I'm a huge nerd when it comes to getting sucked into pulp scifi and fantasy. I love david weber, and I've read the john ringo stuff, and his collaborations too. I'm also an avid reader of the ludicrously named 'Deathstalker' series by Simon Green. When I was younger I was swept up despite myself by pretty much any series with a coherent premise, including the Pern stuff by Anne Mcaffrey and those ridiculous Xanth books by piers anthony. It's a guilty pleasure.
I expected the 1632 series to be along those lines. Wildly uneven, full of crowd-pleasing, unnecessary sex and violence, nearly pornographic descriptions of technology, and classic serial nick-of-time escapes. It was all those things, and a fun side-line of real history, which provided a nice grounding to the proceedings.
One thing that's common to pulp series is that, after the initial newness, you find the writer wasting 2/3rds of a book telling you things you already heard, and repeating formulas that were great at first, but quickly become cringe-worthy. Eric Flint has a habit of making his setups laborious and repetitive, but the payoffs make it worth it. In practice this means that much of a book is spent skimming and quickly flipping pages trying to get past parts you already know, until the plot starts to gather steam, and then the last half of the book is addictive. This makes every book end on a note that makes you want to continue, just in time to read another 200 pages of boring crap.
In this book, he's found the cure.
The reality is that serial authors suck at shepherding their own serials. Even Edgar Rice Burroughs gets old when you read his stories back to back. It's rare that someone like CS lewis takes off in new directions repeatedly, or CS Forester can carefully pace their plot across a span of a dozen novels. Eric Flint can't do that, but he's got a lot of great ideas, and an appreciation for history. His strengths are showing a variety of interesting moments and extrapolations inside a premise, not a strong thread across a saga with a small cast of characters.
When you read the core books of the 1632 series (according to him, 1632, 1633, 1634: the baltic war, 1635: the eastern front), you get the sense that he doesn't know what to do, except tell the same cute stories with a different set of people over and over again. He makes cheap use of the conversion of an antagonist to a protagonist (without muss of fuss) and the disposal of inconvenient characters to keep the plot moving, until he gets the point where he can set up all the fun tension-filled events, and then spring them together. Any villains with intriguing traits become heroes. Any heroes without interesting roles become disposable for a cheap tear.
That's all fine! It's by the numbers, but it works.
But he's got this interesting philosophy, where he basically considers that any interesting premise is far more interesting when involved in a collaboration. No George RR Martin stuff for this author; he's outsourcing with anyone and everyone he thinks can bring something to his setting. At first, I thought this was another excuse to get some david weber on the grill. Until I read The Ram Rebellion, I didn't get it.
If a writer could just write things he thought were interesting, he'd always be at his best. Some writers are half-editors who aren't really suited to generating all the text themselves. There's a proud tradition in fantasy and scifi of the short-story anthology, but they're usually brought up short by palette-challenging abrupt changes in tone and context. If an author has to describe their universe to you while they're writing a short story, they run into the serial writer's problem on a smaller scale.
Here, we see how fanfiction and professional serial writing can coexist. Instead of a book full of irrelevant, boring narrations of character motivations you've already heard, and paragraphs given over to repetitious formulas that have lost their impact, there's a variety of voices and intensely interesting stories about characters that would normally have never made the cut in an adventure series.
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Top reviews from other countries
Ole Bjørsvik
This book is a genious!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 24, 2020Sylvie Begin
I enjoyed it even more than when I originally read
Reviewed in Canada on July 16, 2015Herr Grosses Tier
An anthology about the takeover of Franconia
Reviewed in Germany on June 12, 2008P. A. Downs
You need to read to the end
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 20, 2019