I just finished re-reading another of my chronoplane novels, Rogue Emperor, and enjoyed it. I'd forgotten almost all of it, so the characters and their problems were new. I'd even forgotten how Jerry Pierce deals with his climactic struggle in the Roman arena in June, AD 100.
So that was fun, but it was also fun to see how well the research worked.
When I first pitched the idea to Del Rey, I thought I knew a lot about ancient Rome. Hey, I'd read Gibbon when I was just out of college. Of course I soon learned how ignorant I was. So I ransacked our local public libraries for books about Rome in general and first-century Rome in particular, and poured what I learned into the story.
With a rough plot line, I let the research fill in many of the details--from Rome's semi-industrial rural countryside to the mosaics in rich people's dining rooms, to the apartments where my characters lived and what they ate for breakfast (porridge with olives).
When Jerry Pierce had to find Pliny the Younger, I sent him out into midnight Rome; he ended up in a popina, an all-night wine bar, where--to my considerable surprise--he bumped into a very drunk poet named Juvenal. That led me to more research into Juvenal and his poems, which enlivened his part of the story. Politically, Juvenal was a jerk. But he was a superb guide for Pierce and moved the story right along.
The trick in a research-heavy story is to avoid the Roman vice of overeating and then vomiting it all back up as undigested exposition. Pierce, as a stranger to Rome, has an outsider's point of view: He has to keep thinking about what he's seeing, how to interpret it, and especially how to avoid drawing suspicion on himself as a tall, obviously non-Roman person speaking a rather bookish Latin. So I exploited his outsider's predicament, and also brought in a few locals who could logically explain things to Pierce because they think he's just another barbarian.
This was all done, of course, in the mid-80s; I wrote Rogue Emperor on a British-made PC called an Apricot, but I was years away from doing anything serious on the internet. The web was five or six years away. Research now is far easier thanks to Google, but a surprising number of people still don't go beyond the Google front page and the "I feel lucky" button.
So here's a handout I used to give my students early in the semester. I'd march them into a computer lab and take them through the steps of personalizing Google to make it easier to exploit. They always learned something they hadn't expected.
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