1632

Format:

Book

Title:

1632

Other title(s):

Sixteen thirty-two

Sixteen hundred thirty-two

Author:

Flint, Eric author

ISBN:

9780671319724

9781416532811

9780671578497

Edition:

Paperback edition.

Distribution:

New York : Distributed by Simon & Schuster, [2001]

Publication:

Riverdale, NY : Baen, 2001.

Physical Description:

597 pages : maps ; 18 cm

Series title(s):

1632verse ;

Ring of Fire ;

Number in series:

General Note:

Novel.

Cover art by Larry Elmore. Interior maps by Randy Asplund.

"A Baen Books original"--Title page verso

"Baen science fiction"--Spine

Summary:

A mysterious accident in time causes twenty-first-century American democracy to collide head-on with the Thirty Years War in seventeenth-century Germany as Mike Stearn and a group of armed miners take on a gang of strangely attired invaders who are threatening peaceful Grantville, West Virginia. Original. Freedom and Justice-American Style 1632. And in northern Germany things couldn't get much worse. Famine. Disease. Religious war laying waste the cities. Only the aristocrats remained relatively unscathed; for the peasants, death was a mercy. 2000 Things are going OK in Grantville, West Virginia, and everybody attending the wedding of Mike Stearn's sister (including the entire local chapter of the United Mine Workers of America, which Mike leads) is having a good time. Then, everything changed. When the dust settles, Mike leads a group of armed miners to find out what happened and finds the road into town is cut, as with a sword. On the other side, a scene out of Hell: a man nailed to a farmhouse door, his wife and daughter attacked by men in steel vests. Faced with this, Mike and his friends don't have to ask who to shoot. At that moment Freedom and Justice, American style, are introduced to the middle of the Thirty Years' War.

Subject(s):

Thirty Years' War, 1618-1648 -- Fiction.

City and town life -- West Virginia -- Fiction.

Americans -- Travel -- Germany -- Fiction.

Time travel -- Fiction.

Fantasy fiction, American.

Germany -- History -- 1618-1648 -- Fiction.

West Virginia -- Fiction.

Geographic Term:

Germany -- History -- 1618-1648 -- Fiction.

West Virginia -- Fiction.

Genre:

Added Author:

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... McMinnville Public Library	Flint, E.	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Monmouth Public Library	Fic (sf) Flink, E. 2001	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

1632

Author Notes

Eric Flint was born in southern California in 1947. He received a bachelor's degree from UCLA in 1968 and did some work toward a Ph.D. in history, with a specialization in history of southern Africa in the 18th and early 19th centuries, also at UCLA. After leaving the doctoral program over political issues, he supported himself from that time until age 50 as a laborer, machinist and labor organizer.

In 1993, his short story entitled Entropy and the Strangler won first place in the Winter 1992 Writers of the Future contest. His first novel, Mother of Demons, was published in 1997 and was picked by the Science Fiction Chronicle as a best novel of the year. He became a full-time writer in 1999. He writes science fiction and fantasy works including The Philosophical Strangler and the Belisarius series.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (3)

Kirkus Review

From the co-author (with David Drake) of Destiny's Shield (p. 760) and a solo yarn, Mother of Demons (1997, not reviewed), a neat what-if that Flint barely troubles to justify: What if a six-mile-diameter chunk of 1999 West Virginia, complete with people, structures, and technology, were suddenly and instantaneously ripped away and inserted into East Germany in 1632? Well, Flint's brawny cast of miners, union organizers, high-school footballers, ex-Marine physicians, etc. (along with their womenfolk), immediately set about promoting American-style law and order in the late-medieval hodgepodge of belligerent, barbaric, warring fiefs they find themselves surrounded by. What else did you expect? Tough UMWA boss Mike Stearns begins by rescuing a beautiful damsel in distress, Rebecca Abrabanel, and her ailing father'both Sephardic Jews fleeing persecution. Later, after bashing hordes of local thugs, Mike will have to accommodate an invasion force led by the pious and relatively benevolent Gustav II Adolf of Sweden'after everyone convinces the monarch that their womenfolk, though highly talented, aren't witches. Not to mention persuading Adolf that democracy isn't such a bad idea after all. Sinewy shoot-'em-up, with pikes and muzzle-loaders squared off against modern automatics and 20th-century tactics: a rollicking, good-natured, fact-based flight of fancy that should appeal to alternate-history buffs as well as military-fantasy fans.

Booklist Review

In Flint's novel of time travel and alternate history, a six-mile square of West Virginia is tossed back in time and space to Germany in 1632, at the height of the barbaric and devastating Thirty Years' War. Repelling marauding mercenaries and housing German refugees are only the first of many problems the citizens of the tiny new U.S. face, problems including determining who shall be a citizen. In between action scenes and descriptions of technological military hardware, Flint handles that problem and other serious ethical questions seriously and offers a double handful of memorable characters: a Sephardic Jewish family that establishes commercial and marital ties with the Americans, a cheerleader captain turned lethal master sniper, a schoolteacher and an African American doctor who provide indispensable common sense and skill, a German refugee who is her family's sole protector, and, not least, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. Not, perhaps, as elegant as some time-traveling alternate histories, Flint's is an intelligent page-turner nevertheless. --Roland Green

Library Journal Review

When a cosmic accident transports a West Virginia community back in time and space to 17th-century Thuringia, the citizens of Grantville find themselves thrust into the midst of the bloody and savage conflict that history books would call the Thirty Years War. Surrounded by warring armies and burdened by the prospect of diminishing resources, Grantville residents, under the leadership of a council that includes a union leader, a doctor, and a teacher, proceed to turn their new world upside down, beginning the American Revolution a century and a half before its time. Flint (Mother of Demons) convincingly re-creates the military and political tenor of the times in this imaginative and unabashedly positive approach to alternative history. A solid choice for fantasy collections. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.