No, it isn’t because history is the secret sourcebook from which so many SFF writers have borrowed political structures, character archetypes, grand events, and vivid details, though that connection between history and SFF is important too.

To understand why all SFF writers are historians, you have to understand what a historian does.

It is easy to think of a historian as an assembler of facts. We scour archives, libraries, and historic sites, sometimes with pick and trowel, more often with dictionary and laptop, to acquire new information: who did, wore, bought, ate, killed, burned, invented, lived, or saw what, when, and where. Just as, when describing a space elevator, I ask friends in the space tech world to send me facts, another writer might turn to me for facts about fabric dyes, currency systems, dueling customs, or castle layout, to give accuracy to a historical story or supply ingredients for an original world build.

However …

The particle physicist’s craft is not primarily describing particles at rest, but observing particles in motion, tracking their interactions, forming hypotheses about how particles form, change, and affect each other, and speculating about particles we cannot yet detect, and new things we may learn from them. Just so, the historian’s craft is not primarily filling encyclopedias and reference books with static facts, but observing historical change over time, describing past transformations and their causes, offering new hypotheses about how societies form, develop, and transform each other, testing said hypotheses, and speculating about things we do not yet know about history while trying to figure out how we might try to learn them.

Many famous histories, like Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, or Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, center on making claims about the causes of historical change: whether and why the Roman empire declined, why WWI took the shape it did, or what caused Europe’s rise to global dominance post-1500 (spoiler: Diamond's argument is right there in his title). Even more prosaic-seeming topics, like Aaron Bobrow-Strain’s White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf, marshal their facts to make arguments about what causes change: White Bread examines the baffling shift from 90 percent of America’s bread being baked at home to 90 percent being store-bought within two decades in/after 1912, attributing the change to profit-seeking bread factories funding deliberate propaganda tapping into xenophobia and hygiene panics (fake news stories about the supposed unsanitariness of bread from home ovens or immigrant-run bakeries) plus the early-twentieth century’s mania for all things scientific (kids need high-tech bread made in labs by white-coated scientists, not baked by ignorant moms!). Zooming out from the details, White Bread argues that profit-seeking corporate greed, propaganda, moral panics, and sudden fads have the power to change the world—at this moment, dozens of writers reading this are thinking about how such kinds of change could apply to their own world builds. (By the way, as White Bread shows, sliced store-bought bread dates to 1912, so the next time you hear someone say, “The best thing since sliced bread,” it means the best thing since 1912.)

History is a social science and, like all sciences, seeks (in Francis Bacon’s words) knowledge of causes and the secret motions of things—in history’s case, the causes and secret motions of human society, of us. When historians get together at conferences, we debate whether there really are such things as Dark Ages and Golden Ages, whether and where it makes sense to draw lines between periods (when does pre-modern become modern?), and whether we’ve been focusing too much on one kind of cause (political leaders, war, dynasties) and should pay more attention to another (livestock evolution, transportation tech, everybody’s mom).

In brief: The historian’s craft aims to show how our world changes, and who or what has the power to change it. Okay …

In SFF, the world usually changes. It may be saved, destroyed, discovered, overrun by zombies, driven mad by faeries, terraformed, irradiated, touched by strangers, or saved from tyrants, but it changes. Often, the story focuses on characters who shape or initiate the change for good and/or ill: plucky rebels, unlikely saviors, shadowy conspirators, ruthless dictators, the king seeking to rule wisely, the king in exile seeking to return, the faithful followers of the king in exile who make it happen. Live on the page, characters win battles, achieve regime changes, create disruptive technologies, release then battle pathogens, found world-shaping institutions, make passionate arguments in the room where it happens, or are placed by fate in the right place at the right time. If it’s a cozy fantasy, they may even popularize a new kind of bread.

All such stories advance claims about who and what has the power to change the world. Think of a dystopia where the world went bad because of Technology X, versus one where the world went bad because of Villain X, or Corporation X, Political Party X, Global Cataclysm X, Supergenius X, Aristocratic Family X, Religious Leader X—each of these makes a different claim about who and what has power to change our world. A future transformed by a new technology presents a different model of who changes the world if the technology came from one genius inventor, versus the synthesis of two inventers, versus a team of university scientists, versus corporate funding, versus a government lab. A political drama of lords, ladies, and emperors advances the claim that only those at the top have the power to shape history; a drama where the lords and ladies are in conflict with a merchant-class bigwig presents two types of world-shaping power in conflict; a drama which adds an idealist rising from the gutter presents a third; a tale where someone starts in the gutter but enters the elite and uses elite power to actually enact change goes back to only those at the top having power again. A struggling space colony may be saved by rugged space marines, dutiful hereditary lords, the teamwork of the crew, or one special little boy; each option makes a claim about where human power lies, while having the space colony perish despite all efforts makes a claim about human powerlessness.

