Eric Flint’s 1632 & Beyond Short fiction is back in the 1632 Universe! Eric Flint’s 1632 & Beyond will publish six issues per year, on the first day of odd-numbered months. Is this from Ring of Fire Press or 1632 Inc.? It’s from a new company, Flint’s Shards Inc. Do you have permission? Yes, we have a contract with Lucille Robbins, Eric Flint’s widow and heir. We will also coordinate closely with Baen Books to maintain the canon continuity for which the 1632 series is known. I missed some Grantville Gazettes. Can I get those? Yes. Grantville Gazette issues are available here individually and in groups of six. What about Gazette issues I paid for but didn’t download? While we are making the back issues of the Grantville Gazette available for sale, we have an obligation to pay the owner of those issues for every issue sold. We do not have permission to give them away for free. I had three issues left on my Grantville Gazette subscription. 1632, Inc. (the company that sold those subscriptions) is no longer in business. Is this going to be just like the Grantville Gazette? Not exactly, but close. We will publish primarily 1632 stories with some stories in the other Assiti Shards universes (Time Spike and Alexander Inheritance). What about 1632 serials? Yes, with caveats: The editors may decide to split a story up into multiple parts. The editors need to see the full serial. Our upper limit is going to be 17,500 words total. That is a hard limit. We can publish novelettes, but not novellas. The same group of characters can go on to have another self-contained adventure. We are strongly in favor of this. But we’re not publishing novels with the serial numbers filed off, either. (Pun fully intended.) What about the other Assiti Shards? Yes, Eric Flint’s 1632 & Beyond will publish stories in the Time Spike and Alexander…
About the Magazine
by Eric Flint | Feb 19, 2020 | Blog | 23 comments “Tempus fugit” is a Latin phrase that officially translates as “time flies.” What it really is, though, is a hoity-toity way of saying “old farts forget stuff.” The old fart in this instance being me—and what I forgot was that my novel 1632 was published exactly twenty years ago. Well… Using the term “exactly” with some poetic license. The book was indeed published in February of 2000, but I’m pretty sure it was published earlier than the 18th day of the month. So I’m fudging a little. By any reasonable measure of the term “success,” 1632 was a successful novel. To begin with, it was successful on its own terms. It sold—this is taken directly from my royalty reports so there’s no fudging at all—7,458 copies in hardcover, which was very good at the time for hardcover sales. Better still, it also had a 69% sell-through. For those of you not familiar with publishing lingo, “sell-through” means the percentage of books printed and shipped that are actually sold. The industry average is around 50%, so 69% is very good, That was the initial hardcover print run. Since then, Baen Books has done a special edition leather-bound hardcover edition ($36.00 a copy BUT CHEAP AT THE PRICE) that has sold 765 copies at a 77% sell-through. Furthermore, the novel is still in print after twenty years, and has sold over 140,000 copies in paperback with a 88% sell-through, which is like incredibly, spectacularly good. A publishing house which has a book that maintains an 88% sell-through over two decades has essentially been able to legally print money for all that time. And—I love this fact because I sneer at so-called “electronic piracy”—keep in mind that 1632 has been available electronically FOR FREE for about the last eighteen years and… still just keeps selling and selling. Every year I get royalty payments for the book somewhere between $4,000 and $5,000. But the novel doesn’t stand on…
by Eric Flint | Jun 9, 2021 | The Editor’s Page This article was originally published in Jim Baen’s Universe Vol 1, Num 4, December 2006. By Eric Flint Since our third issue came out a few weeks ago, we’ve expanded our staff by adding two new people. Beginning a few weeks ago, Stoney Compton became our assistant art director. And starting with this issue, Mike Resnick is going to be joining the magazine as our new executive editor, while my title changes from the former simple “editor” to “editor-in-chief.” If you’re wondering what those titles really mean, I’ll explain in a moment. I’ve known Stoney for thirteen years, since we met at the annual award presentation of the Writers of the Future contest in 1993. I’d won first place in the 1992 winter quarter’s contest and Stoney had won second place. We became friends over the course of that weekend and have remained in touch ever since. Earlier this year, at my recommendation, Jim Baen bought Stoney’s first novel Russian Amerika, an excellent alternate history that will be coming out in April 2007. (Yes, that’s a plug. It really is good—and, better still, it doesn’t retread the standard ground that so many alternate history novels do.) Stoney started helping the magazine informally a few months ago, in all sorts of ways. Eventually, it simply made sense to officially add him to the staff. Stoney did and will wind up doing all sorts of things for the magazine. But since he’s a professional graphics designer and will probably spend most of his time working with Dave Freer on the magazine’s art work, we decided to give him the title of assistant art director. My personal acquaintance with Mike Resnick is much more recent than that, although I’ve known who he was for . . . Jeez, I dunno. Three decades, something like that. In my years as an unpublished author—we won’t dwell on that miserable period—there was no one…
