“Making History” by KJ Parker

This was a fun novella of the “author has cool idea that won’t work for an entire novel” type. I tend to love this kind of thing; it’s fun seeing authors get experimental and run with things.

The premise here: the local king has a bunch of top scholars from the university attend to him. He wants an excuse for war on the neighboring kingdom. Their assignment is to use their knowledge of their respective disciplines and create a ruined city that can be rediscovered, showing that thousands of years earlier the ancestors of the neighboring kingdom had savagely attacked their own ancestors. None of them are particularly enthused about this, but the threat of death is a great motivator.

But then, as these are all academics, they get into it. They might not want to do the project, but they nevertheless get excited by the challenge of it. Our protagonist is professor of philology/linguistics; his job is to invent a language that could have been the proto tongue of their own modern language.

Things take a turn, though, when he hears a sailor in port using a word that he only understood because he had literally just made it up. And other pieces of their creation start appearing, to all appearances thousands of years old…

This was fun on many levels. Great quick read.