A historical novel is easy to identify. Wolf Hall (2009) by Hilary Mantel is a historical novel. It’s clearly fiction and not biography, since Mantel supplies so much of Thomas Cromwell’s thought and inner life. And it’s historical, because it takes place in the past.
But ‘historical’ is a component of many other genres of fiction. Perhaps most well known is historical romance, like Bridgerton or the Regency novels of Georgette Heyer. Romance novels revolve around the love lives of the characters, and therefore a historical romance is a love story that takes place in the past. Some of the most popular books in the world are historical romance novels: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1936), for instance.
Other genres have their historical categories. A historical fantasy is a novel that is grounded in magic, or centering around dragons or such, that is set in a historical period. A Sorceress Comes to Call (2024) by T. Kingfisher is Victorian, while Jo Walton’s Lent (2019) is set in 15th century Florence. Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series has dragons fighting in the Napoleonic wars. The Brother Cadfael novels by Ellis Peters, or the Marcus Didius Falco series by Lindsey Davis, are unquestionably historical mystery novels, driven by crime-solving detectives but set in a historical period. And historical horror novels are quite common – the fictional explorations of Jack the Ripper come to mind, and many vampire novels. Other examples might be The Terror by Dan Simmons (2014), in which a monster attacks 19th century explorers trapped in the ice in Canada, or Fevre Dream by George R.R. Martin (1982), about a New Orleans riverboat in 1857 assailed by a vampire.
So then we can consider: is there such a thing as historical science fiction? There must be science fiction set in the past. We don’t hear a lot about it – it’s not a major marketing category dominating the best-seller lists, like historical romance or historical fantasy. But a little digging turns up enough titles to show it really is a separate genre. So, let’s think about historical science fiction some more.
Firstly, I think it’s fair to declare that a work written in the past, set in what was at that period the future, cannot be historical science fiction. 1984, by George Orwell, can’t be historical science fiction even though 1984 is history, more than 40 years ago as I write this. When Orwell wrote it, in 1949, 1984 was inarguably science fiction, and the book continues to be a classic of SF to this day. But it’s not historical, because Orwell didn’t intend it to be historical. He was writing in 1949 about what was, for him, the future. The same reasoning would apply to 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke. 2001 was the future, when Clarke wrote it in 1968. This is inevitable. All science fiction set in the future must eventually slide back into our past, unless (like some of the works of Olaf Stapledon or Cordwainer Smith) it’s set in the far future.
Nor does declaring that the movie is set ‘a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away’ make Star Wars historical SF. The movies make no mention of anything historical that happens on Earth. All the history, of the Jedi order or Darth Vader’s origin and life, are strictly in-story and fictional, the product of imaginative scriptwriters. We accept that entire universe the way we accept Middle Earth, set in an era entirely distinct from any time frame we know.
So what is historical science fiction? The simplest historical SF involves time travel. This goes back at least to H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895). If the characters have a time machine, then they can travel either to the past or to the future, and Wells has his hero do both. It’s the dream of the historian, to go back and see stuff happening, and many SF authors have had huge fun with it.
A favorite manifestation of this is what I’m going to call the ‘wow the rubes’ plot. When the Connecticut Yankee visits the court of King Arthur, in Mark Twain’s 1889 novel, he astonishes the knights of the Table Round with his ability to predict an eclipse or use lightning rods. Another example of this kind of setup is Lest Darkness Fall, by L. Sprague de Camp (1939). The modern hero is mysteriously transported to 6th century Rome, where he wows the rubes by using double-entry bookkeeping to prevent fraud. There’s even a movie with this plot, The Final Countdown (1980), in which the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz inexplicably travels back in time to defend Pearl Harbor from the Japanese on December 7, 1941.
If you reverse this plot – if someone arrives from another planet or time to wow us – then it's a superhero story. Superman arrives from Krypton with fantastic powers, My Favorite Martian arrives to live in an American suburb with Bill Bixby, or Mork visits from Ork to entertain Mindy.