by Eric Flint | Jun 9, 2021 | The Editor’s Page This article was originally published in Jim Baen’s Universe Vol 1, Num 3, October 2006. by Eric Flint Jim Baen, the founder of this magazine, died three months ago. Between that and the fact that we’ve now had enough initial experience with Universe to have a much better sense of the prospects for the magazine than we did when we launched it at the end of last year, I think it would be appropriate for me to use this issue’s Editor’s Page to let our readers know what our current plans are. Jim was replaced as publisher of Baen Books by Toni Weisskopf. I met with Toni at the recent Worldcon in Los Angeles to discuss the prospects for the magazine and, most importantly, to decide whether we’d continue with Jim Baen’s Universe after the first year was over. When we launched the magazine, Jim didn’t want to commit to more than one year’s publication. Six issues, in other words. Given that there were so many as-yet-unknown variables involved in publishing an electronic magazine based on the business model we’re using, I completely agreed with him. We simply had no way of knowing ahead of time, without any experience, whether a magazine like this could make it commercially. We had a lot of theories, when we started, but theory is a treacherous beast if it’s not muzzled by facts—and we had no facts. True, we could use Baen Books’ experience with Webscriptions, selling e-ARCs and distributing the e-magazine The Grantville Gazette as something of a guide. But none of those really served that well as a model for a magazine like Universe. That’s the reason, if anyone has ever wondered, that we’ve been selling subscriptions only in the form of a fixed one-year package. Regardless of what month you start your subscription, what you’re going to get is the first six issues, starting with the June 2006 issue—as opposed to a…
Eric said, in the preface to Grantville Gazette Volume V: “Sigh. Not one of these stories deals with Ye Big Picture. Not one of them fails to wallow in the petty details of Joe or Dieter or Helen or Ursula’s angst-ridden existence. Pure, unalloyed, soap opera, what it is.” And we continue in our grand soap operatic tradition with Grantville Gazette (count ’em) Volume Seven. Is Jon and Linda Sonnenleiter’s introduction of up-time style pizza to Naples critical to the war? Nope. Don’t think so. Neither is Mark Huston’s quiet story about an elderly couple and their choices. But the fans don’t much care, we’ve found. Ditto for John and Patti Friend’s crew of misfits who, somehow, make their way to Magdeburg. They’re not important to the events we’ll all read about in 1634: The Baltic War, at all. Neither is Virginia DeMarce’s Minnie Hugelmair or Tina Marie Hollister. They’re just not at all the type to get involved in politics and war. No more so is Russ Rittger’s Chad, who manages to find himself as something of a laundry mogul, or Terry Howard’s Jimmy Dick, who seems to drink himself into a philosophical mood with some regularity. On the other hand, Rick Boatright’s radio heads just might have an effect on that little altercation up in the Baltic, and there’s just no telling what Kerryn Offord’s Dr. Phil might come up with next. Kim Mackey’s Colette . . . well, she’s got this really, really rich relative who just might come in handy to know. And, if you’d like to build a Victrola, explore the mass media implications, plan the route for a railroad—not to mention learn about the engines for the trains, well, this is the place. Chris Penycate, Gorg Huff, Carsten Edelberger, Iver Cooper and I will tell you what we know about those. So, grab your coffee (or whatever beverage), load up on the chocolate bonbon’s, kick back in…
In the 1632 novels, you get—more or less—The Big Picture featuring the Stars of the Story. In the 1632 anthologies, you get basically more of the same, simply with a narrower and tighter focus and (often but not always) featuring a worthy character actor who gets his or her day to strut on the stage. What do you get in the Gazette? All the shenanigans of everybody else, that’s what. The damn spear-carriers, run amok. Slice of life story piled onto family sagas—functional and dysfunctional alike—and all of it ladled over with a heavy scoop of personal melodrama. I mean, honestly. Who cares—just to name one example—if Karen Bergstralh’s woebegone blacksmith gets around the oppression of the guild-masters and starts setting up his own successful business? Who cares—to name another example—if the pimply-faced American teenager in Jay Robinson’s “Breaking News” wins the heart of the (hopefully not acne-ridden) teenage daughter of a downtime artist who is only remembered by art connoisseurs? (The mother, not the daughter—nobody except scholars remembered the daughter, for Pete’s sake, until Jay dragged her out of historical obscurity.) Shall I go on? Who cares if Velma Hardesty’s daughters escape from the Horrible Mother’s clutches, in Goodlett and Huff’s “Susan Story”? Just to make it worse, from what I can tell about a dozen other writers seem to have become infatuated with Wicked Velma, and it looks like we’ll be getting a small cottage industry cropping up of “Velma Gets Her Just Desserts” stories. Sigh. Not one of these stories deals with Ye Big Picture. Not one of them fails to wallow in the petty details of Joe or Dieter or Helen or Ursula’s angst-ridden existence. Pure, unalloyed, soap opera, what it is. There are times I think of just throwing up my hands and publishing all of the stories in the Gazette as “continuing serials.” And, in my darker moments, contemplate changing the title of the…
