(typewriter cranks) (typewriter dings) (soft music) - [Alix] Hi, I am Alix E. Harrow, and this is "The Everlasting".

A big sad lady knight is stuck in a time loop, and it's the cowardly historian who's sent back from the future to make sure she keeps playing her part because it's necessary for the future of the empire that they're building.

- What was the idea behind this story?

- I didn't have the hubris to think I'm gonna do a time loop story, because there's impossible.

They're ridiculous.

But what I wanted to do was a lady knight book, because those were my favorite, like kind of middle grade and young adult fantasy.

When I was young, there were these really formative ones where it's like a young girl gets a sword and studies to be a knight, and I loved them.

And I was like, "I'm one day gonna do my grownup lady knight book."

But then I encountered the problem of what the medieval really is, what knighthood really is, and the function it's played in sort of our rhetoric and the aesthetics of fascism.

And they love a knight.

Anyway, so it was kind of a bummer.

So this is like this romantic image I had of knighthood kind of meeting the reality of history and of propaganda.

And I wanted a way to explore the way that I think heroes and folklore are made into tools for empire building, for nation building.

And the only way I could do that, that I figured out, was to have this recursive structure where you get to see the building of the folklore and how it's deployed and why it's told this way and why it has to play out that way.

- Who gets to write the history?

And that's exactly what you're exploring here.

- And not just who gets to write it, but who gets to use it?

And for what purpose?

Because I'm fascinated by the way that writing history is necessary to control the future.

- Well, and how do we know what's real?

- Yeah, and I have a master's in history, and so I was supposed to be very concerned with that.

And I think I got more concerned even in my grad studies with does it matter what was real or does it matter what we say happened, and how we receive that.

Because the process of studying history is weaving a narrative out of disparate events.

They're very random, like things don't occur in narrative structures, but we have to align them in order to make sense of our history.

And so the sense making part of history is kind of what this is about.

- Thank you so much for being here today.

This was fascinating.

- Thank you so much for talking to me.

- And thank you for watching "A Word on Words".

I'm J.T Ellison.

Keep reading.

(typewriter dings) - [Alix] One of the things that we can forget about propaganda and about history is that it has to be based in some little grain of truth.