These are fairly simple stories, but time travel can make for great subtlety. If you turn this plot inside out – if the hero arrives in the past and it’s a disaster – then you get classics like Michael Moorcock’s “Behold the Man,” a 1966 award-winning novella that Moorcock later worked up into a novel of the same title (1969). A time traveler visits the first century CE hoping to meet Jesus of Nazareth, and after many unpleasant discoveries and existential crises finds himself crucified on Golgotha.
Wowing the rubes easily develops further into alternate history, another large and popular subset of historical science fiction. Alternate history is What If, selecting a single historical event and changing it to see what happens. Harry Turtledove, a master of AH, has written the Southern Victory books, a many-volume series of alternate history novels exploring the ramifications of what would have happened if Confederate General Robert E. Lee had won the Battle of Antietam, a turning point of the American Civil War in 1862. There are novels speculating about if Rome had not fallen, if Britain had lost to Hitler, if the Black Plague had killed 99% of the population of Europe – almost every eventuality in the past that you can imagine. The temptation to fix a calamity or flip a success (if only Lee’s courier had not gotten lost! If only Hitler had funded research into the atomic bomb!) is irresistible, because so much of history is a razor-edge proposition. Battles and wars proverbially turn upon the loss of a horseshoe nail.
When alternate history moves past the straight What If scenario, it can become truly artistic. A great example would be My Real Children (2014) by Jo Walton. The protagonist, Patricia, remembers two separate worlds that are historically different from ours. In one, President John F. Kennedy was killed by a bomb in 1963, and in the other Kennedy lives but does not run for president again after a nuclear disaster. Against these two AH backgrounds Patricia led two different lives, with two different spouses and sets of children and careers. Which is the “real” one? She, and we, never know, even though she can remember them both and is, clearly, the same person. This taps into the familiar haunting feeling that, if only you’d gone into science, or married the one partner rather than the other, or taken up the flute when you were ten, your life would be not only different, but better. In other words the book is a personal alternate history.
But historical SF can be much more than alternate history or a simple time travel stunt. There are also lots of novels about spaceships or aliens arriving in the past, and playing merry hob with major events: with WW2 (Turtledove’s 8-volume Worldwar series), or knights in armor as in The High Crusade by Poul Anderson (1960), or the 1300s and the Black Plague in Eifelheim by Michael Flynn (2006), or The Moon and the Sun by Vonda McIntyre (1997), in which an aquatic alien visits the court of Louis XIV.
If these events change our history, then they don’t become alternate history – which is, as you’ll recall, based upon a single change in one historical event. I suppose a mermaid not turning up in the French court could be deemed history, but it seems like a stretch to add the mermaid alien and then say it’s alternate history. It seems fair to simply call it historical SF. Science fiction has always been the loosest and largest of the genres. There is literally nothing that can’t happen in an SF story. There are no limits. The whole point is to go where no man has gone before, as Captain Kirk used to say, and this freedom is irresistible.
Another influential subset of historical science fiction is steampunk, a term coined in the 1980s by SF writer K. W. Jeter. Steampunk is quite narrowly defined as SF taking place in the 19th and early 20th centuries, from late Victorian into the Edwardian period. Steampunk features technical developments powered by steam, gears, or other 19th century technology. In other words, it’s about what happens if the science and technology we see today developed in the direction foretold by early masters like Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, or Mary Shelley. Michael Moorcock’s The Warlord of Air (1971) is one early example of steampunk, and there are many current examples.
Steampunk is unique in that there’s a powerful visual, crafting, and costuming component for its fans. Steampunk is a look, a style that is sufficiently close to us in time that it’s achievable. People want to make it, wear it, or hold steam-powered ray guns. There are entire conventions revolving around dressing up in a long leather coat, goggles, and a top hat adorned with gears. Thriving businesses have arisen on Etsy to fill this marketing niche. You can find millions of photographs on the internet, but the online graphic novel series Girl Genius (2001 and ongoing) was very influential in developing this look.
But the most free and creative historical SF just lets you take it as it is. Consider the Lady Astronaut series by Mary Robinette Kowal. In 1952 an asteroid takes out a large chunk of the United States and sets the Earth reeling towards uninhabitable. Humanity is forced to make the leap to space and colonize other planets. Science fiction, yes? But it’s set in the mid-20th century, which makes it historical. Is it alternate history? Not really – there’s no specific, historical, battle lost or assassination averted to kick off the diversion into a different history. If anything the Lady Astronaut books fit into the ‘aliens arriving in the past’ category. And it’s a perfect example of the range and originality of historical SF.
