That’s what I say! I love the 1632verse because there are so many stories and voices in it. Eric created something amazing in this.
– Bethanne Kim (Publisher, Eric Flint’s 1632 & Beyond magazine)
Baens Bar
28 December 2014 09:59
One of the things that makes the 1632 series unusual — unique, in fact, so far as I’m aware — is that no attempt is made to maintain a standard narrative voice across all the stories in the series. We do maintain a standard setting, but that’s as far as it goes. The different novels and stories in the series vary widely in terms of their narrative voice and emphasis. Some of them have a lot of military action and some have very little. The latest one, 1636: The Viennese Waltz, has no military action at all.
Naturally, this leaves a lot of readers dissatisfied. I don’t doubt for a moment that a large number have abandoned the series because they find this lack of consistency annoying. It’s my hope and belief — which so far seems to be substantiated by ongoing sales over a period of almost fifteen years — that other people will find the complexity part of the interest.
My advice to people (and there have been quite a few over the years) who complain to me that they don’t like books or stories in the series written or co-written by Author X, Y or Z is that they should stop reading novels that have X, Y or Z listed on the cover and skip over the stories written by X, Y or Z if they come across them in an anthology. This — so it seems to me, anyway — exceedingly cogent and superb advice nonetheless leaves almost all plaintiffs still holding a grudge.
Which brings to mind the observation made by the world’s very first publisher, whoever he was:
“You can please all of the readers some of the time, and some of the readers all the time, but you cannot please all the readers all the time.”
