1635: The Wars for the Rhine by Anette Pedersen
Cover art by Tom Kidd
Published by Baen Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
I've been a fan of the Ring of Fire 'verse ever since 1999, when Baen put sample chapters of Eric Flint's 1632 on their website. I loved the idea of a town of West Virginia coal miners and hillbillies being tossed backward in time and deciding they were not going to adapt to the world in which they found themselves, but change it for the better with American ideals. Democratic government and religious freedom being the most obvious, but also modern medical and sanitation technologies. The original volume came to a definite conclusion, but the line at the end about "a skirmish is not a battle, a battle is not a campaign, and a campaign is not a war" suggested that the story could go on beyond the initial battle for survival.
A few years later I was quite happy to hear that Jim Baen had decided to team Eric Flint up with established author David Weber, who had already achieved name recognition for his Honor Harrington novels, to write a sequel. It succeeded well enough that Baen was willing to publish additional volumes -- and to publish an anthology of authorized fan fiction from the Ring of Fire community on Baen's Bar.
From there it just kept snowballing as success bred success. There were so many good stories for the anthology that Eric Flint proposed starting an electronic magazine, at a time when it was generally thought that people would never pay to read digital content. Instead, it sold so well that a paper version was then published, and after a while the paper versions became so far out of sync with the electronic ones that later paper volumes became "best of" compilations.
And Eric Flint was so impressed by the quality of a number of these writers' works that he actually took them on as junior co-authors in side novels that he might never have written had the been trying to write the series entirely by himself. This resulted in a huge expansion of the breadth of the 'verse, telling stories so peripheral that they probably wouldn't even have registered as "far trees" otherwise. Eventually, Eric Flint green lighted the publication of several volumes in which he had so little input (beyond the general setting) that his name didn't even appear on the cover.
This volume is one of them. It grew out of several stories the author wrote for the Ring of Fire anthologies and Grantville Gazette, and illuminated events referred to in passing in several stories written by other authors. It explores a series of events on the western border of the Germanys, along the Rhine and its various tributaries, dealing largely with relatively minor figures of history.
My biggest problem with it was that, while I wanted to like it, there was nothing in it so striking and memorable that it really stuck with me after I read it. Instead, I have vague impressions of a variety of events: a man tortured by the Inquisition because he asked too many questions, a woman who's been ill-used by her brutish husband and is trying to ensure that she can never be the victim of others' whims again, a viticulturist recognizing the spread of the blight that had nearly destroyed the wine industry in the world the uptimers left, brought to Europe prematurely in the soil that came along with Grantville.
Part of my problem may well be that I was constantly left wondering how many of these minor characters were the invention of the author, and how many were actual historical figures, albeit so minor that their names are never mentioned in the history books, and thus known only to those who delve into the dusty tomes of birth, marriage and death records in various archives. If they were in fact very minor historical figures, it's quite possible that their characterization lacks the sort of color we see in the major figures for the simple reason that so little is know about these people, and the author feels uncomfortable about inventing material for their fictional alternate lives.
However, taken as a whole, it forms a fascinating examination of the resilience of human beings as individuals, and the limits on the flexibility of societies as a whole. A society can handle a certain amount of change, but there comes a point at which it is simply too much, and there is a reaction against the changes.
Sociologists talk about the Overton Window -- the range of opinions on a given subject that are acceptable in public discourse. The Overton Window can move -- after all, flexibility of mind is humanity's superpower, the adaptation that has enabled us as a species to dominate pretty much every region of the planet and even extend our reach beyond the atmosphere to place our machine ambassadors throughout the Solar System.
However, there is a limit to that flexibility. Even as individuals, people can only change their views so far and so fast before they hit a limit. And a society is a population of individuals with varying levels of openness to change. If the Overton Window moves in one direction, the people on the other side of the spectrum of opinions become increasingly marginalized (a phenomenon that Mary Lou Mendum portrayed quite effectively in A Shift of Means, a Sime~Gen fanfic that has since been professionally published through Jacqueline Lichtenberg's patronage (another example of a situation in which the original author, discovering the creativity and perceptivity of her fans, opened the door to collaborative works in her universe). As people whose opinions were formally pretty centrist find themselves increasingly on the edges, they are apt to feel threatened by this shift, and to try to force things back to the comfortable old ways.
We saw this at the top levels of the world the Ring of Fire created in 1636: The Saxon Uprising when Axel Oxensternia, trusted advisor to King-Emperor Gustavus Adolphus, took his sovereign's incapacitation as an opening to ally with the more reactionary elements of the United States of Europe and trim back the democratic reforms. This novel shows it at less rarified, more familiar levels of society, much as 1636: The Devil's Opera does for things happening in Magdeburg.
On the whole, I think this novel is really more for the completist and the dedicated fan, the people who just have to own or to read everything set in the Ring of Fire 'verse. For casual readers, it may prove more a frustration than a joy.
Buy 1635: The Wars for the Rhine from Amazon.com
Review posted February 6, 2021
