Enlightenment Era Fiction

I’m mostly been let down by big comic book events, but I recently read the New 52’s Forever Evil and I really liked it. There’s something about watching Lex Luthor getting some character development and working with villains to stop invading villains from another universe that shouldn’t be that fun and well done, but somehow is. So props to Geoff Johns for that.

We’re going to talk about Enlightenment Era fiction. That is, fiction set in the Enlightenment Era, rather than fiction written in the Enlightenment Era.

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Enlightenment Era Fiction

For whatever reason I’ve been reading a lot of books set during the Enlightenment? I didn’t mean to fall into this sort of niche book category, it just sort of happened? And I’ve noticed that there are some things I liked about it as a period people write about, and some things I didn’t like as much.

Let’s start with asking ourselves: what is the Enlightenment? Wikipedia defines it as a huge chunk of the 18th century, though it notes in the same article that there are people who define its beginning with Descartes’s work, and for the sake of argument that’s what I’m going to be going with. It’s a bit fuzzy when the Renaissance led into it, because historical periods are actually kind of fuzzy in general. But the Enlightenment, so-named by the people who lived in it (which should tip you off about what the scholars of the time thought of themselves), was an age that tried to define itself by reason. More of the population of Europe than ever could read, as there was now a way to print more books rather than writing them by hand. People who could read got together in public and shared their ideas, leading to more people being educated and opinionated. No longer were the scholarly conversations dominated by religious figures; instead we see the beginnings of modern sciences like chemistry and astronomy. The absolute power of kings is crumbling as people no longer saw monarchs as divinely appointed and in their place we saw the ideas of a social contract between the governors and the governed. 

Despite all these assertions that the world was becoming more reasonable though, it wasn’t without its obvious downsides. World wars start becoming a thing, like the Thirty Years War, the War of Spanish Succession and the Seven Years War. Colonialism was in its heyday, and around now is when you start to see the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade going full throttle with no signs of stopping. London burned that one time. And then you have that little occasion in which the people of Paris decided to start executing people who didn’t show enough loyalty to the state.

Then there was also a bunch of weird shiz going on. This is when we start seeing the rise of secret societies; some of which were basically social clubs and others which were… not. Some, like the Freemasons, last until today. Others, like the Illuminati, did not. Alchemy was heaving its last breaths as a field of study (Newton himself really loved alchemy), and interest in the occult began to fill in that void of the obscure knowledge. 

Warfare began to change immensely. With the advent of more reliable firearms, more armies switched to gunpowder weapons as the default ranged equipment rather than bows or crossbows. But guns hadn’t become so reliable that they’d replaced the sword, and so swords were still used in combat, both on the battlefield and in disputes of personal honor.

It was a time like any other, really. Despite its pretensions of being so much more civilized than the “Dark Ages” (a term coined in the Enlightenment), there was just as much violence, superstition and unreason as any other time in history.

What makes the period appealing to many writers is that it’s this sort of border in history; it’s not the Middle Ages or Renaissance, but it’s definitely not the Modern Age. It’s a time when people are so convinced that they know everything, but there’s so much that’s yet to be discovered. And it’s close enough to modern sensibilities that you don’t alienate your audience by presenting close-to-modern views in your characters.

I’d sort of gotten an interest in the period from Assassin’s Creed. I still hold that the American Saga, set in the 1700’s, contains the best writing the series has ever had. I also played a lot of Unity this year, set in the French Revolution, and I liked the idea of it much more than the actual execution--you can see my review of it on this blog.

But what was supposed to start this kick in books was Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver. The first book in the Baroque Cycle, one of the copies in the library had a big fancy alchemical symbol for Mercury on the cover, and despite it being around nine hundred pages I thought it seemed like it could be a cool introduction into the period. Well-researched history! Characters from different backgrounds! Globe-trotting adventures! What more could you ask for?

Except… I got three hundred pages into this book, and I was really, really bored. I liked the history, but it mostly involved a guy hanging out with scientists of the era, and their personal lives. I didn’t care. I was waiting for the real adventure to get started. I didn’t even get to a part where there was more than one viewpoint character. So I put that book down.

I also picked up Ex-Libris, a book by Ross King (not Stephen King, like I had thought when I picked up the book), and I was slightly disappointed with the book, but I did finish it, and overall I enjoyed it, unlike with Quicksilver. It being significantly shorter probably had something to do with it. The book chronicles a bookseller being tasked with finding a rare alchemical text that was supposedly dictated by Hermes Trismegistus. It felt a bit like an Umberto Eco novel, though there wasn’t as much travel as I would have liked.

The book that ended up actually sparking more of my interest in the period was A Star Shall Fall by Marie Brennan. It’s the third volume in the Onyx Court, a book series that chronicles a faerie court based in London at different points of history. This one was incredibly interesting to me because unlike other books of the time period I’d read, this one went all out in its fantasy elements, mixing alchemy and science, as the way the main conflict was to be solved involved both. That was a cool idea, and I wish I could find more fiction with this setting that played with alchemical ideas.

[I did just put Newton’s Cannon on hold at the library; maybe that’ll feed this craving I have.]

But I’m still kind of bothered that there’s a lot of this fiction that tends to glorify the Enlightenment. Less so among those that cover the colonial side of the equation, but there’s a lot in the European side. So much of Ex-Libris is praising the age, and characters making statements like “The world’s gotten so much better since Galileo proved that the world revolved around the Sun!” Which… he didn’t, actually, he just helped support the theory and also demanded it be taught as incontrovertible truth without being able to prove it. But regardless, that’s a vast oversimplication of how events rolled out. At least Ex-Libris beat into your head the results of the English Civil War, but other than that the problems of the era are generally treated as “Those darn Catholics wanted to crush all our SCIENCE!” without getting much into, say, Cromwell trying to genocide the Irish, or wars of succession, or wars over colonial territories.

And I suppose because a lot of the books are from the point of view of English people living in Europe, that makes sense as a point of view, but it is still a bit jarring to see stories where people in England are raving about how life is so great now that they’ve got SCIENCE! and when colonialism and slavery are still part of the reasons these big wealthy empires exist in Europe at all. I’m not saying that in every one of these stories, someone needs to run in and say “What about the slaves?!” but there should, I think, be an acknowledgement that no matter how great this period appears to be to some of the people in it, that system’s built, like so many others, on the suffering and exploitation of others. Only this time period sometimes gets away with it because it labelled itself as enlightened.

It’s a great period to set a story, but I don’t just want to see more fiction set in it, I also want to see fiction that deals with the problems of the Age of Enlightenment in an honest way, that doesn’t try to cover up the flaws with the propaganda of the time. I want more complicated fiction that plays with the time’s weirdness. And I want it to be more interesting than Quicksilver, which bored me to tears.

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