Making History by K.J. Parker Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: historiography, Dark Fantasy, fantasy, historical fantasy, dark academia
Pages: 128
Published by Tordotcom on September 2, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
In K. J. Parker's new whip-smart dark fantasy, a group of scholars must do the impossible for a ruthless king. The cost of refusal, of course, is death.
History isn't truth, it's propaganda.
Seeking war with his neighbor, the tyrannical ruler of Aelia convenes several of his kingdom's professors for a chat. First Citizen Gyges only just invaded Aelia a few years back and, naturally, his public image can’t take the hit of another unjustified assault.
His totally sane solution? Simple, really. These scholars must construct a fake ancient city from scratch to verify Gyges’s apocryphal claims.
Now these academics must put their heads together to make history. Because if they don't, they'll lose their heads altogether.
My Review:
There’s that old saying that goes, “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” But there’s another old saying, that “History is written by the victors.” Which leads to some really interesting questions about what went into the making of the history that we’re supposed to learn so we don’t repeat it. Because that first quote sort of assumes that the history we’re learning is the truth, while the second one negates that quaint notion utterly.
In the case of this particular book, Making History – and is that ever a hint – both of those old quotations run headlong into a much, much newer one, whose pithiest expression is generally attributed to the late Henry Kissinger, that “Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small.”
They’re not nearly as small as usual in this story, as the newly anointed tyrant king of Aelia has commissioned, ordered, voluntold, etc., a colloquium of the leading experts in all of the history and history-adjacent academic fields at the renowned University of the Kingdom of Aelia to ‘manufacture’ an archaeological site all the way down to its potsherds and bones in order to create a false pretext for a very real war.
Because nothing brings a fractured populace together like a righteous reason to conquer their enemies.
The reasons are as old as the hills – including whatever hills will need to be razed to make this happen. The self-serving nature of the emperor’s orders is clear and obvious – as are the consequences for the academics. They either manage the whole elaborate production in nine months – or they die.
One of them can’t stand the pressure and slits his wrists to escape the only way he can.
The rest – well – the rest get much too interested in solving the puzzle of the thing – and in scoring off against each other – to worry too much about the cost. No matter how many ‘disposable’ workers they have to go through in order to meet the deadline and keep the deadly secret.
But just as they think they might beat the deadline, they discover that they’ve been beaten from the outset. It turns out they aren’t ‘making history’, they’re part of a history that’s already been made – and that they are every bit as disposable as all the other workers who were used to create this vast and costly historical hoax – for the other side.
Escape Rating B: This is one of those stories where you’re not quite sure what you’re in for. At first, it’s a bit more like a philosophical treatise than it is fantasy – except that this world isn’t ours. But it sure does feel like it, as everything that happens is, well, as familiar as that history that we learn so we don’t repeat it.
This has all happened before – after a fashion – and it will all happen again. So to speak.
It’s also familiar to readers of the author’s previous work, particularly Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City, as the voice of the (unnamed, first-person) protagonist is very clearly the author’s own avatar. If you like his voice in his previous work, you’ll like his wry, acerbic, cynical stand-in in this one as well.
As I read this, I found it interesting but wasn’t quite sure what the intent was, because there’s not a whole lot of story in this story. It turns out that this is a caper story – but unlike a lot of caper stories, we’re not following the ones pulling the caper, we’re following their victims.
And by the time we reach the ending, we realize that they all deserve whatever happens to them, no matter how much we may have empathized with the original academic protagonist all along.
Because there’s one last dichotomy of old sayings at the heart of this puzzle. Both the tyrant king Gyges and all the scholars decided that the end justified the means, while the puppet masters ultimately pulling their strings proved that “you can’t cheat an honest man” – or, in this case, righteous king. If Gyges hadn’t taken the bait, well, this whole, entire story would never have happened in the first place.
In the end, this is more interesting than it is fun – but I’m fairly sure that was the author’s intent all along. Unless, of course, I’ve been played along with those academics and their king.
