S.M. Stirling has a long history of writing alt-history as one of the best in the genre, also known for his collaborations with some of the best authors in science fiction. He’s got a great series out right now called Make Darkness Light featuring time travel and Roman times which is a lot of fun. He sat down with Fandom Pulse to talk about the new series and more:
Make the Darkness Light drops a team of modern Americans into 165 CE near Vindobona in Pannonia, with Marcus Aurelius on the throne. That’s an extraordinarily specific pressure point in Roman history. What made this exact moment the right point for the series rather than, say, the third century crisis or the reign of Diocletian?
Well, it was when things ‘started to go wrong’. Also it had a very intelligent man on the throne.
Time travel fiction has gotten enormously complicated in a lot of modern fiction. You went the other direction with a more classical “stranded experts try to rebuild civilization” approach that reviewers have compared to L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall. Was that comparison something you welcomed or something you set out to push past?
The comparison is rather flattering, in fact! And I’m not interested in the baroque complications of time travel; more in the historical stuff.
The Winds of Fate introduces a second group of time travelers of Chinese refugees from the same 2032 nuclear war. Both modern groups are pursuing world domination by a single power specifically to prevent nuclear weapons from being developed. That’s a much darker moral premise than most readers expect from a time travel adventure. How conscious were you of building that ethical trap?
Well, it’s not that nuclear weapons are never developed, it’s that the world is politically united.
The City Who Fought came out in 1993 as the fourth Brainship novel, in the middle of a wave of McCaffrey collaborations with different writers. How did you specifically get tapped for that book, and what did Anne tell you about what she wanted from a co-author in her universe?
