A recent novella: Making History, by K. J. Parker

Making History, by K. J. Parker

a review by Rich Horton

K. J. Parker's latest novella is Making History, from 2025. Parker is a very enjoyable writer, either under his real name (Tom Holt) or Parker pseudonym. His work is almost always comic, but the tone varies, with the Tom Holt stories being rather lighter, even daffier; while the Parker stories are profoundly cynical, and often verge on tragedy. (Holt's greatest work, in my admittedly unconventional opinion, is a diptych (latterly republished in a single volume) called Goat Song/The Walled Orchard, a bleakly funny and ultimately truly tragic historical novel about the Athenian invasion of Syracuse. Holt published a few more historical novels set in Ancient Greece, some loosely connected to this book.) 

Most of Parker's work is set in a sort of secondary world that roughly resembles, maybe, our world at something like the time of the Byzantine Emperor. These stories occasionally contain explicit fantastical elements, but usually do not. The geography of that "world" is somewhat consistent, the history, not so much -- it serves primarily as a ready-made setting for these stories, giving him a stage with a reusable set of props -- a religion, a few perpetually rival countries, a consistent technological level, some cultural figures to reference. Parker's interests as a novelist are a cynical view of of political actions, a despairing view of human relationships (particularly those between men and women), and a fascinated view of the ins and outs of technology, art, and language. 

Making History is told by a linguist in the country of Aelia. Aelia has somewhat recently been taken over by a man called Gyges, who is seeking to pick a fight with a neighboring country. To do so, he needs to establish that this country was responsible for wiping out Aelia's Golden Age ancestors. So he recruits a team of the best academics in the country, and orders them to create a convincing archaeological dig that will prove this. The narrator has to invent a convincing proto-Aelian language, and his fellows have to design art, and buildings, and tools and such. This gives Parker the latitude to interestingly describe how such an enterprise would work ... which is right up Parker's alley.

The rub comes when somehow some of these artifacts start appearing, even though they haven't really been created yet. Eventually, even the whole city is unearthed. What could be happening? Is it possible that they did their job so well that they perfectly mimicked real history that no one had known about? Or is someone on their team leaking information to the enemy. Or is it something more sinister?

The narrator knows only one thing -- he has to escape. So he asks his mistress -- a prostitute who has plenty of connections among the criminal class -- to arrange this. Now, this being a Parker novel, you know that if a woman, especially a woman the protagonist cares about but who is probably out of his league, gets involved, well, things won't turn out so well... 

Bottom line for me, alas, is that while I enjoyed this story well enough, it ultimately seemed too much of a same with many previous Parker stories. The cynicism seemed overdetermined, and the plot really didn't convince. In the end, this is not one of K. J. Parker's best efforts.