All such stories are practicing the historian’s craft, not the half that is gathering facts, but the half that is advancing a claim about the causes and secret motions that shape human history.

SFF with worldbuilding does this even more. Every world build involves the author deciding how the imagined society got to its present shape. Was there an ancient golden age of noble elf kings, followed by a dark age caused by the actions of one evil mastermind? Such a book is in the camp with histories that claim there are such things as dark ages and golden ages. Was there a massive revolution which wiped away the old regime and built a blank-slate new world order dreamed by revolutionaries? Such a book accepts those histories of the American and French Revolutions which depict themselves as restarting from nothing like a new dawn. Did the revolution shed more blood than it likes to admit, and leave a lot of old structures and hierarchies embedded in its new order? Such a book uses different histories of the American, French, and other revolutions, and makes a different claim about whether a blank-slate new era is possible. If this is SF, did Earth face a third World War, from whose ashes the fragmented survivors created a new civilization shaped by … what? Idealistic visionaries? Rival religious cults? Rival warlords lifted to power by their dominance of guns, germs, and steel? Having World War III in the backstory of any imagined Earth future advances the claim that new eras are often born through war; a future built on the rise of a charismatic leader, or hard-earned incremental reform, makes peaceful change feel plausible. Every world build makes choices about where agency rested in the great stages of its past, using histories as models and also practicing the historian’s craft: making claims about how the world changes, and who has the power to change it.

Importantly, every sentence above could have said teaches instead of claims. Storytelling is how most claims about how the world works reach us, in childhood and adulthood, from our very first picture books to this year’s Hugo finalists. We are all familiar with the importance of representation, how it feels empowering to see a story where the hero resembles us and disempowering when the hero never resembles us, but the same is true in the structural sense. It feels empowering to read stories—fiction or nonfiction—where the world is changed by the kinds of things we feel we too could do: by teamwork, grassroots action, steady effort by someone not too different from ourselves; it feels disempowering only when powers we can’t hope to wield transform the world: superpowers, royalty, geniuses, or vast inhuman processes, whether military, economic, medical, or alien. When Sam and Frodo save the world through friendship and resisting corruption in their hearts, we, in our smallness, feel we could aspire to that; when Superman does we know we can’t.

So, all SFF authors—authors of stories with worldbuilding, and of stories where the world changes—practice the historian’s craft.

You can find some SFF that doesn’t. Romantasy, for example, sometimes has nothing at stake larger than the happiness and intimate lives of the characters; such romantasies may still have a world build which makes claims about history, but a sufficiently light world build may not. Conversely, some non-SFF genres have world-changing stakes. Many thrillers and political dramas make claims about who has the power to save the world, though usually in the form of guarding the status quo; in such stories it’s usually the choice of threat that makes claims about what changes history, whether James Bond or Jason Bourne battle terrorists, business tycoons, government agencies, traitors within governments, etc. Similarly, non-SFF historical fiction often makes claims about history, like Mantel’s Wolf Hall or Renault’s The Mask of Apollo, if the story shows the exercise of power or a major historical event, but not if it just shows the detective solving the murder or the heroine finding happiness against a historical backdrop.

In sum, all SFF writers are practicing the historian’s craft. If we think carefully about what claims our plots and world builds make about who has the power to change the world, we can use that to advance models of history which encourage hope and action, and we can avoid or subvert those models which teach powerlessness and cede agency to the powerful. And (my historian colleagues would urge me to add) we can be careful to advance historical models that recent historians agree are true, and not outdated ones like Great Man History or cycles of Dark Ages and Golden Ages which historians are toiling so hard to combat, but one bestselling book can undo the labors of a thousand academic monographs.

Important corollary: Most authors of other genres outside SFF are not historians; this is more important than it sounds like when we remember this is especially true of mainstream literary fiction.

So-called mainstream literary fiction is a genre which many falsely argue is not a genre but “normal” or “non-genre” literature. But lit fic has its tropes, pacing, furniture, and expectations just as much as other genres, it just tricks many into not noticing them, since its formula is less formulaic than the genres defined by extreme formulaicness (romance, mystery), and its furniture is less conspicuous than the genres defined by conspicuous furniture (fantasy, SF, western), but SFF is certainly as variable in formula and romance and mystery are often as realistic in setting as mainstream lit.

