Historical Fiction/ Alternate History -Sarath


 We say time is the only resource that is distributed equally to everyone. Time does not show any partiality or discrimination. History can be said to be the time our world has once gone through. Around 13.5 billion years ago the big bang happened and the universe started expanding. That must be history.  The evolution of homo sapiens and ancient civilisations are also history.  But, what about a year or a month ago? What about yesterday or each passing moments of our life? Is that history or mere past?

When history and fiction are mixed in the right proportion, great things happen. It could be a book, a movie, a poem or even a painting. We spent an evening discussing about these things.

Our session started with the discussion on ‘Caging Skies’ by Christine Leunens. The novel tells the story of a boy who is a member of ‘Hitler Youth’ during World War II and has Adolf Hitler as an imaginary friend. The film ‘Jojo Rabbit’ was adapted from this book. Then we discussed some classics like ‘A tale of two cities’ by Dickens and ‘Mother’ by Maxim Gorky. Some of the new books like ‘The Devil’s Prayer’ by Luke Gracias and ‘The Illuminati’ by Robert Howells came into the picture.
We came across Dan Brown’s books in the Robert Langdon series which amazingly merge history with fiction. Amish’s mythical fiction works were also discussed. Novels in regional languages were discussed during the end of the session. Sunil Ganguly's historical fiction work ‘That Time’ and ‘Red Badge’ by Rajesh R Varma which shows an alternate history of Kerala were some of them. Apart from books, we shared our views in some other aspects like counter culture movements arose in the 60’s.


History is a vast subject. Historical fiction has been a favourite area of many writers. We could discuss only a fraction of it in our session. What if the noetic science findings in Dan Brown’s ‘Lost Symbol’ become true? What would have happened if Hitler was actually killed as in the Tarantino movie ‘Inglorious Basterds’? Well it would be nice to think of it and find some alternate versions of our time.

Some good reads:
Caging Skies – Christine Leunens
A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Mother – Maxim Gorky
The Devil’s Prayer – Luke Gracias
The Illuminati: The Counter Culture Revolution-From Secret Societies to Wilkileaks and Anonymous – Robert Howells
The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
Angels and Demons – Dan Brown
The Shiva Trilogy – Amish
That Time (Bengali - Shei Shomoy) – Sunil Ganguly
Red Badge (Malayalam - Chuvanna Badge) – Rajesh R Varma

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