I’d love the local library to get their hands on the Cadfael DVDs. I’m sure they’re great.

I wanted to add a ‘me too’ to the suggestions of CJ Cherryh – she (along with Lois McMaster Bujold) is one of the few science fiction or fantasy authors I still try to read everything by. Oh, I still pick up the occasional science fiction or fantasy book by other authors if it happens to catch my eye, and some of them I quite enjoy, but if Cherryh or Bujold has something new out, I read it. Exotic locations, great characters (although Cherryh’s seem to suffer a lot more than Bujold’s!) and gripping stories.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw_2_11?url=search-alias%3Ddvd&field-keywords=brother+cadfael+dvd&sprefix=Brother+cad

Most readers of historical fiction, most especially historical romances, don’t know enough about the period to spot inaccuracies, so they’re not jarred out of the story there-by. Just like many readers of hard SF aren’t familiar enough with physics to spend their time saying “but you can’t DO that!”, or they just agree that for the purposes of the story, facts are in abeyance.

Reading a story set in an unfamiliar milieu, whether Regency England or Pell Station, frees the mind for thought experiments in ways that reading about known environments cannot. Like Cheryl & Lee said above, they don’t want to read about someone living a life similar to theirs. I’m pretty sure there are plenty of books about such people on the General Fiction shelves. I avoid them too, unless the people in them are dead, mysteriously.

As JD said, I highly recommend the Brother Cadfael mysteries. In those, I remember getting a really medieval viewpoint of faith as a reality of life, of death being ever present, no expectation of equal treatment under the law, and of life lived very simply, while the people themselves were not simple, nor did they have overly simplified motives, either. The people, in other words, were not portrayed as modern.

The best SF writers can give you a viewpoint of what it might be like to not be human…or at least to deal from a human viewpoint with the non-human. CJ Cherryh has built her whole body of work on this exploration. The best mystery writers can give you a sense of what it might be like to be *differently* human..someone who makes choices out of a nearly unimaginable mental landscape. In both cases, it helps one explore and define what’s inside, by exploring what is *other.*

And in all cases, it helps if they can write a cracking good story at the same time.

It’s perfectly true that for the most part the historical novelist never lived in the period of which she writes, and I have seen historical novelists go very far wrong, so nearly as I can tell, on matters of custom and sensibility–but then few of our best crimewriters have been private detectives or policemen, and even fewer, I suspect, members of criminal undergrounds. Many of our adventury story writers haven’t even been soldiers, let alone soldiers of fortune. I think in all these cases, the most we can ask of a writer is that he give it his best shot, and it doesn’t seem to me that the historical novel is inherently more suspect than the crime or adventure novel.
And, of course, there is always the question in depecting any strange local: does one describe it as it would seem to a time traveler from our age, or as it would have appeared to the natives? Either way is, I think, legitimate, given the author is consistent. (It actually seems to be more of a problem in science fiction than in historical novels, by the way. Heinlein used to be the master of the stray word or clause which told the reader the world he was reading about was not his own.)
Why write it or read it, though? Would we be better off without THE SCARLET LETTER, WAR AND PEACE and A TALE OF TWO CITIES? I would say that to immortalize an event would be a suficient reason. To comment on our present society is certainly legitimate, and to comment on the human condition likewise. Not all these purposes are well served by novels about the lives of discontented contemporary academics, or by re-reading Silas Weakly’s THE SWEAT AND THE FURROW. And despite years of school assignments, I still accept writing to entertain as a legitimate purpose. In fact, I’ll pay people to entertain me, and I don’t care who knows it.

The fiction writer–ANY fiction writer, if he’s any good–places his story in the setting that best serves the story. Sometimes that’s here and now. Sometimes that’s recent history. No one speaks of Jane Austen as a historical novelist, but PERSUASION takes place in a very specific time frame already a year or so past when she started writing. Sometimes the best place is the historical past. There’s a reason gothics often take place in the early modern period in the north and west of the British isles, and why so many historical romances are regencies. Certain periods and places lend themselves to certain types of stories.
And some of those places don’t exist yet. Some never shall. But that hasn’t kept me from walking Old Town Jekkara with a former member of the Martian Archeological Society, sallying from Helm’s Deep, defending Shamla Pass and taking much too small a starship from Pell Station to the Hinder Stars. Historical fiction, science fiction and fantasy exist for the same reason as any other fiction–to take us where we wish to go, and show us what the author wishes us to see.

I suppose it’s true that a modern person will never completely be able to get into the head of someone who lived in another era. But that doesn’t seem to me to be a reason not to try. As close an approximation as the author can manage is better than nothing, if it helps me to understand what life was like in that period.

As to who writes them, judging from the author bios in the books I read, it seems to be one of the main job opportunities for history majors these days!

I don’t read the romantic, sanitized type, but costume dramas like that seem to me to be almost a romantic daydream, where the reader can imagine s/he’s there, without any of the attendant inconveniences, like a lack of antibiotics & indoor plumbing. And the swashbuckling always ends happily. It doesn’t happen just in fiction. Think of the Disneyfication of so many tourist spots. I grew up in New Orleans, and went back to visit a few years ago (before Katrina). The French Quarter had been so cleaned up it looked to me as if it had been redone by somebody who’d spell shop “shoppe”, and then laminated. (It was a terrible contrast with the rest of the city.)

There’s nothing wrong with daydreams–we all do it occasionally. As long as you *realize* you’re daydreaming…

Now, I’ve no illusions that Falco is a realistic portrayal of a Roman of the period – his voice sounds typically modern to me – but I love the exotic nature of the settings (which I think are more realistic) and the plots. I’ve read other mystery novels set in the Roman era, but I don’t like them as much. One series struck me as a bit too didactic. I liked ‘Medicus’, first in a relatively new series.

I think the main reason I like historical novels so much is the exotic settings. I like novels set in foreign countries, too, sometimes, but historical settings are both more exotic, being distant in both place and time. I started with books set in medieval Europe, especially the UK. This wasn’t really to the exclusion of history; I read history sometimes too, although I read much more fiction. A novel, especially a children’s historical novel, can make history come to life in the way a history book can’t – even if the novel is not really accurate. They don’t have a lot of children in history texts; well, except princes and princesses, who are very difficult to identify with. I read a lot of Norah Lofts, Georgette Heyer, quite a stream of what used to be called ‘Gothic’ novels (not the real thing, the ones with a distressed woman in flowing robes in front of an ominous castle on the front cover.) I have also read some of the books which are really a vehicle for fantasy about some Highland lord or Viking warrior, with a greater or lesser amount of explicit descriptions of the heroine’s relationship with the hero. The historic setting of these is incidental – the stories are direct descendants of those very un-explicit Harlequin romances of many years ago in which the conquering hero was a Greek shipping magnate or the Chief Surgeon in the local hospital (although foreign was better, or at least more popular). Joan Aiken in one of her early sort of Gothic novels did a nice take on the Greek shipping magnate idea. Anyway, that was a contemporary setting, or at least, it was contemporary 30 or 40 years ago.

I think, barring the sex fantasy stuff, historical fiction is popular because it is set in a different time and place; it’s exotic.

I’m not much interested in novels about ordinary people leading ordinary lives in contemporary small Canadian cities. I have a pretty good idea how that sort of life works because I live it. So I read mystery and historicals and some science fiction and fantasy.

Of course, I don’t know how typical I am of mystery readers.

The best historical novels that I know of came out in the 50s and 60s. Set in Ancient Greece and written ny Mary Renault. I’m told they are considered to be accurate reconstructions. They got me interested in ancient civilization and Philosophy.