1635: The Eastern Front by Eric Flint
Published by Baen Books
Cover art by Tom Kidd
Cover design by Jennie Faries
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
The Ring of Fire is a story that has grown with the telling. When Eric Flint originally set fort to write 1632, he envisioned a single, self-contained novel of what happens when twentieth-century small town mining values collide with the Age of Confessions and the Wars of Religion. Of what happens when modern technology backs those modern values in the face of a culture that is at once recognizably Western, yet all the more shocking in its primitive and brutal aspects for all that.
But the readers loved it so much that they were soon clamoring for more about the West Virginian town transported into Franconia in the midst of the Thirty Years' War. So much that Jim Been soon convinced Eric Flint to write another Ring of Fire novel through the expedient of teaming him up with David Weber, who at the time was the one Been author that Everybody Knows. From then on the series took off, with multiple collaborations and anthologies telling the stories not only of the major figures, but of the ordinary Joes and Janes of both the fictional town of Grantville and of the Europe into which they were thrust.
This volume is one of the few solo novels that Eric Flint has done by himself, which means it deals primarily with Mike Stearns and his inner circle, and with the big questions of politics and warfare. However, that said, it also uses a number of minor characters who were originally developed by other writers for stories in the various anthologies.
The novel begins three years after the Ring of Fire, and we see the situation through the eyes of ordinary people, downtime supporters of the American ideals. One of the more amusing details is the uptime flashlight that they carry about as a Treasure, almost a sacred relic, now that its batteries have long since died and they have no way to replace them. But that flashlight is a touchstone to the contact they've had with those wonderful people who can Make Things Happen, and who treat the little people as Real Human Beings rather than contemptuously like everyone else does.
Their mission is to stop a band of deserters who have become little more than bandits, preying upon local townsfolk. It's a tough form of justice that these people have to deal out, but even in executing the five survivors who dug the mass grave for their compatriots, they show a certain measure of discipline and humanity. No, they will not give in to the one of their number who wants to bury these men alive in retaliation for past cruelties. Bandits these men may be, deserters and criminals, but they will be given a quick, clean death with a bullet in the skull, not the slow suffocation of being buried alive. This is the difference between harsh but decent human beings and the sort of brutes the now-exterminated gang had become.
After that brief vignette of ordinary people trying to maintain some sort of decency amidst one of the most hideous wars of modern history (in the Primary World, the Thirty Years War wreaked such devastation that many regions in Germany did not recover until the twentieth century, just in time for the horrors of the two World Wars -- and on a per capita basis, the death toll of the Thirty Years' War was greater than WWII, simply because of the much smaller population of the time), we move to Magdeburg, which Gustavus Adolphus has made the capital of the new United States of Europe. Of course it is an empire rather than a republic, with a legislature more like the English Parliament than the US Congress.
Mike Stearns and his lovely wife Rebecca are touring their new home. Times have changed a lot since Mike led a band of miners to find out what the hell had just happened and encountered a bunch of bandits torturing a farmer. Mike now moves in quite elevated circles, advisor to kings and emperors. But in the process he has made enemies, and he is very aware that anti-Semitism is alive in well in this time and place. So he's made sure that his new home is defensible in case of a civil disturbance, complete with provisions to allow gunners in the second story to fire on invaders in the foyer. But there are also creature comforts, including electricity in the first fully industrialized city of this new Germany that uptimers and downtimers together are creating.
But Mike isn't gong to have much time to enjoy it, because he's just been named head of an army to deal with the problem in the East. It seems that some of the elites in the eastern German principalities aren't exactly happy with the way Gustavus Adolphus and his uptime allies are changing things. For one thing, it's disturbing their privileges and prerogatives, and they don't like that. Neither do the Polish noblemen even further east, but at least they're members of another sovereign nation, not nobles walking a fine line on the boundaries of treason. And the Polish noblemen are aware that the uptime people have a certain fondness for Poland, thanks to events in a world now left behind, and are more likely to treat the Poles sympathetically (if nothing else, the Catholic uptimers left behind a world in which John Paul II, formerly Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, was Pope, and still recall the Polish pontiff with considerable fondness).
It's interesting to see how Eric Flint simultaneously is able to weave together the big-picture political maneuvering and the close-in effects of everything upon the ordinary people at the bottom. It means that he's weaving together dozens of different threads of story scattered all across Europe, and has to keep track of all them and make sure that they move forward in a coordinated fashion, with no thread allowed to get too far ahead and reveal information that should come as a surprise in other threads, or let any thread get forgotten or even just neglected for too long.
However, this volume is different from previous installments of the Ring of Fire series in one very important way: it is not complete in itself. In previous volumes, the author has always been able to draw the storyline to a satisfying conclusion, even if it is one that leaves doors open for further storylines to develop. But this one ends on one hell of a cliffhanger with one of the major characters sustaining a head injury that leaves his mind addled, not to mention smaller cliffhangers for several of the minor characters who are left dangling in very awkward situations.
In fact, it rather surprised me when I was reading the novel and was coming to the realization that no, there was no way to bring this storyline to a conclusion in the rapidly shrinking number of pages on the right-hand side of the binding. I still remember talking with Eric Flint at Windycon many years ago about the problem of surprise sequels and the book that just stops instead of finishing. He pointed out that the last thing you want as a writer is for a reader to grab your book from a spinner rack at the duty-free store in the airport just before setting out on an hours-long flight, then boarding and opening the book to discover that it is not a complete story, but one piece of several. Bad enough to discover that the "first" chapter is in fact a middle chapter, with the real beginning in another volume that is nowhere to be found. But it is even more maddening to be reading along, thinking that you've got a complete story in your hand, and then come to the last page and discover that no, the story just stops, and you won't get the rest until you buy the next book -- which may well be nowhere to be found at your destination. And if it hasn't been published yet, may not be anywhere to be found for months or even years.
If it had been a book with a collaborator, I would've been less surprised and chalked it up to the collaborator's having written a story that was simply too long for a single volume. But this is one of the solo volumes, which makes me really wonder why he would have had such an oversight. On the other hand, it's possible that he knew from the beginning that he was telling a story that was simply too big to be told in a single volume, and tried to find the best stopping point possible, rather like he did in his Bellisarius series, which he did with David Drake, and which also ended up almost twice its original length simply because it was such a huge story.
At least now the direct sequel, 1636: The Saxon Revolt is now available, so it's no longer necessary to wait indefinitely for it to come out in order to have the whole story.
Review posted June 20, 2018.
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