I once read about two groups who were at war. The losers said they won the war with tales of bravery and fictional battles they won. To me that is fictional history. (don't remember the details, possibly in South America) Historical fiction, to me, is those who write about past events and change the story, we see it all the time in movies.
This post was edited by . at February 9, 2024 5:08 PM MST
Historical fiction isn't supposed to be believed. And often better researched than fictional history.
When I was a kid in school, Governor Lachlan Macquarie was held up as some kind of paragon, "the Great Emancipator". He was - if you were white. To the First Nations people he was a genocidal butcher, but history lessons left that bit out. I was as tall as I am now before I found out what a brute he really was.
Historical fiction is tales about invented people around real events, possibly with some real people thrown in to maintain the context or to pose "what if?" themes.
Fictional history is a self-contradiction, since it needs the entire setting, characters and events to be invented and does not even need be credible as it is... fiction!
Futurist fiction is similar, though some does use real places for its settings. The further ahead the projection the wilder it can be but one of the best and least wild novels I have read, set in eight centuries' time, is Robert Harris' The Second Sleep - not a space-ship or flying car in sight, nor any car of any sort indeed; and set in a fictional village not far from the real city of Exeter (where one scene takes place) in the real English county of Devon.
