Various storytellers have tried to create better verisimilitude for their stories by linking them to real history. Protagonists could have witnessed a historical event or even participated in it (often fighting in various wars). In some stories they may even be originators of some event or try to prevent it (see Secret History) but fail – history, as we know it, does not change.
In other stories, writers have simply placed the story in some specific year or date.
Fictional countries may also include history of their own, even if the story itself is not concerned about them.
These dates are connected to either specific historical dates or real-world historical events. They are known to be fictitious – not claimed nonfiction of conspiracy theories.
1278 BCE
- Major Arcana founded (Nephilim roleplaying game)
- Brotherhood of Hermes founded (according to Ars Magica roleplaying game)
- Forerunner of Necronomicon, Kitab Al-Azif, written
- Events of Macbeth (the play)
- Chief Hveghi drives away Turkish conquerors and founds Syldavia
- Syldavians drive away Bordurians
- Events of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose
- Robert Gadling begins to meet The Sandman every 100 years
- Events of The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
- January 1 – Connor MacLeod, the Highlander, is born in Glenfinnan, Scotland.
- Connor MacLeod is mortally wounded at the battle of Loch Shiel, but instead of dying, becomes immortal.
- D'Artagnan arrives to Paris and meets The Three Musketeers (according to Alexandre Dumas)
- D'Artagnan and The Three Musketeers in the Siege of La Rochelle.
- Innsmouth (of Cthulhu Mythos) founded
- D'Artagnan and the Three Musketeers fail to rescue Charles I of England and return to Paris to witness the Fronde rebellion (Twenty Years After)
- Robinson Crusoe is shipwrecked
- Peter Blood is convicted of helping a nobleman during a rebellion against King James II and transported to Barbados (according to Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood)
- Robinson Crusoe rescued
- Lemuel Gulliver finds Brobdingnag (Gulliver's Travels)
- Mutinous crew maroons Lemuel Gulliver in Houyhnhnm land (Gulliver's Travels)
- Events of The Last of the Mohicans during the French and Indian War.
- Lestat becomes a Vampire (according to the Interview With a Vampire of Anne Rice)
- Blair Witch legend
- The Scarlet Pimpernel begins
- San Theodoros gains independence
- Edmond Dantes imprisoned suspected of Bonapartist sympathies (According to The Count of Monte Cristo).
- Harry Paget Flashman is born
- Mike Steve Donovan flees to North during the American Civil War and joins the Union army with the name Mike Blueberry.
- German professor Lidenbrock takes his nephew to the underground trip down Iceland (according to Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth)
- Ardan, Barbicane, and Nicholl ride a cannon fired spaceship to the moon.
- First reports of Captain Nemo's submarine
- Captain Nemo saves professor Arronax and his entourage (according to Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea)
- Phileas Fogg sets for a journey (Around the World in Eighty Days) with his new valet Passepartout (according to Jules Verne)
- Sherlock Holmes and John Watson befriend
- Allan Quatermain finds King Solomon's Mines
- Corto Maltese is born
- Georges-Antoine Kurtz is sent to Congo to gather ivory (according to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness).
- Dorian Gray dies
- Count Dracula arrives in London
- Rudyard Kipling travels around India meeting various animals in order to gather research material for The Jungle Books.
- Sherlock Holmes disappears in Reichenbach Falls and is presumed dead
- Brisco County Senior is killed – his son Brisco County Junior begins pursuit of the culprits
- Sherlock Holmes reappears in London
- Indiana Jones born as Henry Jones, Jr. (according to internal evidence in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles)
- Charles Dexter Ward is born (according to H. P. Lovecraft)
- Sherlock Holmes retires to keep bees
- Hercule Poirot resigns from Belgian police
- June 16 – Events of James Joyce's Ulysses
- 10-year-old Indiana Jones in Africa
- Professor Challenger explores Maple White Land (according to Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World)
- Events of Hugo Pratt's Ballad of Salty Sea begin – first story about Corto Maltese
- Richard Hannay defeats an assassination plot by a gang of German secret agents in John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps
- Harry Paget Flashman dies
- James "Biggles" Bigglesworth lies about his age to enter Royal Flying Corps
- Roderick Burgess imprisons The Sandman – Sleeping Sickness begins
- Indiana Jones volunteers to join Belgian army
- Hercule Poirot flees Belgium under German occupation and becomes a refugee in England
- Richard Hannay goes undercover in Germany and the Ottoman Empire to defeat a Central Powers plot to ferment an Islamic uprising against British Empire in John Buchan's Greenmantle
- Lord Clifford Chateley marries Constance but afterwards he is seriously wounded in the front during the First World War and permanently paralyzed under the waist – which leads to events of Lady Chatterley's Lover.
- James Bond is born
- Arkham Asylum opened
- Palombia gains independence (according to Marsupilami stories)
- Young Walt Rawley becomes an apprentice of magician Master Yehudi (according to Paul Auster's Mister Vertigo)
- Events of the run of Jazz Age Chronicles comic book by Ted Slampyak
- Parisian inspector Maigret meets (his) writer Georges Simenon for the first time (according to Maigret's memoirs)
- Tintin visits Soviet Union
- Nero Wolfe hires Archie Goodwin and begins his job as a private eye
- Tintin witnesses Japanese invasion of China after an incident similar to Mukden Incident (The Blue Lotus).
- Willie Garvin is born in Whitechapel
- Accidental founding of town of Cicely, Alaska (according to Northern Exposure)
- Tintin becomes briefly a colonel in the army of San Theodoros
- Lord Peter Wimsey marries Harriet Vane
- Modesty Blaise's assumption of her birth year
- Corto Maltese disappears in the Spanish Civil War
- Indiana Jones finds and loses the Holy Grail
- Doctor Emilio Lizardo is possessed by Lord John Whorfin (the Red Lectroid war criminal) when his dimensional experiment goes awry at Princeton.
- October 30 – Alien spacecraft (presumably from Mars) land at Grover's Mill, New Jersey, as reported by Orson Welles.
- November 1 – Forty-six people apply for Social Security cards in Grover's Mill, New Jersey, all named "John". (Actually Red Lectroids, as revealed in The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension)
- Failed attempt to oust Syldavian king Muskar XII
- Monique D'Aubainne takes over in Al Amarja and becomes its president-for-life.
- Parisian private eye Nestor Burma is released from a prisoner of war-camp and resumes his job during the German occupation of Paris (according to Leo Malet's books)
- Winston Smith is born in Oceania
- Young amnesiac girl (future Modesty Blaise) escapes from a prison camp in Greece
- Hercule Poirot retires
- Buckaroo Banzai is born
- August 31 – Buckaroo Banzai's parents are killed when an experimental vehicle explodes, due to sabotage by Hanoi Xan.
- November 5 – Marty McFly from 1985 stumbles in, meets his would-be-parents and tries to get Back to the Future
- Modesty Blaise retires from the lead of her Network
- The A-Team is framed
- Coup in San Theodoros reinstates General Alcazar
- Lesbians Mo, Clarice, Lois, Sparrow and Toni meet each other in Second women's Pentagon Action demonstration, (According to Unnatural Dykes to Watch Out For)
- Birth of Buffy Ann Summers
- Big Brother's power hour.
- The Time of The Gathering, as shown in the movie Highlander