But one nearly-universal characteristic of contemporary mainstream literary fiction (as nearly-universal as technology is in SF or magic in fantasy) is a focus on a powerless character making an internal journey to come to terms with the world. It may be a journey of finding joy or finding despair, but the world is the challenge, and whether it's static or changing is despite the characters, not because of them. Lit fic thus does not teach any models of how the world changes or how history works, other than the powerlessness model of the individual being ground along by progress, like Charlie Chaplin trapped in the gears of Modern Times. In fact, when literary authors want to talk about characters changing the world, they reach for the tools of SFF or historical fiction, as in Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, Lessing’s Shikasta, Spufford’s Golden Hill, Piercy’s Gone to Soldiers, and Mantel’s Wolf Hall—all of these authors established themselves first as mainstream authors but used genre tools when they wanted to address the genre question of how the world changes.

Romance fiction, in contrast with lit fic, does depict characters taking actions to improve their lives, since part of the formula is that the heroine does not only find love, she makes some change in her life that makes her much happier: a new job, new career, moving to Italy, taking up a new hobby and forming friends, finally opening that bakery, etc. Romance depicts agency in the small sense of people making a difference in their own lives and those of communities and loved ones. These messages of hope have great power to inspire collective action, as we have seen in how romancelandia via its Romance the Vote has raised over a million dollars for democracy and, this month, tens of thousands for funding pop-up supply depots for Minneapolis protestors. But romance, like thriller, usually deals on the global sense with a static world, in which individuals take actions within the status quo that impact lives around them, but do not make one era move on to the next.

In other words: Most people today get our ideas about how history works and changes primarily by consuming SFF and historical fiction. We in the SFF genre are not only historians, we are the most influential historians practicing today. That is a lot of responsibility.

When SFF authors offer portraits of how people change the world, we exercise enormous power over worldview, over expectations, over hope. When we use history innovatively, presenting diverse or inspiring portraits of agency, we can spread truly life-shaping calls to action, or at least calls to expect that one’s actions matter, but even an old-fashioned tale of kings or superheroes, or outdated Dark Ages and Golden Ages, at least shows the world in motion, and with pivot points when some choice or action causes the next. We should not underestimate how much power genre writers have to shape how people expect the world to change, what actions are important or likely to matter, what threats to watch out for, and whether it is worth taking action when we see the world on fire.

Nor should we underestimate the power of genre readers to challenge the hegemony of the literature of powerlessness by pointing out that SFF practices the social science of history, analyzing and depicting the causes and secret motions of the human world at a larger, truer scale than the microcosmic lens of mainstream lit aspires to do.

Sometimes people ask me why I, a historian, became an SF writer since past and future are opposites. I always answer: Nothing is more like the future than the past, a long period in which cultures change, disruptions happen. I’m not a historian who decided to write SF, I wanted to write SF—indeed SFF—from early childhood, and became a historian because I realized it would be the perfect training. The more I practice both crafts, the more I realize they are one.

In a brilliant scene from Kerry Callen’s Halo and Sprocket, a slice of life comic about a single woman and an angel helping Earth’s first sentient robot learn about the world, the three unlikely roommates visit a local art show. Two pictures hang side-by-side, an abstract mass of shapes and a night scene with lovely landscape and stars. The robot asks why humans call the shapes piece abstract and the nightscape realistic when the stars are in completely inaccurate places, while the geometry of angles and lines is perfect. Once that challenge is voiced, you can’t un-see it. We shift the paradigm the same way when we ask the denigrators of genre fiction why our literatures, with diverse and realistic depictions of human agency and worlds in flux, are less realistic than mainstream lit fic with its narrow, zoomed in portraits of inner journeys and human powerlessness. When Le Guin called genre writers “realists of a larger reality” she focused on how SFF portrays other ways of being and living, demonstrating alternatives, but we also portray a larger reality by showing those realities in motion instead of in stasis, as so much real-world contemporary fiction does.

The historian’s craft is a powerful one. Medical research does not let us control that massive system called the body, but it lets us understand how it works and changes, guiding us in what to expect, and how to start our interventions when we want to affect the body for the better. Just so, the craft of history does not let us control events, but it reveals mechanisms, guides our expectations, helps us diagnose, and posit treatments. SFF authors are not usually the researchers who developed the new historical model, but physicians are not usually the researchers who developed the cure either; SFF authors are the front-line practitioners who put the fruits of history’s craft into daily practice, sharing it in doses the public can consume, combining, treating, administering, customizing, even inoculating against evils like propaganda and despair. All human beings wonder how we got the world we have and how to change it; not all stories help answer that question, but—for all their faeries, rockets, spells, and aliens—ours do.

Editor: Gautam Bhatia.

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department.