make a version of history sound so real and compelling that it doesn't *matter* to many readers if it fits their mental model: they start to want it to have been that way. Easier to describe than to do, perhaps - and doesn't work for all readers. I was desolated to discover from Amazon that there are even people for whom Ursula Le Guin's world-building clearly doesn't work - to which my reaction was like this: =:-OOOOO
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2013-06-16 08:16 am (UTC)It won't help the people who bale out after chapter 1 because they prefer their vision of the world to yours, and people will probably quibble with the afternote - but at least that way you stand a fighting chance of it not being completely dismissed as fanciful.
I think some writers manage to make a version of history sound so real and compelling that it doesn't *matter* to many readers if it fits their mental model: they start to want it to have been that way. Easier to describe than to do, perhaps - and doesn't work for all readers. I was desolated to discover from Amazon that there are even people for whom Ursula Le Guin's world-building clearly doesn't work - to which my reaction was like this:
=:-OOOOO