Eric Flint was an author who became well-known for his alternate-history fiction. Since he had a Master’s in History, that should come as no surprise. He also had a habit of collaborating with other authors, and he thought he was pretty good at that (as I read in the comments he included in one of his books). I find some alternate-history fiction enjoyable, so I put Flint on my “to-read” list. I finally read the novel 1632, and fell down a very deep rabbit hole.
In this book, Grantville, a small town in rural West Virginia (based on the real-life town of Mannington), suddenly and without explanation finds itself relocated in time and space. They are in Thuringia (which would someday be a state within modern-day Germany) during the Thirty Years’ War.
Upon poking around I learned a bit about the author. He moved around a lot, at one point he lived in France. He studied South Africa. He worked as a longshoreman while taking his degree. After graduating he took a series of blue-collar jobs, was a union man and a political activist. He was a self-proclaimed socialist. A lot of this shows in his writing.
1632 hit the shelves in 2000 and was very successful. Publisher Baen Books ended up churning out a whole series of interrelated books. Short story collections, collaborations, and parallel series. This is where the “Assiti Shards” moniker comes from. The explanation for the time-shift that dumped Grantville into the Thuringia of the past is blamed on a group of aliens mucking about irresponsibly. Somehow this brief throwaway paragraph spawned even more books.
This stuff also sparked a mega-ton of fan fiction that ended up fueling an official fanzine, which ran for 102 issues. Only sputtering to a halt upon Flint’s death, it would be followed up by a new periodical entitled 1632 & Beyond. There are five issues of that one, as of last month.
But I sat down to read a novel, and here’s how it goes. Contemporary rural West Virginia dying town, local girl Rita Stearns is having a big wedding and visitors have arrived to attend. A flash, and a sphere containing the town along with quite a decent amount of terrain are popped into Europe. Literally. There’s a circular boundary where the topography doesn’t match up. Fortunately they’ve brought along their power plant, and even their coal mines are still beneath them. Yeah, it’s a mining town, and it sports the United Mine Workers of America, led by Rita’s brother Mike Stearns.
Mike gathers some of his union brothers and a little exploration leads to encounters with the locals. Flint shows us that life is pretty bad during the Thirty Years’ War. I confess that my education was lacking in this area, but the books have helped to remedy that somewhat. Anyway, Mike is an ex-boxer who ended up becoming a union leader, and now demonstrates his leadership skills. The locals will later be referred to in reviews as hillbillies, but honestly I didn’t really get that “Jed Clampett” vibe from them while reading the novel. What I did get was that while there was bitterness against “The Man,” there was also a lot of patriotism for America and American ideals. In today’s fractured environment it’s nice to be reminded of the values our country stands for. Anyway, Mike is determined to mold events and locales into an environment he favors. He will be opposed by everyone from leaders both noble and religious down to ruffians and bandits.
What have we learned? Wow, religious intolerance was definitely a thing. Culture varied quite a bit over what we would consider very limited territory. Technology was at various levels, depending on who and where you were. Alliances and enemies were all over the board. (Spain was in the Netherlands?) This is what you get when “History” class in your school systems is always about US History. Eric Flint was out to remedy that, albeit in a small way. There’s a thin line to walk when you’re telling a story rather than teaching a class, but he does all right. Generally speaking.
1632 works fine as a stand-alone novel. Mike Stearns is a good protagonist. But now we get those two other factors coming into play. The fan fiction, initially blossoming out of a Baen online chat room, along with Flint hooking up with author collaborators. David Weber, Mercedes Lackey, Charles Gannon, plus a slew of unknowns, some coming up through the fan fiction. My problem with “shared universes” is that the style and quality and focus vary considerably from work to work. My problem with all the short stories and their anthologies is due to the same issues, plus my dissatisfaction with the short story format.
Having enjoyed the original novel, and noting the sea of affiliated material that had sprung up over the years, I confess I was curious to see how the story continued. But Flint, very confidently sure that all this ancillary material would be of interest to the wider readership, orchestrated a shared universe. Between his co-authors and his guest authors, and the way things varied between short fiction and novels, and how the timeline jumped around between publications, it’s a really mixed bag.
I broke down and read the anthology, The Ram Rebellion. OMG. This opened the series to a cast of thousands only surpassed by G.R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire. Really. OMG. What makes it worse is that the names are often either similar, or forbiddingly awkward for this American. But these are some of the reasons why I don’t like shared universes, or short stories.
As I’ve pointed out before, when you read fiction you project yourself into the protagonist. You feel about, settle into the character and his environment, and begin to toy with how you might do things differently. I don’t have time to do any of that with short fiction, the damned thing is over with before I know anything. Flint tried stringing the short stories in The Ram Rebellion into a sort of narrative. Didn’t work for me at all. Further, there was way too much wallowing in politics and philosophy and religion and social theory. Dear sweet Spaghetti Monster, remember that thin line I mentioned concerning telling a story and throwing in facts and theories? OMG. This book was a total failure as a form of entertainment. For me.
And as I floundered about through the subsequent novels, avoiding any short fiction (NEVER AGAIN), I kept hitting walls of text that just weren’t enjoyable. Mostly, I think, because of the collaborators. Especially Virginia DeMarce, but I’m not a big fan of David Weber, either.
Here’s what I’ve read so far:
- 1632, by Eric Flint
- 1633, by Eric Flint and David Weber
- 1634: The Baltic War, by Eric Flint and David Weber
- 1634: The Bavarian Crisis, by Eric Flint and Virginia DeMarce
- 1634: The Galileo Affair, by Eric Flint and Andrew Dennis
- 1634: The Ram Rebellion, by Eric Flint and Virginia DeMarce (mostly)
- 1635: A Parcel of Rogues, by Eric Flint and Andrew Dennis
Mainly I’m frustrated. I tried picking up 1635: The Cannon Law by Flint and Dennis, pushed through a few pages, and finally just gave up. After trying twice. I was going by the year specified in each title. But it’s just been too much. Unfocused, dwelling on non-story elements, the extreme overabundance of characters with names that are so difficult for me to track, and wandering through the narrative arc with so, so many diversions. I’d kinda like to know what happens to the few main characters from the initial book, and the overall fate of their movement. Even though Mike Stearns becomes a ridiculously-sagacious sock puppet for Flint’s beliefs. I enjoyed the overview of the historical setting, but not the extreme details of this and that philosophy. I pretty much want more of what we started with, Eric Flint writing in the original novel. The rest of it, I’m just over. Is what I want out there? According to what I’ve seen, I should be able to follow the main story in just a few more novels:
- 1635: The Eastern Front, by Eric Flint
- 1636: The Saxon Uprising, by Eric Flint
- 1636: The Ottoman Onslaught, by Eric Flint
- 1637: The Polish Maelstrom, by Eric Flint
But from what I read online, things are far from resolved, and just picking these four out would make for difficulties without material from a lot of the other books. I don’t know, I suppose I might get back to it someday. Should you read it? Hey, you should decide for yourself. I really enjoyed the first novel, and you can get that one for free. Then who knows? If you feel like poking around in the vast collection of related fiction, I think it’s a mixed bag. Flint has passed away, so if we’re to get past 1637 I suppose it’s up to all the remaining writers associated with the project.
The Michlin Guide 
I really enjoyed 1632, but the others I tried in the series left me cold. It’s one of those series that should’ve been left as a stand-alone novel IMHO. One thread flowing through all Flint’s work is that blue-collar people can be heroes too, his stories don’t follow the usual fantasy/SF assumption that heroes must be upper class and villains lower class. I like that.
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