Never Forget Where We Came From

A couple of weeks ago the good folks at Our Opinions Are Correct, Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders, interviewed me and Tananarive Due about our approach to historical fiction. The podcast episode is out now: Always Remember Where We Came From.

I enjoyed it; it was a good interview. Annalee and Charlie Jane are both smart and well read, and both me and Tananarive got to say a lot about our respective areas of interest and eras of history. I learnt a lot from what Tananarive had to say—you absolutely should go read her book, The Reformatory—it’s well worth a listen.

One of the things I’m finding about group radio/podcast/Zoom/YouTube conversations, though, is that a lot of stuff gets elided. In my interviews this seems to happen a lot more often with groups than in one-on-ones1 Sometimes this is a slip of the tongue, sometimes it’s an unfortunate edit, sometimes I’m hurrying to make a point and forget to say the words that actually connect the dots leading to point, and sometimes it’s just that someone makes a mistake.

So if you listen to the podcast, and you’re not deeply versed in either Early Medieval or my personal history, I’d like to clarify a couple of things. I do have a PhD, one I earned rather than was given—it’s not honorary—but the story of that PhD, what it is exactly, how it could be described, is complicated. When I was trying to explain it before we began, I said it was an analysis of my fiction and how it works and what it does, using research in neuroscience and more (poetics, the rhetorics of various genres, history). I joked that you could say it’s as much in cognitive poetics as anything. And in a way that’s true—it’s just a lot more complicated than that.

Similarly, talking about plagues, climate change, and culture change, it sounds as though I’m saying the so-called Justinianic Plague2 caused the fall of the Roman Empire and led to same sort of labour shortages that put more power in the hands of common folk as happened after the Black Death. What I was trying to say (obviously not well very, sigh) is environmental crises (volcanoes, weather events, climate change, asteroids) lead to environmental changes that lead to things like mass migration and plagues—such as the Antonine and Cyprian plagues—that destabilise society.3 It’s also been documented that after the massive mortality of the Black Death in the fourteenth century, in England skilled labourers were in such short supply that they had the unprecedented power to demand an increase in wages from the king. But I just want to make clear that I don’t believe the first bubonic plague brought down the Roman Empire, that it lasted beyond the eight century, or it was that first pandemic that led to peasants demanding higher wages.

So enjoy the podcast and forgive the elisions.

I don’t know why. Perhaps because there’s less opportunity to stop and backtrack and/or clarify in a rolling, moving conversation. ︎It’s much more accurate to refer to it as the First Plague Pandemic, or even Early Medieval Plague. One day I’ll explain in detail on my research blog—but today is not that day. Today let’s just say there’s evidence of Yersinia pestis (the bacterium that causes bubonic—and pneumonic and septic—plague) in several countries, including Britain, before it ever reached Constantinople. ︎The Antonine Plague, for example, killed at least 25% of the population of the Roman Empire, and some argue that Rome’s power never returned to its pre-pandemic zenith. ︎