I should take the time here, I think, to explain to interested readers where the Gazette fits into the 1632 series as a whole, and where other projects in the series stand at the moment.
First, a number of readers have asked me when 1634: The Baltic War will be coming out. That's the direct sequel to 1633, which came out three and a half years ago, in August of 2002. Not surprisingly, many fans of the series have been waiting for it with increasing impatience. Some—though not many, I don't think—have even been irritated by the appearance of other 1632 titles in the interim, such as 1634: The Galileo Affair.
Let me start with the good news, which is that Dave Weber and I will be starting the novel very soon. For the rest, I sympathize with the impatience of readers who've been waiting for it, but I also need to explain the logic of the delay. Yes, there is a logic, it's not simply because either I or Dave Weber forgot about it. The problem, in a nutshell, is that both Dave and I are writers with a lot of work on our hands and a number of other commitments. That means that getting our schedules to match up well enough for the months it takes to do a collaborative novel is . . . not easy. Since we completed 1633, we've had only two windows of opportunity that were long enough to do the trick. The first, in 2003, got taken up with writing Crown of Slaves, a novel that Dave felt was important to the development of his very popular Honor Harrington series. And the second, which was supposed to have been last year, wound up never materializing at all because of a variety of factors.
So it goes. In the meantime, I saw no reason to tie up the other lines of the story that began with 1632 and have kept them chugging along. One of the most important of those lines—call them "side" lines, if you will, but that's really a misnomer—is the one I began with Andrew Dennis in 1634: The Galileo Affair. Three sequels are planned to Galileo, the first of which Andrew and I now have well underway.
I said that thinking of The Galileo Affair and its sequels as a sideline was a misnomer. In fact, it's nothing of the sort. True, it began as a separate adventure that was, in a sense, a spin-off from 1632 and 1633. But, as will soon enough become obvious, the ramifications of those events in Italy will have a greater and greater impact on the events taking place in Europe as a whole—indeed, the entire world. My problem, at the moment, is that I can't prove it to you without revealing the plots of several books that haven't been published yet. Just . . . take my word for it, please. Trying to determine what's an "important" story and what isn't, in this alternate universe, is a lot trickier than it looks at first glance.
Which is the way I intended things, from the moment I decided to turn 1632 from the stand-alone novel it was originally written to be into a series. Whatever else, I am not going to produce a formulaic series, in which one book succeeds another by simply rehashing the same basic material. The world has more than enough of such series, I think.
There's a second consideration involved, also, which has to do with the way I see this entire story in the first place—and did from the beginning. 1632 was written as much as an American novel as a science fiction or alternate history novel. More precisely, as a novel that fits within that loosely defined literary category known as Americana. In particular, it was written from a desire on my part to make a relatively ordinary American small town the collective protagonist of the story. And then, as the story unfolded, to keep the focus as much as possible on what you might call the level of the common man and woman—understanding that, as the story unfolded, more and more seventeenth-century Europeans would become an integral part of that collective protagonist.
I didn't do that from some preconceived notions of what constitutes the "right" way to tell a story. I have no objections at all to grand epics. In fact, I just completed one myself: The Dance of Time, the sixth and last volume in the Belisarius series, which by happy coincidence is being published at the very same time as the volume you hold in your hand. (Yes, that's a shameless plug.)
I'm quite proud of the Belisarius series, as is my coauthor David Drake. Yet, you would be hard-pressed to find too many common men and women in that massive six-volume story. The main characters run almost entirely to emperors, empresses, kings, queens—existing or in the making—and generals and other top commanders. Even the occasional commoner is typically someone like the cataphract Valentinian, who is also universally recognized as one of the greatest swordsmen in the known world.
Grand epics of that sort are a perfectly valid form of fiction and I enjoyed writing the Belisarius series. But the 1632 series is a very different kind of story. One that certainly has its share of great historical figures—it's enough to mention that Gustavus Adolphus and Cardinal Richelieu are both major characters in it—but always, ultimately, has a different focus.
So, the novels and anthologies that have been or will be produced in the series have a variegated character. Some, like 1633, will center on the "big" issues and the actions of the "big people." Others, like 1634: The Galileo Affair, will start small and grow . . . very big. The same description could be applied to the immediate sequel to 1634: The Baltic War, which is 1634: The Bavarian Crisis, which I coauthored with Virginia DeMarce. (I should mention, by the way, that we've finished the first draft of The Bavarian Crisis, so fans of the series don't have to worry about another long delay. That book will be coming out soon after The Baltic War.)
There's yet another level of storytelling in the series, however, and those are stories that start on the ground level and more or less remain there throughout. I was especially concerned to produce stories like this, because the 1632 series is ultimately a story about a great political, religious, social, and economic revolution in Europe begun by the Ring of Fire—and I think people generally have screwy ideas about what revolutions are and how they work. That's especially true in science fiction, where revolutions have typically been depicted as the product of magical hand waving by a handful of big-shot heroes. They decree, and therefore it is done.
