u/jonawesome

I'm looking for a book that is fiction, but is about someone trying to figure out what happened in the past through the use of academic historical study.

Examples:

* Fire and Blood by George RR Martin

* What We can Know by Ian McEwan

* Arcadia by Tom Stoppard

I love a good nonfiction history book. I'm a high school social studies teacher so I love just pouring into a 600 page tome about some civil war or revolution. Stuff with like 800 different primary sources but reads like a thriller - great stuff.

I also read a lot of epic fantasy, partially cause it's cool to see a reimagined history with its own nations and political ideologies.

As I've read through George RR Martin's various books, I've found my favorite to be Fire and Blood, because it perfectly meshes these two genres of book for me. It's written like a history book, with the "author" frequently saying there are differing sources on what exactly happened in certain situations.

I also recently read What We Can Know by Ian McEwan (it's great you should read it), which was about a literary historian in the year 2119 trying to track down whether there exists a copy of a famous poet's lost poem from our time. He spends the book checking all the accounts of the people who heard the poet read it the one time he did in 2014 and trying to figure out if it's even possible to find out the truth. Very cool.

As I was thinking about these similarities I also thought about Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, which has been one of my all time favorite plays ever since I saw it performed by some college student when I was in high school. It's two parallel stories in an English manor house, one about a several month period in 1809, and another about two historians trying to figure out if Lord Byron visited the house in 1809. It's a really cool depiction of something that I love about history, which is having to use clues to guess what happened and knowing you'll get it wrong, and a beautiful celebration of the humanities.

Anything else like this?

I'm making my first game after buying MZ a few weeks ago. feel like I must be doing something wrong here.

I'm placing torches and other flames all over the place and I want them to flicker to give the game some life (and eventually use them as light sources with some parallax shading) but I'm having trouble animating them.

So far I've been using control switches to switch to the next sprite in the animation after a few frames. This seems to be working, but is quite cumbersome and feels sloppy. I also haven't figured out how to make an enemy sprite (some of which are flames) animate similarly as it follows a movement route.

Is this actually the only way to get some simple animations into the background? I feel like I must be missing something. Is there at least a plugin that does this more easily?

I love HF, and I often love the 1,400 page HF masterpieces that give detail to a century of change. However, I've been reading some sorta difficult/dry books recently and want a real adventure story for my next pick.

What's your favorite HF book that is just a rip-roaring good time and feels like a blockbuster Hollywood movie? Stuff that plays to the cheap seats with exciting sword fights, and forbidden romances, and lovable characters on adventures. Not saying it can't have darkness in it (I feel like it's kind of hard to do stories in the past without a heap of darkness) but more as a means to make defeating the dastardly villain more satisfying than to showcase the difficulties of life during that period.

I still want all the best parts of HF in terms of historical research and versimillitude, but more in service of an exciting story with a fast-paced plot than purely academic. Of course I expect that a book like this would show a more romanticized version of the past than true realism, but I still want someone who did their homework.

Ken Follett's Kingsbridge series are sorta what I'm looking for, with all the mild trashiness that come with them. Heroes you live to root for, sexy romance, and villains you love to hate, all combined in a story that covers half a continent through many of the most consequential moments in history.

I recently read two fantastic books — The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by S.A. Chakrabourty and Babel: or the Necessity of Violence by R.F. Kuang — that were heavily researched books of historical time and place (the 12th century Indian Ocean trade network, and Oxford University in the 1830s, respectively) but also had outlandish fantasy elements like sea monsters, deals made with djinn, and silver bars that give special powers based on words etched on them.

These were both among the better books I've ever read and now I want more of the type. I love history and I love fantasy stories, so this is a totally awesome combination of my interests.

What are some other books that bring an historian's level of research to a real setting but also tell a creative and exciting fantasy story?