@Taweret

Finally, someone who gets there is nothing nostalgic or golden about the past, especially if you time travel back before 1800. It smells, you smell, the smelly gross world is trying to kill you. You. Are. Food. You will be sick. Even if you have money, your servants are trying to kill you because nobody knows sanitation and everybody believes disease is a curse, god's will, or a miasma. Don't forget being bled by leaches was a thing…

Your little guide should be required reading for anyone writing a historically correct time travel story to prod them into providing the proper gritty verisimilitude.

I boosted. Other authors should boost the original post thread, too. Well done indeed.

#writingCommunity #writesOfMastodon #timetravelAuthors #author #writer #timetravel

@AnnaSaultron_schreibt

some sort of vaccines could exist for "professional time travelers"

I think Connie Willis used that approach in her time travel novel, but some things you can't immunize against, like worms and lice, and some bacterial diseases, for instance. But you could take a medkit with deworming medicine, antibiotics, etc. Still dangerous, and easily pilfered, if it doesn't get you branded a witch.

I think handwaving (what I call lamp shading) to make a "clean" story is one way to deal with this. However, the best stories are where the protagonists have thought out everything minutely, but fail nonetheless and have to deal. Such things put our humanity on display.

Worse, there were common diseases that we aren't affected by anymore. When you come back, if you aren't quarantined… Well, starting a small pox pandemic as a returning time traveler would be a very ironic story, wouldn't it?

cc: @Taweret

@sfwrtr @AnnaSaultron_schreibt @Taweret

Maybe it's hand waving, but with my Protags being ghosts or spirits, they have temporary immunity.

There was a branch to the story where Bijou was in Dickonian London, and the air quality was mentioned. Otherwise, any human time area has been post-WW I.

@sfwrtr @NaraMoore what I'm constantly thinking about is how micro plastic has to be figured in for a roughly 300 years ahead human society. There are already rocks made out of plastic forming and some sort of bacteria and fungus already eating that stuff today.

So who knows what the future will be.

And I absolutely agree without vague and hand waving explanations Fantasy and SciFi wouldn't work the slightest.😅