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@daeus-lamb

Sorry. I saw this post and was going to comment but forgot about it. Thanks for the reminder!

This is a really interesting topic and after reading you and Kate’s posts I know I have a lot more work to do at incorporating the past into the story’s present.

@kate

Wow! Great list…between what you and Daeus shared I don’t feel like I’ve got much to add. 🙂

But after reading through your list I do have some thoughts on this subject:

If we are talking about the real world…this is a huge problem. Thinking of the western world in particular, kids arn’t being taught history properly and so they are growing up with the wrong ideas about government, patriotism, freedom, and basic morality. We are repeating the past because we refuse to learn from it. (Take socialism for an example…)

While I have often thought about this in the real world, I never really thought of incorporating this into my story world.

In my fantasy WIP the common, working class people don’t trust their government, because of century old grievances between them and their country’s leaders. In fact they despise it…well the old people do anyway. The children don’t know anything different then the corrupted, twisted system that they were born into. The government hand feeds the younger generation propaganda and they take it. (On a side note, do you think this is too cliche? The poor, oppressed people and the government “blinding” everybody so that they just believe what they are told, that type of thing…Is it too overused? Not making my story world and it’s government to cliche has been something I’ve been struggling a lot with.)

And of course I can’t talk about history and fantasy and world building without mentioning Tolkien. But I’ll spare you all a rant and just say this: if you want to learn how to incorporate history into your story and do it well…go read the LOTR.

And of course there are other great authors who knew how to do this type of thing well too…but seeing as the amount of fantasy literature I have consumed is quite small, I really can’t name any others. (Lewis and Fforde are two that I have read and like how they dealt with history in their fantasy books.)

Sorry if none of that ramble made sense…I feel like I kinda just wrote what I was thinking, in no particular order and with no sense of consistency.

*sigh*