An interesting point many 1632 readers may not realize is that it has sister storylines. In the original novel, we find out that alien artists from a race called the Assiti caused the event by being careless with their artwork, allowing “shards” to fall randomly. One of those caused Granville to swap places with some land in 1631 Thuringia, but it was not the only event. We eventually learn that there were many micro-events that didn’t register with the public mind. No one would notice if a sphere of land in the middle of the ocean swapped with land pretty much anywhere in history, for example. It would just literally be swallowed by the ocean and disappear without a trace. But in addition to events that no one noticed, there were a few bigger events.
Time Spike was the first of these to be published in 2008, with Marilyn Kosmatka. In 2017, The Alexander Inheritance with Gorg Huff and Paula Goodlet was published, followed by The Crossing in 2022 and An Angel Called Peterbilt in 2024. At the time Eric wrote the post below, it was the only additional shard to be written. Two sequels to it were printed by Ring of Fire Press and they are being re-released by Baen Books in early 2026.
In Time Spike, an Illinois prison is sent back through time millions of years, landing them with the dinosaurs. But it’s not just dinosaurs. Along the way, they picked up native Americans, murderous conquistodors, and a few post-Civil War American soldiers. In addition to having a lot more people travel back, it’s a much larger amount of land and the land, like the people, represents multiple eras. Garrett W. Vance has taken this fertile landscape and written Time Spike: First Cavalry of the Cretaceous and Time Spike: The Mysteerious Mesa.
There are also short stories set in the Time Spike shard in The Grantville Gazette and we hope to have some in Eric Flint’s 1632 & Beyond
– Bethanne (Publisher, Eric Flint’s 1632 & Beyond magazine)
22 March 2015 10:48
The short answer is that while you’d still have a pretty good novel [if the Assiti Shard had left it where it was geographically and “only” moved it through time], it wouldn’t be as good a story as 1632 — and it certainly wouldn’t have launched a long-running series. There is a reason that I’ve never written a sequel to TIME SPIKE. One of the basic problems you confront if you write action/adventure stories — which is almost all that I write — is to come up with a suitable opposition to Ye Heroes. In some instances, as with the novels I write with Ryk Spoor (the Boundary trilogy, 1st volume free on Baen, and the recently-published CASTAWAY PLANET) the opposition is simply nature. But in most instances, the opposition has to be an intelligent adversary. That can be alien species, as in the Jao Empire series I’ve done with Kathy Wentworth and David Carrico, or demons, as in the Heirs of Alexandria series I’m doing with Misty Lackey and Dave Freer. But in most of my novels it’s a human adversary. And the key there is that the adversary has to be really threatening, or you wind up with an unexciting story about people shooting fish in a barrel.
The problem with transplanting a modern town into the New World is that the disparity in tech levels and (especially) population simply doesn’t provide a suitable adversary, at least not beyond the scope of one novel. Even in TIME SPIKE, it’s not an accident that the principal adversaries were themselves time transplants — De Soto’s conquistadores and the inmates of the prison.
That’s one of the main reasons why I chose to transplant Grantville into a European setting at a time in history when European tech levels were quite high and the population numbered in the many millions. That provided me with plenty of suitable adversaries.
I will be starting a series that combines fantasy and alternate history in the New World during the colonial era, with Kevin Anderson and some other authors. [This became the Arcana America series.] But what will make that work is that because of the premises of the series the New World is cut off from the Old World, so there’s no longer a constant inflow of European immigrants, and the emergence of magic gives native Americans as well as African slaves a powerful counter to the technological superiority and greater population of the Europeans present in the New World. And, in any event, the principal antagonism in the series isn’t between Europeans and Indians and African but between humans of many varieties and the dark forces that begin to emerge because of the transformation. So we’ve solved the problem of providing suitably powerful adversaries. But we can only do it by making the story a fantasy as well as an alternate history.
