I have just finished Robert Silverberg's "Lord of Darkness". In his afterword, he called it historical fantasy, which seems a fair description. It is based on the scant history of an Elizabethan privateer, Andrew Battell, who was held as a prisoner-of-war in Angola for twenty years. Silverberg says that his purpose was to show what it might have been like for an English seaman to have spent twenty years in the West African jungle in the late Elizabethan era. It seems credible from that perspective.
|