Note: Starting with The Grantville Gazette Volume 6, the Baen books with the same number (e.g., The Grantville Gazette VI) no longer have the same content as the online magazine. Volume 6 of the Gazette is coming out three months later than we’d projected. There are three reasons for that, which are closely connected. The first reason is that our copy editor fell behind, for various reasons including some health problems. The second reason is that she’s also one of the copy editors for Baen Books, with many other assignment. And the final reason is that the launch of the new online magazine, Jim Baen’s UNIVERSE, further complicated the situation because the Gazette’s copy editor is now also one of JBU’s copy editors. To put it another way, the Gazette was the runt of the litter. On the bright side, the long delay due to production problems also means that the editorial staff of the magazine is way ahead of the game. We’ve pretty much got the next volume already put together, and most of the one that comes thereafter. From a purely editorial standpoint, therefore, we could publish Volume 7 very quickly, and Volume 8 soon thereafter. However… We’d likely run into the same bottleneck and logjam with the process of copy-editing and proof-reading. The tie-up with Volume 6 was not the first time that’s happened, and it’s very likely to happen again. Being the runt of the litter is never any fun, and, alas, the runt is what the magazine shall remain. Facts are stubborn things, and it’s just a fact that while the paper editions of the Gazette generate a significant income for Baen Books, this electronic magazine does not. Yes, yes, granted—it’s the root source. But publishers are no different from you or me or anyone else, when they are faced with that nastiest of all nasty eight-letter words: Cash flow. Okay, it’s two words. But,…
Note: The Roman numeral references the version put out by Baen books, available in print copy. The arabic numeral is the one used in the online version released by as part of the online magazine. Well—hallelujah—we managed to get Volume 5 of the Gazette out pretty much on schedule, about four months after the publication of Volume 4. As I said in my preface to that issue, I’m hoping to be able to maintain a triannual publication schedule for the magazine. We should be able to do the same, I think, with Volumes 6 and 7. We’ve already got all the stories and articles assembled for Vol. 6, and most of the ones we’ll need for Vol. 7. That said, most of the time involved in producing such a magazine is required by the editing and copy-editing process, which takes some time. Still, we should be able to get Volume 6 out before the end of the year. Some remarks on the contents of this volume: As always, parsing the distinction between “regular stories” and “continuing serials” probably falls somewhere in the category of secularized medieval scholasticism. Just to name one example, Karen Bergstralh’s “Of Masters and Men” is essentially a sequel to her “One Man’s Junk,” published in the last volume. But since there is—yet, anyway—no indication that she’s going to be continuing this story, I chose not to put it in the category of continuing sequels. Yes, you can argue the point. The fact remains that I’m the editor of the magazine and if say the number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin is 15,468,622, then—here, at least—15,468,622 it is. Ultimately, this is probably a hopeless battle on my part for Literary Clarity. Hopeless, because as time goes on, it’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that the assessment I made of the Grantville Gazette in my preface to Volume 4 is indeed…
Note: The Roman numeral references the version put out by Baen books, available in print copy. The arabic numeral is the one used in the online version released by as part of the online magazine. Some remarks on the contents of this fourth volume of the Grantville Gazette: Once again, I had to go through my usual dance, trying to decide which stories should go under “Continuing Serials” and which should be published as stand-alone stories. This is a dance which, as the Gazette unfolds, is getting . . . Really, really complicated. In the end, I parsed the contents of this volume in such a way that only David Carrico’s “Heavy Metal Music” fell into the category of “Continuing Serials.” I am even willing to defend that choice under pressure, although—fair warning—my defense will lean heavily on subtle points covered by Hegel in his Science of Logic. (The big one, not the abridgment he did later for his Encyclopedia. So brace yourselves.) That said . . . Well, to give just one example . . . “Poor Little Rich Girls,” by Paula Goodlett and Gorg Huff, continues the adventures of the teenage tycoons-in-the-making that Gorg began in “The Sewing Circle” in Volume 1 of the Gazette and continued in the story “Other People’s Money” in Volume 3. Eventually, many of these characters will probably appear in a novel that I’m planning to write with the two of them. (As will the characters in David Carrico’s story, in a novel he and I are working on.) Note: Those books are 1636: The Viennese Waltz and 1636: The Devil’s Opera. The Barbie Consortium is a sequel to The Viennese Waltz by Paula and Gorg, without Eric. The same will probably prove to be true, sooner or later, with many of the other stories in this volume. The truth? The distinction I make for the Gazette between “continuing serials” and “stand-alone stories” is pretty much analogous to the distinction the law…
