Historical fiction grapples with a Hubble’s universe turned inside out – the things closest to us slip away most rapidly,our perception of them changing at bewildering speed; the most distant times arefixed in Ptolemaic eternity, immoveable and unchanging. One task of fictionshould be to bring those distantly unexamined events rushing towards us,blue-shifted up close urgent, vivid with all the immediacy of lived experience.

What ferrymen can we hire to guide us on the crossing intothe undiscovered countries that lie beyond barriers like 33AD, 1789, 1917?  Tolstoy (War & Peace) and Hardy (TheTrumpet Major) both write historical novels looking back across the gulf of1815 & the Congress of Vienna into one of the authentic lost worlds.  Walter Scott does a similar conjuring in Waverley.  Gore Vidal achieves it repeatedly acrosscontinents, civilisations and ages. And Cervantes begins the whole form bylooking backwards.

For writers looking back from 2023 where is the first greatimaginative void that we peer into, knowing only that on the other side theydid things differently there?  Fun fact:the Historical Writers’ Association defines an historical novel as one set atleast 35 years before the present day – yes, that really is 1988.  I recently put up a poll on Twitter askingpeople how far in the past ‘historical’ fiction started.  The consensus surprised me – 25 years and /or the author’s lifetime.   

But personal experience and its vicar word-of-mouth areunreliable witnesses of this event horizon. As a youth I sat at my grandfather’s knee hearing stories of his ownyouth when he crewed the last tea-clippers alongside old salts who had, intheir youths, crewed the last slave-ships. Walking in Charlottesville in the 1990s an American friend pointed outan old man on a street corner. That guy, he told me, is the grandson of a manwho was president of the USA – before the Civil War. These moments blue-shifthistory with all the re-aligned perspective of an acute panic attack. So here’sa modest proposal:  to paraphraseVirginia Woolf, Sometime between 3rd May 1979 and 12thAugust 1981, human character changed. Those dates mark the election of Margaret Thatcher and the launch of theIBM personal computer; the end of the post-war contract that underwrote socialcohesion, and the start of the transformation of our social selves, and there-imagination of consciousness, by information technology.  To look back beyond that time is to sense signalsfrom a world incomprehensibly alien to those who did not experience it, foreverlost to those who did.  Somewhere amongthose 832 days lies the event horizon beyond which any fiction we choose tomake today must, of necessity, be historical. Our task as reverse-engineers ofthe human soul is to make that historical fiction real and now.