1636: The Saxon Uprising by Eric Flint
Cover art by Thomas Kidd
Published by Baen Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
The previous volume of this thread of the Ring of Fire series, 1635: The Eastern Front, ended on one heck of a cliffhanger. Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden and Emperor of the new United States of Europe, had sustained a head injury that left his mind addled -- right when the USE most needed firm leadership.
This state of affairs caught me quite by surprise, because Eric Flint had always been quite adamant that novels should always be as self-contained as possible. As he explained it, put yourself in the shoes of someone who's about to embark on a lengthy airplane flight. You want something to read while on the way, so you buy a promising book off the spinner rack at the duty-free shop. Now imagine your surprise and disappointment when you are airborne and open that book to discover that the first chapter is not in fact the beginning of the story, but clearly the middle of something much larger, and you don't have the first book to orient yourself as to who all these characters are and why their situations matter. Or you get to the end of the book and suddenly discover that no, you don't get an ending, because there's another volume after this one.
Now, having read both volumes, I'm starting to think that he discovered at some point that the story he needed to tell was simply too big to fit into a single volume. So he decided to arrange the two volumes so each of them could be as complete as he could make them, with some threads (most obviously the injury to Gustavus Adolphus) carrying across the two books.
In many ways, the core of this volume is something that traces back to the very beginning of the series, and the social upheavals that resulted from the sudden arrival of a community from three centuries in the future. Not only did the people of Grantville bring with them technologies three centuries more advanced than their new surroundings, but they also brought with them their ways of interacting and their habits of thought, all very different from the norms of seventeenth-century Germans.
Humans are quite flexible, both as individuals and societies. That is the advantage that has made our species such a success story -- we don't have to wait for the slow processes of natural selection to reshape our behaviors. We can learn new ones and teach them to the next generation.
However, humans are not infinitely flexible, not as individuals and certainly not as societies. While there will be some highly neophilic individuals in any society, even the most hidebound, they are outliers and represent a small segment of the total population. Once their eager embrace of change reaches a certain point, the less flexible segments of society will begin to resist in earnest.
In previous volumes, the reactionary elements of downtime society tended to be portrayed in uniformly dark tones, such as the anti-Semitic element that took such a hard thrashing in 1635: The Dreeson Incident. These are unpleasant individuals and we're quite happy to see them get what they have coming to them.
In this volume we see a character who's previously been portrayed as sympathetic reveal a darker and more reactionary side. Axel Oxensternia has been from the beginning of the series the trusted prime minister of Gustavus Adolphus. He belongs to the upper nobility of Sweden, but he is loyal to his sovereign, even if he may be personally uneasy about all these innovations the King-Emperor is embracing and promoting.
But now, with Gustavus Adolphus laid low, Oxensternia sees it as an opportunity to roll back some of the wilder changes and restore the country to sanity. Of course he can't do it all himself -- he needs allies, administrators, advisors. So he turns to the more reactionary element of the high nobility to help him form a new government and formulate a new constitution that will return power to the hands most suited for wielding it, and remind the rabble that their place is to obey, not presume to be better than they are.
However, he underestimates just how extensive the social and cultural changes of the past several years have been. People no longer see politics and governance as things properly left to their betters, but as things they can and should become involved in. Just these few years of exposure to the self-organizing tendencies of the temporally displaced Americans of the Ring of Fire has taught them well, and groups such as the Committees of Correspondence swing into action to ensure that order and public health are maintained within the cities even as incipient civil war disrupts things.
One of Eric Flint's notable skills is his ability to weave together a multiplicity of threads, dealing with people in all stations of life tackling one or another task in a far larger situation, and creating a sense of the big picture from all these little elements. Whether it's Jeff Higgins and the Hangman Regiment in the field or Prince Ulrik and Princess Kristina trying to find safe passage to Magdeburg, it all fits together to create a picture of a society of people standing up and taking action.
And if there has been one enduring theme throughout the Ring of Fire series, it's been the idea that the best way to deal with a problem is to get off your butt (and but's) and act. Eric Flint's world is not one for whiners waiting for free stuff, but for sturdy folk who are willing to roll up their sleeves and do what is necessary to get the job done, whether it's finding a way to clear enough buildings in a crowded European city to enable an airplane to take off, or organizing a battle in extraordinarily confusing weather conditions that would be regarded as impossible by most downtime commanders.
The ending is more bittersweet than truly happy, because of the terrible costs involved in defeating those who want to turn back the clock, to shore up an old order with a patchwork of privileges that made sense in the centuries immediately after the collapse of the the Roman Empire but no longer do anything but create difficulty for innovation. In particular, the pain of having to condemn a friend as a traitor, but also all the hundreds of small losses scattered throughout the conflict, the dead and the maimed, the people who have lost everything.
And we see the passing of the torch to a younger generation who have proved themselves in the crisis, as the old monarch realizes that his abilities are now permanently compromised. It's a scene that makes me think of the ending of Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Mercy. The two books are nothing alike otherwise, yet that one scene in this novel immediately hearkens back to the other, read almost a decade ago.
And yes, this novel does indeed end, with a satisfying conclusion that at the same time is clearly one battle in a long, long campaign to transform a society, and hopefully prevent some of the worst horrors of the twentieth century in the world Grantville left behind.
Review posted June 18, 2019.
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