A note from The Historical Fantasy Bundle curator and award-winning author Melissa Scott: My favorite fantasy novels are the ones that ground the fantastic in the historical — that use pieces of our known past to build their fantasy worlds. Partly, of course, that's because I was trained as a historian, and seeing bits of esoteric detail used to buttress an entirely new story is always a delight, but even when I don't know the period well, there's something tremendously satisfying about seeing the details of the past used as scaffolding for new stories. The historical imagination and the fantastic imagination have a lot in common, after all: both take known data points as scaffolding on which to hang a narrative. The difference, usually, is that the fantasy writer has created the data as well as the story. In these novels, however, fact and fiction mingle, whether the author is placing fantastic events in a real and familiar world or using that familiar history as a basis for a fantastic setting.
In this collection I've been able to bring together an extraordinary group of writers who draw their inspiration from Western history, in periods from Ancient Egypt through the Second World War. There are classics like the World Fantasy Award-nominated Lord of the Two Lands and the Nebula-nominated Death of the Necromancer, and newer novels like Daughter of Mystery and The Emperor's Agent— and Stag and Hound, just released in April. What these novels have in common, across these very different periods, is a depth to and delight in their worlds, in the precise detail and pitch-perfect moment that not only propels the story, but makes it utterly, dazzlingly real.
You can read more about how the bundle was assembled
here, and make sure to click on each cover for reviews, a preview and a personal note from our curator!