Well, since I just noticed that my previous post on this series (Eric Flint’s 1632 Universe, aka, Assiti Shards Series) was about three of the books and the first 8 Grantville Gazettes, I’ll make this one about the next three books and the latest two Gazettes :)
In the previous installment of our saga, the city of Grantville, West Virginia, gets caught in an accident. It seems like a slightly careless Assiti artist cut of a shard from a time-sculpture that he was making, and it hit around Grantville, sending the small town and its 35,000 inhabitants and visitors to Turingia, Germany…right smack in the middle of the 30 Years War, during 1632.
The new books in the series are:
1634: The Ram Rebellion
1635: The Cannon Law
1634: The Baltic War
And yes, they are in the right order like that, even if it’s weird that a book about 1635 goes before a book about 1634…don’t ask me why, Flint gives a better explaination in the introduction to Ram Rebellion:
It’s an oddball volume, as I said, something of cross between a traditional anthology and a novel. There are many different stories in these pages, written by many different authors. At the same time, all the stories share not only a common setting but a common story arch and a common plot thread—as obscure as that may seem to the reader in the first two parts of the book.
Virginia DeMarce and I provided that, partly in stories we wrote separately, but especially in the short novel we co-authored that concludes the volume and shares the same title: The Ram Rebellion. All the separate threads that are first introduced in Parts I and II begin to come together in Part III, and reach their final culmination in Part IV.So what to call it? I don’t know, to be honest. Let’s just settle for “a 1632 book,” and I hope you enjoy it.
Both Ram Rebellion and Cannon Law fit under that description, even if Cannon Law is a single novel and not an anthology-with-a-single-story-arc like Ram Rebellion. Both these books are…parallel to the main story of Mike Sterns and his cohorts, with Ram talking about the adventures of different up and downtimers in Franconia during the Ram Rebellion…one of the, if not The, strangest rebellions ever.
Cannon deals with the story of Frank Stone, his new wife and family, trying to expand the Committee of Correspondence in Italy…starting in Rome. We also get to follow Sharon Nichols and her new paramour, Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz, who we met before in the series, and in many ways reminds me of the unknown Hidalgo that Cervantes was thinking of when he wrote the Quijote as a mocking on all Hidalgos…Spaniard nobles of the era when they were the most deadly and insufferable of all the nobles.
Both books can be seen as canonical as far as the series goes, but neither of them touches on what most people consider the main story arc of it, just like it happened with 1634: The Galileo Affair.
On the other hand, Baltic War is the direct continuation of the main story arc that started with 1632 and 1633. In other words, if you want to get through the main arc of the series, read 1632, 1633 and 1634: The Baltic War; the other four books (Ring of Fire, Galileo Affair, Ram Rebellion and Cannon Law) and the ten (so far) volumes of the Grantiville Gazette are (very interesting) side stories that don’t impinge on the main story arc (much, at least for now).
On the other hand, I truly recommend you read them all, even the Gazettes…this is an incredibly rich universe, in which characters and human interaction are as important as the story itself, and where many different voices have gotten into the telling. Also, there’s, almost certainly, going to be future books that are part of the main story arc that will be based on or related to those side stories…there’s too many good writers sticking their hands into the Gazette for it not to happen…Eric loves to collaborate and there’s bunches and lots of new authors that are involved with this Universe, and I’m sure Eric will find more than a few he’ll want to write with.
As for the third book, the one that *is* part of the main story arc, Baltic War, is about what happens when the USE gets involved helping Gustav Adolf in getting the affairs in order in his side of the world, where Danish King is trying to take over the area, including Sweden, and…things get interesting :)
It is a really fun series of books, and the writing is above average, well worth the time spent reading them all.
Technorati Tags: eric flint, assiti shards, 1632 series, baltic war, cannon law, ram rebellion, book review, grantville gazette
Tags: Books, Reviews
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This entry was posted on Saturday, May 5th, 2007 at 12:04 pm and is filed under Books, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
[...] what-if SF, specially when it’s mixed up with good military SF, like in Flint’s Assiti Shards/1632 series…and the Nantucket saga fits right in that realm. The series was written and published [...]
I think that the 1632 series has been one of the biggest successes for SF in ages. It has generated a very large and fanatic fan base. Just check out 1632.org for a view at some of the research that has been done. Also the Grantville Gazette has been a great stepping stone for budding authors. They are up to volume 18 on the web (www.grantvillegazette.com via subscription). It provides room for all kinds of different story ideas from those interested in history, the art of war, genealogy, dog breeding and farming.