Oh, what a laugh. In the real world, no social phenomenon is as turbulent, complex, contradictory, and downright messy as great revolutions are. The only thing that compares to them are great wars, and wars have the advantage of being (usually) somewhat better organized and under tighter control from the top. Of course, even making the distinction is artificial, since most great revolutions include wars as part of them, foreign as well as civil—and, on the flip side, there has never been a great war in history that didn't revolutionize many things beyond military tactics and hardware.
As much as anything else, I want to capture that reality in this series. One of the ways I'll be doing that is by producing—as both the editor and one of the major writers—at least two somewhat unusual anthologies. The first of these is entitled 1634: The Ram Rebellion, and will be published May 2006. The second, which serves partly as a companion volume and partly as a sequel, is entitled 1635: The Torturer of Fulda, and will probably be published about a year later.
These two volumes are anthologies, in the sense that they are comprised of separate stories written by different authors. But, unlike most anthologies, the stories are directly connected to each other—not necessarily in a linear fashion—and, taken as a whole, constitute what amounts to quasi-novels. What both of them deal with is an issue that was initiated at the end of 1632, and then mentioned in 1633 and 1634: The Galileo Affair—usually in passing, although most of Chapter 21 of The Galileo Affair is devoted to it.
The issue is this: At the end of 1632, in the course of the negotiations between Mike Stearns and Gustavus Adolphus that end with the creation of the Confederated Principalities of Europe, the king of Sweden hands over the large and poorly defined region of Germany known as Franconia to the American-dominated little United States (which consists of a portion of Thuringia) to govern and administer. To put it a different way, a big region of a nation is disposed of in exactly one paragraph of the book:
Quentin nodded. "Yeah. And if I'm following the latest twist and turn in the debate, Mike just got half of Franconia added along with the rest of Thuringia. I think he's shooting for all of it, too." For a moment, his eyes grew a bit dreamy. "Be one hell of an expansion in the market, that's for sure. Every business in the U.S. will start growing by leaps and bounds. The railroads alone—" He broke off, scratching his chin worriedly. "Still—"
How sweet it would be . . . to just leave it at that. The President proposes, the king disposes, and everyone does what they're told and lives happily ever after.
Not hardly. What The Ram Rebellion and The Torturer of Fulda deal with is the messy reality of what really happened after. The story—stories, rather—of how a small number of Americans sent to Franconia fared in that mission. And, just as much, the related and intersecting stories of the Germans who allied with them, or conspired against them, or set their own course—or, often enough, did all three at one time or another.
And so, finally, we come back to the question I posed at the beginning of this afterword: Where does the Grantville Gazette fit in all this?
That's not an easy question to answer. In the nature of things, being a magazine, the Gazette tends to go wherever the best writers contributing to it decide to take it. As editor, I can direct that process to a degree, but I don't really try to control it.
More accurately, I don't want to control it. We started the Gazette because Jim Baen and I thought it would be, if nothing else, an interesting experiment in commercial publishing. Which it has been, on its own terms. But with experience, I've learned that the Gazette serves the series as a continual wellspring. It's a constant source of new ideas, new viewpoints, and new angles on old viewpoints. And, as often as not, the seeds sown in the magazine wind up growing in very unexpected directions, and can produce some very large and luxuriant narratives.
It's perhaps enough to say that 1634: The Ram Rebellion, which will be coming out soon, began as a series of whimsical in-jokes concerning a scruffy sheep that appeared in one story. Before the issue of the magazine that story was planned for could come out, those little whimsies had produced a crop of other stories, all of them related in one way or another, and often in very odd ways. What, after all, could be the connection between a belligerent ram, an American farmer trying to expand his acreage, a ballet, a peasant rebellion, and a dungeon?
Those of you interested can find out in three months. But remember: it all started in this magazine.
Eric Flint
April 2005
There are various images, mostly portraits from the time, that illustrate different aspects of the 1632 universe. In the first issue of the Grantville Gazette, I included those with the volume itself. Since that created downloading problems for some people, however, I've separated all the images and they will be maintained and expanded on their own schedule.
If you're interested, you can look at the images and my accompanying commentary at no extra cost. They are set up in the Baen Free Library. You can find them as follows:
1) Go to www.baen.com.2) Select "Free Library" from the blue menu at the top.
3) Once in the Library, select "The Authors" from the yellow menu on the left.
4) Once in "The Authors," select "Eric Flint."
5) Then select "Images from the Grantville Gazette.
If anyone is interested in submitting stories or articles for future issues of the Grantville Gazette, you are welcome to do so. But you must follow a certain procedure:
1) All stories and articles must first be posted in a conference in Baen's Bar set aside for the purpose, called "1632 Slush." Do not send them to me directly, because I won't read them.
It's good idea to submit a sketch of your story to the conference first, since people there will likely spot any major problems that you overlooked. That can wind up saving you a lot of wasted work.
2) Your story/article will then be subjected to discussion and commentary by participants in the 1632 discussion. In essence, it will get chewed on by what amounts to a very large, virtual writers' group.
You do not need to wait until you've finished the story to start posting it in "1632 Slush." In fact, it's a good idea not to wait, because you will often find that problems can be spotted early in the game, before you've put all the work into completing the piece.