Note: The Roman numeral references the version put out by Baen books, available in print copy. The arabic numeral is the one used in the online version released by as part of the online magazine. First, I need to apologize for the long delay between the publication of Volumes 2 and 3 of the magazine. That was due to several factors, only one of which-my own heavy writing schedule this past summer and early fall-was predictable. The others involved illnesses to two key people involved in the work, and the recent decision by Baen Books to issue a paper anthology which will contain about one-third of the material that had originally been planned for this volume. That decision, while it was one I welcomed, required us to do another round of story selection and editing. (The current working title for the anthology, by the way, is 1634: The Ram Rebellion. I hope to have it turned in by the middle of next year, in which case it should be published sometime in 2006.) Fortunately, however, the material for Volume 4 is already put together and needs only the final rounds of editing and copy-editing. So there shouldn’t be the same long delay between publication of this volume and the next. It should be available sometime in late January or February. People who’ve read the first two volumes of the Grantville Gazette will notice that I’ve added a section entitled “Continuing Serials.” In this section, I’m placing those stories whose episodes are clearly and definitely not stand-alone stories. In this issue, we conclude the short novel “An Invisible War,” which was begun in Volume 2, and we continued the episodes of Enrico Toro’s “Euterpe.” (Episode 3 will appear in Volume 4 or 5.) I readily admit that there’s a very gray area involved here, because some of the “stand alone” stories in this issue either continue a story thread begun in…
Note: The Roman numeral references the version put out by Baen books, available in print copy. The arabic numeral is the one used in the online version released by as part of the online magazine. As you can perhaps deduce from the simple existence of a paper edition of the second volume of the electronic magazine the Grantville Gazette, the first issue—which we did as an experiment, to see if there would be enough interest in such an oddball publication—proved to be successful. Quite successful, in fact, better than either I or my publisher, Jim Baen, had expected. The magazine’s been doing well, also. Five volumes of the Gazette have been published thus far, with more issues in the works. Now that I know the Gazette will be an ongoing project, at least in electronic format, I’ve got more leeway in terms of the kind of stories I can include in the magazine. A number of the fiction pieces being written in the 1632 setting are either long or are intended as parts of ongoing stories. There are two examples in this issue: Danita Ewing’s “An Invisible War”and Enrico Toro’s “Euterpe, episode 1.” In terms of its length, “An Invisible War” is technically a short novel. In the electronic edition, it was serialized over two issues of the magazine, the second half appearing in Volume 3. Since that wouldn’t be suitable for a paper edition, I included the entire novel in this volume. Enrico Toro’s story is somewhat different. Neither he nor I know what the final length of this story will be. Not to mention that in later volumes of the magazine, his story begins to intertwine with a series written by David Carrico. “Euterpe” is written in the form of episodes, each told in epistolary form by the narrator. I wanted to include it because (along with Gorg Huff’s story, “God’s Gifts”) Toro’s piece approaches the 1632 framework…
The Grantville Gazette originated as a by-product of the ongoing and very active discussions which take place concerning the 1632 universe Eric Flint created in the novels 1632, 1633, and 1634: The Galileo Affair (the latter two books co-authored by David Weber and Andrew Dennis, respectively). More books have been written and co-written in this series, including 1634: The Baltic War, 1634: The Bavarian Crisis, 1635: The Cannon Law, and 1635: The Dreeson Incident. 1635: The Eastern Front is forthcoming, and the book Time Spike is also set in the Assiti Shards universe. This discussion is centered in three of the conferences in Baen’s Bar, the discussion area of Baen Books’ web site. The conferences are entitled “1632 Slush,” “1632 Slush Comments,” and “1632 Tech Manual.” They have been in operation for almost seven years now, during which time nearly two hundred thousand posts have been made by hundreds of participants. Note: Baen’s Bar now has three areas for 1632. As of mid-2023, “1632 Tech” has 349 pages of content. I have no clue how many posts, comments, and participants that equates to, but it’s a lot. There are also 138 pages of “1632 Slush”. Every one of those comments on “slush” is a story submission, either new or revised. Since “1632 Slush Comments” doesn’t go back quite as far as “1632 Slush”, it “only” has 126 pages. Soon enough, the discussion began generating so-called “fanfic,” stories written in the setting by fans of the series. A number of those were good enough to be published professionally. And, indeed, a number of them were-as part of the anthology Ring of Fire , which was published by Baen Books in January, 2004. (Ring of Fire also includes stories written by established authors such as Eric Flint himself, as well as David Weber, Mercedes Lackey, Dave Freer, K.D. Wentworth and S.L. Viehl.) The decision to publish the Ring of Fire anthology triggered…