A way with worlds: 37 - God, Darwin, History

I find that the Darwin excuse often occurs the same ways the God excuse does - when there's less thinking out about the important elements of the world, it's an easy excuse to invoke. However, the Darwin excuse is a bit more insidious as saying "it's evolution" or "survival of the fittest" is a way to add at least an air of scientific respectability about what you're doing - even if its unearned.

HISTORY:
How I love history. Then again, I love a good drink, but I don't approve of drunk driving.

Basing your world on actual historical events is obviously a good idea - you've sort of got "pre-tested" ideas sitting out there in history books, videotapes, and more. Whether it's an alternate timeline, parallel culture, or "classic" historical events, real history is a great source of ideas.

However, like the other excuses, it's too easy to toss something into your world and into your writing and say "it's validated by history." One of my oddest experiences as a reader of fanfic was, upon criticizing the social model of a person's post-apocalyptic story, was to have them explain it was somehow consistent with human history. So even though the person never managed to explain various inconsistencies, it was "historically accurate," because he'd "seen things like this before."

Most cases of the "history excuse" involve modeling world and story elements on historical events without understanding the context and causes of the events themselves. Copying an event and throwing it into your world (or worse, looking up a historical event like ones in your world to justify their existence) ignores the whys and hows of history - and history is whys and hows mixed with whens.

History is great for research, but it's a lousy excuse. Use history to understand, but make sure you understand first.

SUMMARY:
God, Darwin, and History are potential excuses for bad writing. Use theology, science, and history to build better worlds - not excuse mistakes.

A Way with Worlds is hosted at fanfiction.net, lit.org, sffworld.com, and Woman-to-Woman.
A German translation is in the works at Christian Spliess's Page
It is archived at the Way With Worlds archive.