3) While this is happening, the assistant editor of the Grantville Gazette—Paula Goodlett—will be keeping an eye on the discussion. She will alert me whenever a story or article seems to be gaining general approval from the participants in the discussion.
4) At that point—and only at that point—do I take a look at a story or article.
I insist that people follow this procedure for two reasons:
First, as I said, I'm very busy and I just don't have time to read everything submitted until I have some reason to think it's gotten past a certain preliminary screening.
Secondly, and even more importantly, the setting and "established canon" in this series is quite extensive by now. If anyone tries to write a story without first taking the time to become familiar with the setting, they will almost invariably write something that—even if it's otherwise well written—I simply can't accept.
In short, the procedure outlined above will save you a lot of wasted time and effort also.
One point in particular: I have gotten extremely hard-nosed about the way in which people use American characters in their stories (so-called "up-timers"). That's because I began discovering that my small and realistically portrayed coal-mining town of thirty-five hundred people was being willy-nilly transformed into a "town" with a population of something like twenty thousand people—half of whom were Navy SEALs who just happened to be in town at the Ring of Fire, half of whom were rocket scientists (ibid), half of whom were brain surgeons (ibid), half of whom had a personal library the size of the Library of Congress, half of whom . . .
Not to mention the F-16s that "just happened" to be flying through the area, the army convoys (ibid), the trains full of vital industrial supplies (ibid), the FBI agents in hot pursuit of master criminals (ibid), the . . .
NOT A CHANCE. If you want to use an up-time character, you must use one of the "authorized" characters. Those are the characters created by Virginia DeMarce using genealogical software and embodied in what is called "the grid."
You can obtain the current edition of the grid at: www.1632.org .
Look on the menu to the right for the item titled "Virginia's Up-timer Grid." While you're at it, I recommend you read at least the two following items in the menu, "Dead Horses" and "The Many Halves of Grantville." That might save you some wasted effort.
The "Dead Horses" section goes over the many issues that have been thoroughly thrashed out in the discussion in Baen's Bar in the "1632 Tech Manual" conference that has been going on for six years now. I should stress that it is not impossible that someone new to the discussion might resurrect one of these dead horses and bring it to life. That has happened in the past, although not often. But you should still look at this to see what's considered a dead horse in the first place, and why.
Yes, you might have a new angle on, for instance, the use of ultralights or lighter-than-air craft. But, frankly, it's not likely. And you for sure and certain won't if you don't take the time to examine what has already been discussed at great length.
"The Many Halves of Grantville" is a short and, um, rather sarcastic essay by me. It's worth reading for two reasons. First, hopefully, you may be amused by it. Secondly, it will give you a good sense of the things to avoid if you decide to write a story for the magazine.
You will be paid for any story or factual article that is published. The rates that I can afford for the magazine at the moment fall into the category of "semipro." I hope to be able to raise those rates in the future to make them fall clearly within professional rates, but . . . That will obviously depend on whether the magazine starts selling enough copies to generate the needed income. In the meantime, the rates and terms that I can offer are posted below in the standard letter of agreement accepted by all the contributors to the magazine.
In the event that Baen Books decides to issue a volume of the magazine in a paper edition, as they have now done for the first two volumes, you will be paid additional money for your story or article which brings the total advance up to professional rates. In addition, you will be entitled to a pro rata share of the authors' royalties, based on the length of your piece.
Below are the terms for the purchase of a story or factual article (hereafter "the work") to be included in an issue of the online magazine Grantville Gazette, edited by Eric Flint and published by Baen Books.
Payment will be sent upon acceptance of the work at the following rates:
1) a rate of 2.5 cents per word for any story or article up to 15,000 words;
2) a rate of 2 cents a word for any story or article after 15,000 words but before 30,000 words;
3) a rate of 1.5 cents a word for any story or article after 30,000 words.
The rates are cumulative, not retroactive to the beginning of the story or article. (E.g., a story 40,000 words long would earn the higher rates for the first 30,000 words.) Word counts will be rounded to the nearest hundred and calculated by Word for Windows XP.
In the event a story has a payment that exceeds $200, the money will be paid in two installments: half on acceptance, and the remaining half two months after publication of the story.
You agree to sell exclusive first world rights for the story, including exclusive first electronic rights for five years following publication, and subsequent nonexclusive world rights. Should Baen Books select your story for a paper edition, you will not receive a second advance but will be paid whatever the differential might be between what you originally received and the advance for different length stories established for the paper edition. You will also be entitled to a proportionate share of any royalties earned by the authors of a paper edition. If the work is reissued in a paper edition, then the standard reversion rights as stipulated in the Baen contract would supercede the reversion rights contained here.
Eric Flint retains the rights to the 1632 universe setting, as well as the characters in it, so you will need to obtain his permission if you wish to publish the story or use the setting and characters through anyone other than Baen Books even after the rights have reverted to you. You, the author, will retain copyright and all other rights except as listed above. Baen will copyright the story on first publication.
You warrant and represent that you have the right to grant the rights above; that these rights are free and clear; that your story will not violate any copyright or any other right of a third party, nor be contrary to law. You agree to indemnify Baen for any loss, damage, or expense arising out of any claim inconsistent with any of the above warranties and representations.