Historical Fiction/Fantasy, anyone?

anyone else combining these two genres together? running into any problems thus far?

besides, i feel like the only lunatic doing this right now? care to share a brief synopsis of your novel thus far?

Yes! Count me in. I'm doing a sort of sequel to a couple fairytales. There are magical/folklore elements, but it's also firmly set in 16th century Germany. I too feel a bit nuts to be doing this. Guess it might count as magical realism. No problems yet.

I knew that there were people around here with close to my type of genre blend perspective.

My setting is 1930's New York after magic was reawakened as a super weapon in the Great War (our WWI where WWII will definitely not happen in the way we know it.) I started it as a role-playing game setting so I have a good deal of material already in place.

That sounds really cool Winston! The period between the WWs is one of my favorites.

My story is kind of the opposite of yours in the fantasy aspect. My characters are dealing with a world where magic is being replaced by science.

I'm writing a story taking place in a city on the eastern US coast (Ocean Falls) in an alternate timeline.
In short: the year is 1870, the American Civil War is still being fought and the harbor city of Ocean Falls that was founded by a recluse scientist is now the most important scientific center of the world.

I have a sort of steampunk retelling of the American Revolution (candlepunk? clockworkpunk?) with supernatural elements threaded throughout the plot. It's a series of vignettes about people I really dig (or at least think are awesome enough to crank out a few pages about their misadventures), and it roams all over the place. So a lot of the period details are bang on for the 1770s, but a lot of it is fantastic, ridiculous romping around in amazing costumes.

YEah, I'm essentially writing a Victorian ghost story... :)

Mine involves magic during the protestant reformation in Germany and then again in 1960s New Jersey during the cybernetics craze.

I have a novel I wrote years ago that has the feel of fantasy--epic struggle against bad guys, etc. It has kings and swordfights and all that good stuff, but not one iota of magic. No dragons. Nothing. It is NOT, however, any specific time period on Earth, so I can't really label it historical fiction.. I've heard "pseudomedieval" used to describe setting, and it's usually derogatory, but I LOVE pseudomedieval stuff. Anyway, I've given up trying to convince and agent to take it, because it's so hard to write a query letter when you don't have genre you can call it. Any suggestions?

I'm loving writing Historical Fantasy. I'm trying to keep to some sort of historical accuracy but I'm combining an early Industrial revolution in the cities with a remaining farming/peasant (not quite medieval - maybe tudor-esque?) landscape in the country. So they have steam and huge factories but still get around on horseback. Creative license at its best :D It means I can explain away things I can't find answers to as a quirk of the world...

Anachronistic approx-1900 Steampunk (?) Fantasy (?) SciFi (?) over here.
So far (13k words in), the tech/science is accurate to 1900 (give or take a few years), and the social attitudes are close-ish (as far as I can tell given I'm not doing research 'till after NaNo). I don't know if it counts as steampunk. From where my idea started, the fantasy has been turned a little up, and the sci-fi a little down. There's also Romance. And I *think* it's a Young Adult novel.

I'm making it up as I go along, basically. And I don't know squat about the late Victorian era.

It's a fun journey! I'm glad I'm not the only one smudging this a bit.

Historical science fantasy here lol

I've had a hard time qualifying my story as science fiction to myself, but there's no magic, but there is TIME TRAVEL (and the requisite high jinks). I suppose it could qualify as adventure as well. And romance, although not primarily.

Basically I've got a woman, a physicist, who upon discovering time travel takes her findings and decides it would be safest for humanity to lay low in early 19th century Ireland. The other protagonist is a special operative sent by her employer to get her back at any cost. THE KICKER: his brain is scrambled in the process (after they sort of haphazardly manage to recreate her experimental conditions) and his memory is permanently damage. He can't retain short term memory much longer than a day or so, and he has no clue who he is or where he came from. He's picked up by a wealthy, antsy ne'erdowell and together they rove the countryside in a wagon making maps for a living. One of their clients, a bounty hunter, makes a deal for them to help her apprehend the very woman he was meant to apprehend to begin with. Shenanigans ensue.

I'm not sure if my novel falls into Historical Fiction as a semi-accurate depiction of 13th century England, but on the other hand, it lacks the major defining characteristics of Fantasy (magic, supernatural beings, etc). But I find it classifies nicely into the Low-Fantasy genre, with the history as a backdrop.

So far, it's been a parody of the usual standard fantasy plot; if all actions of the protagonists were taken to their logical extremes during that time period (guards are actually competent!)

Um...mine's like historical slightly-AU horror-fantasy-fannishfiction...Real history!people, with their personalities as accurate as possible but with added super(ish)powers, fighting zombies(ish), caused by a real historical problem that exists on a different plane but crosses over occasionally. So.

It takes place in America, late 1832, sparked by the Nullification Crisis, and the main characters are Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Andrew Jackson, and John Quincy Adams. And so far, only a few hours have passed. I think it's gonna end up taking place over perhaps twelve hours. But there are very fun-to-write flashbacks to the Founding Fathers...also fighting zombies(ish).

I swear there's some logic behind this somewhere.

I've taken the premise that Rome never fell, but society and tech went on. So basically it's... not quite modern era, but the geopolitical map looks a lot like 125 AD under Hadrian. My MC is Ivernian (Irish) and running around with a bunch of Roman smugglers/terrorists/draft dodgers/whatever you want to call them, they're just trying to earn a living with the least amount of direct blood on their hands. The conflict is that Rome is currently trying to take Ireland, so she's sooort of a massive traitor.

I set the tech/modernity level where it is, with inflation and scarce luxury goods and abundant drinking, to be on par with what I've seen out of war-ravaged states (like east and central Europe for most of the twentieth century). They keep going, more or less, but not very well, and it's kind of crippled with no real regard for the actual state economy. The barter system/black market is where it's at, and cultural priorities have shifted. Gas, cigarettes, and birth control are prohibitively expensive, so people find ways around it, sort of thing. There are TVs, but rare and they probably suck. Lots of radios. My characters spend their time backpacking through [France], though, so they're more worried about camping gear than technology.

Bulk of the research is of where the war fronts are, where the roads are, and wtf to call things when there is no Britain and there is no France to name everything. So I'm digging up old Celtic and Latin names for rivers, roads, towns, oceans, etc. That part is kind of a chore, but it's a fun authentic flavor.

Yay this thread! YAY YAY YAY. And it's more in a lit fic style than adventure, so I can't even hang there. =P

My western, Detour Trail, isn't fantasy, but Jake the mule is so fantastic, he's pretty close...