Quote:
Originally Posted by Apache
My only beef with Shogun was that James Clavell's book should have been a Historical Fiction Book. Except he changed the names of the major Historical characters. This made it harder for me to read. Imagine someone writing a Historical Fiction book about the American Revolution or Waterloo and changed the Historical Figures names.  |
I think that's actually been done, in some of the AU sf/fantasy stuff. (GGK comes to mind, even though he hasn't yet gotten around to Waterloo, he's definitely done almost direct analogues of El Cid and Justinian and Theodora, among others, with not that much modification and Lois McMaster Bujold did a Spanish reconquista with Ferdinand and Isabella variant in her Chalion series, although she does blend in a large amount of original fantasy stuff into that, and Harry Turtledove directly transposed the fall of the Berlin Wall into the future Third Reich and I recognized a lot of public-figures-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off from my history classes).
And Clavell did tweak some of the character stories (like setting up the love affair with Lady Gracia Hokosawa, who apparently never got involved with and perhaps never met the other guy in real-life and he made the Joao Rodrigues-based interpreter character a lot more "barbarian" than he was in real life, where he actually bathed and such) and I prefer it when authors do stuff like that, they don't pretend they're writing about the exact same people.