Without a Summer: The science behind the title and the year 1816

There is a surprising amount of science in Without a Summer, considering that it’s a fantasy novel set in the Regency. Strangely, the scientific history was one of the hardest things to convey in the story.

1816 is often called The Year Without a Summer. In the U.S., it was also Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death because the world experienced a serious and prolonged winter. At the time, they didn’t know why.

In 1815, the island of Tambora experienced a massive volcanic eruption, which dwarfs every other eruption in recorded history. The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, in the same island chain, got more press because the telegraph, but it was significantly smaller than Tambora. People in Britain didn’t know about the Tambora explosion until the following year, and even then, no one connected it to the change in weather.

And there was a serious change in the weather.

Tambora blew so much material into the atmosphere that the entire northern hemisphere experienced cooling. For example, in the U.S., Washington D.C. had snow in July. Crops failed as the cold weather set in and stayed.

The problem with writing a novel with magic is that when you introduce freakishly unnatural weather, all of your readers assume that it’s magic. Explaining that it’s not becomes more difficult when no one in the real world made the connection between Tambora and the cold.

In the real world, people thought that this was a sign of the end times or the wrath of God. Imagine if your characters live in a world with coldmongers. I’ll explain how the science behind glamour works in detail in another post, but for the moment I’ll explain that coldmongers are specialized glamourists who can cool things.

Note that they can cool things, by which I mean make things a few degrees cooler. They cannot freeze things or effect large scale changes. But… my early readers thought that they could and kept waiting for the plot to explain how the cold weather was a massive coldmonger conspiracy.

This was particularly frustrating because I’d gotten in touch with the Met Office National Meteorological Archive in London and had scans of logs of weather conditions written at the time. Recording weather was a hobby at the time, so we have surprisingly good and varied records. To the best of my ability, the weather I’m describing in Without a Summer is the actual weather on that day.

(As a side note: I’d planned a scene in which they skated on the Thames in September, because I’d seen several websites that talked about the Thames freezing in September. It turns out that this wasn’t true. There was ice seen in London, but the recorded temperatures didn’t drop below freezing long enough. I moved the skating party to a pond at Carlton House, just after Easter. Normally I don’t fret so much about real weather, but in this case it seemed significant enough to try to get it right.)

To tackle the larger problem of people thinking that the coldmongers were behind everything, I finally went at it head on by making that part of the the overall plot of the book. At first, the plot issue that I’d planned were simply that the coldmongers were out of work because of the freakish weather. I broadened that to have the common people attempt to blame them for the global cooling. If the real world thought that the global cooling was the sun dying, it only made sense that people would blame coldmongers in my alternate history. There were already food shortage riots in the real world, this just gave the crowds a new target. It also allowed me to have characters comment on the science and impossibility of the idea directly.

Here’s a sample of how that looks in the novel.

The carriage rocked to a halt. With London’s traffic, this was not entirely unusual, but a moment later, she became aware of shouting. “Another riot?”
“Let me see.” Vincent disengaged himself from her, and looked out the window. He shook his head. “It is in front of us. A moment.”

Before Jane could protest, he had stepped out of the carriage. Cold air gusted in, stirring Vincent’s hair as he stood on the step of the carriage, peering over the crowd. With the door open, Jane could now make out some phrases coming from the mob, like “coldmonger” and “weather fiend” and “stop the snow.”

Jane leaned out to look down the street. She had expected to see more Luddites pulling a frame out of a building, but instead a crowd had gathered in front of a grocer’s. Their anger was affixed upon a clear spot in their midst. One protester held a sign on a stout stick demanding “God’s wrath for weather meddlers.” Another read,  “Coldmongers are the Devil’s servants.”

Jane stared in disbelief. “They cannot think that coldmongers are responsible for the weather. It flies in the face of science.”

“Superstition rarely troubles with facts.”

I also cheated at another point and cited Benjamin Franklin, who did raise the theory that volcanic eruptions could effect the weather in 1784, but only tangentially and in a lecture. I gave him a firmer opinion than he really had and put it into Poor Richard’s Almanack. That stopped publication in 1758, but I knew that modern readers would recognized the name and give the information weight and credit. It’s not unreasonable that someone with ready access to a large collection of books would be run across an old copy of Poor Richard’s Almanack while researching the plight of the coldmongers.

The actual connection to Tambora and the tragedy there didn’t come until much, much later.

If you are interested in reading about the real Year Without a Summer, Scientific American has an excerpt from a new book and it goes into detail about the eruption of Mount Tambora. It was a horrifying tragedy and killed an estimated 92,000 people. I only wish The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History had come out while I was researching mine. It’s a compelling historical narrative.

Did you know you can support Mary Robinette on Patreon?