A character in one of my works-in-progress right now is an English knight from the early 1400s. Because of that, I’ve been doing a lot of research about England in the late Middle Ages, just so I can understand what he does and doesn’t understand about the modern world. I know lots of writers of sword-and-sorcery fantasy study of medieval England,

Last week a commenter on my blog asked a question about how to research a setting you don’t know well — or one you’ve never been to at all. I had been thinking about this very thing lately! Fantasy and science fiction writers have to go to the trouble of inventing a whole new world, but unless they have inconsistencies,