At the risk of repeating myself, there's an old line about historical fiction (borrowed from science fiction) that says it's neither good history nor good fiction. It bears repeating. Often the task of obsessing over authentic period details drives away all but the most fixated or oddball writers, which leads to accurate environments occupied by characters that don't resemble people. The alternative involves a piece of literature showing the lives of rich characters set against a historical backdrop so bizarrely off that it wouldn't be out of place at an alien version of EPCOT Center.

I could carp about this sort of thing forever, but that's not why I'm here. In the spirit of my last column, I wanted to name a few standout examples of historical fiction from the past decade, books or authors that might give you an inkling of where to go next. As with the last column, I'm cheating and including 1999, because it's still 2009. So there.

Blue at the Mizzen - Patrick O'Brian (1999)

It's fitting to open the piece with the last complete novel by the man who's widely acknowledged to have set a new standard for historical fiction as a genre. It's probably inevitable that historical fiction remain the domain of niche interests and stylists — a topical pool that literary heavies only occasionally dip their toes in — but if everyone wrote like O'Brian, no one would complain. His technical and historical scholarship are both first rate, and in Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, he's created a timeless pair of best friends. This book really should not be read on its own, but I include it because it's tough to overstate how happy fans of the series were to read this book and learn of the happy fate of a character. Think of this as a destination to aim for: go back to 1970's Master and Commander (yes, the very good movie is named for this book, although its plot is taken from another O'Brian novel in this series) and exult in having twenty outstanding books to read.

Dark Voyage - Alan Furst (2004)

With Night Soldiers and Dark Star, Alan Furst wrote two tremendous near-epics of ordinary men overwhelmed by WWII and spycraft. Then he spent the next few books figuring out how to slow down, decrease the scope of the books and keep up a regular output of fiction without burning out on his topic. All of Furst's heroes survive their stories; all traipse through Paris, and all find even temporary companionship. All sometimes are most interesting when nothing happens. To a certain extent there's something very familiar and "series"-ish to his books. These conventions aside, comparisons between his prose and le Carré's are well-earned. Dark Voyage represents Furst's better awareness of pace and willingness to do more with less, even within the familiar confines of his books. Like le Carré — and like the old WWII poster — Furst recognizes that war is a lot of little things, and those little things can be the most momentous parts of a story. The description "a dutch freight captain ships cargo he can't identify through the U-Boat-laden Baltic" may not sound gripping, but with Furst's sense of atmosphere and put-upon humanity coping with forces beyond their control, it achieves the status of espionage thriller.

The Final Solution - Michael Chabon (2004)

Before writing this unusual book, Michael Chabon was already a household name. He'd written the underrated Mysteries of Pittsburgh (for which people mistook his sexual orientation), the Pulitzer-winning Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and the acclaimed Wonder Boys, which became an underrated quasi-indie film. This book didn't stay on a lot of people's radar, though, despite being possibly his most accessible. In it, an octogenarian and famous retired detective helps a young Eastern European refugee find a missing parrot. Set in 1944, the story draws together (possibly) England's most famous fictional detective and the very real abominations of ethnic hatred on the Eastern front of WWII.

Against the Day - Thomas Pynchon (2006)

I could have picked any Pynchon book and automatically had a good example of historical fiction (Lot 49 has a real post-Renaissance postal system; V deals with the German genocide of Namibia; Gravity's Rainbow not only follows WWII but includes real advertisements in contemporary newspapers; Mason & Dixon is literally about Mason and Dixon — and also often not). But of course this book hit stores this decade, and with steampunk's retrofitting of history with pneumatic hoses, people who wear goggles for no reason and blimps aplenty(!), perhaps it's an especially fitting choice, standing as it does astride two momentous centuries. Against the Day lacks a plot that makes a lot of sense, but it makes up for its chaos with parody and conceptual ferment. (On the parody front: probably no book will be more rewarding than this one to readers of popular fiction from the turn of the last century.) It overloads the reader with data that cannot be aggregated sensibly within predictive frames, in a way that suggests all citizens of transitional eras are foolhardy to think they can sift the useful information from the millions of new signals coming at them. In many ways, it's what science-fiction literature from 1900 might have looked like: roads and futures that seem doomed and comical to us now seemed then to be deliciously possible. All these possible futures lie beneath the shadow of the certain doom that is WWI, rendering the social excesses more conspicuously empty and scientific shortcomings more pitiable. As Pynchon himself wrote in a summary of the novel, "With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred." In addition to familiar themes, readers will recognize familiar real faces (Nikola Tesla, no stranger to the steampunk crowd) and the familiar baffling array of punning Pynchon names we've all come to expect.