1637: The Volga Rules by Eric Flint, Paula Goodlett and Gorg Huff
Cover art by Tom Kidd
Published by Baen Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
When I originally found 1636: The Kremlin Games, I was delighted to see the story of the Ring of Fire finally taken to Russia. Given that my undergraduate major was Russian Language and Literature, I'd wondered almost from the start how the arrival of Grantville in the midst of the Thirty Years' War would affect Russia, which at that point was still recovering from the Time of Troubles and thus very suspicious of the outside world, thanks to some unwelcome intervention and intriguing in Russian politics on the part of neighboring Poland.
That novel was primarily the story of Bernie Zeppi, an uptimer who'd been struggling with PTSD in the aftermath of the Battle of the Crapper (one of the major turning points of 1632) and was at loose ends. Just the sort of man who'd be willing to accept an offer to go to a distant foreign land and help apply uptime technology to downtime problems, because at least it was something to get his mind off his own problems. (One of Eric Flint's most central beliefs is that, when you feel down and aimless, the best thing to do is to find a problem you can solve, roll up your sleeves, and get cracking at it).
However, by the end of that novel we saw that, yet again, while humans are astonishingly flexible, both as individuals and as societies, they are not infinitely flexible. And the changes that Bernie and his downtime associates were introducing proved simply Too Much for some of the more hidebound elements of Russian society. Suddenly Czar Michael was "in seclusion" in a coup reminiscent of that which attempted to unseat Gorbachev in 1991 in the world Bernie left behind.
That novel ended with the Czar and his supporters fleeing eastward to Ufa to get away from Director-General Sheremetev and his cronies, who want to maintain the old ways. It was pretty clear that there would be a sequel. So I took a look at Baen's website and found that I was right in my assumption. A quick look at the online catalog of the Indianapolis Public Library determined that yes, they did indeed have a copy.
Unfortunately, I did not find this novel nearly as enjoyable as its predecessor. I think part of the problem was the way in which Bernie Zeppi is no longer front and center. Instead of being the primary protagonist of the story, he now appears only in a few cameos.
This could have worked if there were some equally compelling characters among the Russian downtimers. Unfortunately, I found that they all sort of ran together in my mind, much like the characters of 1635: The Wars for the Rhine. Worse, there was the problem of various errors of Russian naming customs and nomenclature that no doubt would have gone right past the average Anglophone reader, but was like fingernails on a chalkboard to me as a Slavist.
On the other hand, these issues may not necessarily be the result of carelessness on the part of the writers. Rightly or wrongly, there is a strong perception that the average Anglophone reader simply will not sit still long enough to learn to deal with the complexities of the Russian name and the proper use of the various degrees of address, ranging from the various levels of diminutives of the forename (familiar, coarse, and intimate) to the differences in degree of formality between forename-and-patronymic address and title-and-surname address. Although a translation of an actual Russian novel will often try to preserve the original Russian forms of address, there is often strong pressure on an American writing in English about Russian characters to Americanize the forms of address, to make them more familiar and comfortable to the English-speaking reader.
As a result, it is possible that what read to me as jarring mistakes are in fact deliberate artistic choices to accommodate the majority of their audience, if at the expense of the minority audience represented by myself, readers with a strong background in Slavic languages and linguistics. However, even more damaging to my ongoing suspension of disbelief were the various errors in the portrayal of Russian culture.
In particular, I feel like the authors have no sense of how to portray a character who is a genuine religious believer. A character who genuinely believes that persistent, unrepentant sinning will indeed consign the soul to eternal damnation, as oppose to one who goes through the outward forms of the faith in order to be socially accepted in the here and now. Yes, it is true that the Orthodox put much more weight upon the outward forms of ceremonial observance than creeds and theology -- the split with the Old Believers was far more about such things as the proper way to make the Sign of the Cross than the proper understanding of the relationship of the various Persons of the Trinity (the split between Catholic and Orthodox was at least in part the result of the question of whether the Spirit proceeded from both Father and Son, or from the Father alone). However, the Russian people still very much believed that their eternal destination depended upon their behavior in this life, and that it was of the utmost importance to get it right. So I find it difficult to suspend disbelief when I am confronted with several characters who are completely unrepentant sinners, including a rebel priest, and who see no problem whatsoever about whether their sins are disrupting their relationship with God and endangering their eternal destination.
It's sad, because there were a lot of fascinating things in this novel, including the ordinary people discovering that yes, they had agency in their lives, and taking it up. The blacksmith who built wagons to help his village escape serfdom, and concealed them until the time came by disguising them as modules for a totally new design for a barn. The crew of the airship which combined both hot-air and hydrogen lifting-gas technologies. And of course all the people around Czar Michael, trying to sort out what the new Russia would look like.
Quite honestly, I think this book would be of far greater enjoyability for someone who has an interest in Russia and the former Soviet Union, but only a most superficial knowledge of its history and culture.
Buy 1937: The Volga Rules from Amazon.com
Review posted January 2, 2022.