What’s the earliest example of historical science fiction? I’m going to be bold here, and nominate The Romance of Alexander, a long poem in Old French compiled by many authors in the 12th century. Today we would call this story fanfic: elaborations upon Alexander the Great’s known story by ardent fans who, unsatisfied by what was merely historically available, created more – much more. It meets all the definitions of historical science fiction. Enthusiastic 12thcentury troubadours wrote a story set 1500 years earlier than their time, featuring their favorite 3rd century BCE Macedonian monarch. They tell of when Alexander was besieging the Phoenician island city of Tyre in 332 BCE. While planning the famous causeway that still joins the island to the mainland of what is now Lebanon, Alexander explores the bottom of the ocean in a glass diving bell.
By The Talbot Master, c.1444. Detail of a miniature from BL Royal MS 15 E vi, f. 20v (the "Talbot Shrewsbury Book"). Held and digitised by the British Library.
It all hangs together magnificently. The diving bell technology was allegedly postulated by the Greek philosopher Aristotle. And, before he became one of the founders of Western philosophy, Aristotle had a gig tutoring the young prince in Macedon. Alexander is known to have kept in touch with his old teacher, exchanging many letters. Almost all of the original royal correspondence is lost, but there’s a historical novel about them, An Elephant for Aristotle (1958) by L. Sprague de Camp.
So Alexander could have had access to the idea. The French troubadours even supply their fictional explorer with scientific test subjects – the king descends to the sea floor accompanied by a dog, a cat, and a rooster. We must assume the plan was for the animals to suffocate first, and thus signal to Alexander that it was time to ascend.
Even as late as the 12th century, the notion of underwater exploration was unquestionably futuristic, quite beyond early-medieval technology. The earliest record of an actual diving bell in use was well after the Romance. Guglielmo de Lorena constructed the first operational diving bell in 1535, to explore a wreck sunk in a lake near Rome. No wonder a story of Alexander at the bottom of the sea was told and retold. It was clearly a popular adventure, copied and illustrated over and over, proving that historical science fiction had legs even at that early period. Many more medieval depictions of Alexander’s undersea adventure may be viewed here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/alexander-bathysphere/
All historical SF depends on the reader’s historical knowledge. The classic Small Change trilogy (2006, 2007 and 2008) by Jo Walton would lose its entire point if the reader was not perfectly aware that Britain was on the winning side in the second World War. I think it’s this requirement that has made this corner of science fiction less popular. Historical fantasy, historical mystery, and certainly historical romance may be set in a vaguely historical period: perhaps sometime during the Regency period, or when knights were bold, or when women wore bustles. The entire point of those other genres is the romance, or who killed the victim, or the horrible monster lurking in the loch in Scotland. You don’t need to know a lot. Historicity isn’t central.
But science fiction’s main strength is convincing and precise detail. The central trick in the genre is to make everything else in the work utterly factual and convincing. Then, when we’re asked to believe something strange – when Captain Kirk declares that his starship’s interstellar drive runs on dilithium crystals? We believe it, because the Enterpriseruns under a convincingly familiar naval command, complete with a Scottish engineer. That’s why reader knowledge is essential in historical SF. We need you to know, and appreciate, the historical facts we’re juggling, so that you’ll believe it when Alexander the Great hops into his glass diving bell.
Brenda W. Clough is the first female Asian-American SF writer, first appearing in print in 1984. Her 2025 novel is a science fiction novel, His Selachian Majesty Requests. In 2024 she published the 12th in the Marian Halcombe series, Servants of the Empress. A novelette, ‘Clio’s Scroll’, which appeared in Clarkesworld in July 2023. A historical novel A Door In His Head won the 2023 Diverse Voices Award. Her novella ‘May Be Some Time’ was a finalist for both the Hugo and the Nebula awards and became the novel Revise the World. She is active in the SF community, attending conventions and doing podcasts. Her complete bibliography is up on her web page, brendaclough.net.