In the end, I’m a storyteller. And this is the Tiana whose tale I chose to tell.
Finally, a word on dialogue and Cherokee orthography. An author of historical fiction set in a period when people spoke an older form of English faces a peculiar problem. Readers think nothing of reading a story set in ancient Egypt or Rome, where the dialogue is all in modern English. But, perhaps oddly, if the setting is English-language, many people expect an archaic form of dialogue to be used.
I sprinkled a bit of the dialect of the time into the dialogue of my characters in this novel. But, for the most part, I simply used modern contemporary idiom, except that I avoided terms which would be obviously anachronistic.
The reason is simple. Period dialect inevitably sounds stilted to a modern reader. But those same words and phrases and sentences would not have sounded stilted to the people at the time. They would have sounded like modern contemporary idiom.
So, given a choice between violating the letter and the spirit of the law, I chose to violate the letter.
The same principle applies to my use of Cherokee orthography. It is the standard practice among scholars to separate all syllables in Cherokee with hyphens. Thus, properly and technically, a name I use such as Tahlonteskee should be spelled Tah-lon-tes-kee.
But I’m writing novels, not monographs. That means I deal, ultimately, more with emotions than intellect. And it’s simply an emotional fact that to people raised in modern Western culture—that is to say, at least 99 percent of my audience—that words divided by hyphens look stilted, at best. Often, they seem downright comical or derisive. As if the peo-ple of the time we-ren’t ve-ry bright, so they spoke ve-ry slow-ly.
Well, they didn’t. Early nineteenth-century Cherokees spoke to each other in modern contemporary idiom, as well. All people do, in all places, and in all times. So, again, I chose to stick with the spirit of the law rather than its letter.
I admit, it’s a low trick. But as I told you, I’m a storyteller. Ours is the oldest profession, and it’s probably even less reputable than the second oldest. So what did you expect?
Eric Flint
December 2004
ALTERNATE HISTORY TITLES BY ERIC FLINT
1632
1633 (with David Weber)
Ring of Fire
1634: The Galileo Affair (with Andrew Dennis)
Grantville Gazette
The Rivers of War
The Belisarius Series (with David Drake)
An Oblique Approach
In the Heart of Darkness
Destiny’s Shield
Fortune’s Stroke
The Dance of Time (forthcoming)
The Rivers of War is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2005 by Eric Flint
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Flint, Eric.
The rivers of war / Eric Flint.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN 0-345-48460-6
PS3556.L548R57 2005
813'.54—dc22 2004065664
Del Rey Books website address:
www.delreybooks.com
Map illustrations by Jeffrey L. Ward
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