Bjorn Hasseller, Editor-in-Chief: Eric Flint’s 1632 & Beyond magazine Eric Flint studied African history; worked as a machinist; drove trucks; wrote, edited, and published books and short stories; and was a union organizer. He was married to Lucille Robbins and had a daughter, a son-in-law, and two grandchildren. He once posted a picture of himself wearing a shirt that said “Grumpa.” I think Eric liked to come across as grouchy. You could quickly see how much time he spent helping others out, though. That might be when he was risking his personal safety helping the unions or something as simple as taking a couple hours to make sure you understood where he wanted to go when he offered you a co-writing opportunity. Eric’s first novel was published when he was fifty years old. I count at least 69 novels as well as numerous anthologies, collections, novellas, and short stories. He wrote in several genres but was probably best known for alternate history. He didn’t just write; he worked with others, especially helping new authors get started. Between the 1632 series and The Grantville Gazette, he helped over 200 authors be published. For about three-quarters of us, it was our first professional sale. That’s aside from everything he did at Writers of the Future and the Superstars Writing Seminars. As he often pointed out himself, the 1632 universe was less than half of Eric’s writing. Of his many alternate history, science fiction, and fantasy universes, it’s the one he opened to anyone who wanted to write in it. Sometimes he’d look bemused at the directions people took with it, but he’d let them do it, as long as it wasn’t interfering with his own plans. We are excited to help carry that legacy forward. * * *
In Memoriam
Bjorn Hasseller, Editor-in-Chief: Eric Flint’s 1632 & Beyond magazine Jose Clavell served in the US Army, was a nurse at Walter Reed, and served in the Puerto Rico Wing of the Civil Air Patrol. He passed away in March, 2023. In the 1632 universe, Jose developed the USE Marine Corps and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. These are moving stories, and they’re influential on other authors. We’d like to keep Jose in the series. FROM: CPT. L. KLINGL, USEN TO: CDRE E. CANTRELL, USEN —MESSAGE BEGINS— RE: RETURN VOYAGE FOLLOWING OPERATION “ISLAND HOPPERS” AND HURRICANE, CAPTURED PIRATE SHIPS LOW ON FRESH WATER. TWO VESSELS DIVERTED TO PUERTO RICO AND HOVE TO OFF LOCATION LABELED MAYAGUEZ ON UP-TIME MAP. REFILLED WATER. NO ENEMY CONTACT. STOP COMMEND USEMC SGT. J. CLAVELL FOR INITIATIVE LOCATING FRESH WATER AND ESTABLISHING CACHES AND DEFENSIVE POSITIONS FOR FUTURE OPERATIONS. STOP HOWEVER SGT. CLAVELL LEFT USE FLAG. CLAIMS WE OWN ISLAND. STOP —MESSAGE ENDS— “I dunno, Clavell.” Hans Ludolf squinted. His nose was scrunched up, and his lips pursed, all signs that the Marine was very skeptical about something. “I think the captain is pissed.” “Hard to tell, from how he was trying not to laugh the whole time,” Clavell countered. “What if the Spanish find that flag? They will search the area. They might find the caches and fighting positions.” “Then they will think there are patrols on the island and waste a lot of time and many more resources than we left in the caches,” Clavell returned. “And if one of our ships passes between Puerto Rico and Hispaniola and needs food and water . . . It is what the up-timers call a win-win. And who knows? We could find ourselves back there someday.”
by Walt Boyes It is my unwelcome duty to tell you that we have lost another member of the 1632 family. This time, it was Head Geek Rick Boatright. Rick passed away on July 22 from pancreatic cancer. He was 66 years old. Rick was a polymath. He knew something about nearly everything and his ability to research little squirrelly facts was astonishing. He and I came up with the Aqualator at a con, and he wrote it into the series. He was the lead presenter, along with Kevin Evans and me, doing Weird Tech at Minicons. (The fact that we lost both Rick and Kevin within eight months, leaving me the Last Amigo, worries me.) He said he wasn’t really a writer, but he had a respectable body of work, and his latest novel (with Kerryn Offord) was published in August. But above all, Rick was a teacher. He gave up teaching because he wasn’t politically correct enough for the Topeka Board of Education, but never stopped being a teacher. He taught everyone he met. The world is much poorer without him in it.
I want to take the time to remember two of the Gazette’s favorite authors. In December, right before Christmas, Kevin Evans passed away suddenly. Then, shortly after that, his wife and writing partner, Karen Carnahan Evans, was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, and she passed away in April. We have lost two of the finest authors in the Gazette, but more than that, we have lost two very good friends. Kevin and Karen lived outside Albuquerque, NM, and they participated in the Balloon Festival every year. This gave them a unique skill set for when the 1632verse decided that balloons and dirigibles were the way to go for flight. Kevin was a steam-head and spent many years working on getting a vintage steam locomotive ready to run again. He was a fantastic artificer, and over time, became the 1632verse’s Master Armorer. He created the designs for the rifles and shotguns used by up-timers and down-timers in the stories. He got pushback over the designs, so he built working models and brought them to Ring Of Fire Cons to show them at the Weird Tech panel, which Rick Boatright, myself, and Kevin presided over for years. He proved that you could power a dirigible with a steam engine. He and Rick made the smallest functioning steam engine I’ve ever seen to prove it. Karen was a great writer, and a gastronome. She delighted the 1632verse with bringing modern chocolate back to the seventeenth century. Not only did she produce recipes, but at RingofFireCons, she brought samples of real Grantville chocolate.” Kevin and Karen were members of the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), Kevin was knighted as Sir Thorgeirr and Karen served as his squire and shieldmaiden, Lady Tyrca. They were great people, a wonderful couple, actually bigger than life, and the world is significantly smaller and darker with them gone. I am going to miss them dreadfully, and I…
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…
by Eric Flint | Jun 9, 2021 | The Editor’s Page This article was originally published in Jim Baen’s Universe Vol 1, Num 2, August 2006 by Eric Flint My original plans for this issue’s “The Editor’s Page” got swept aside last month by the death of Jim Baen, the man who launched the magazine and whose name is—and will remain—on the masthead. Jim lived just long enough to see the first issue of the magazine come out on June 1. Less than two weeks later, on June 12th, he suffered a massive stroke from which he never recovered consciousness. He died on June 28th. That’s not much of a consolation, but it’s some. This magazine was important to Jim for several reasons, one of which I will spend most of this editorial discussing. He was only sixty-two years old when he died, after a life of many accomplishments, of which Universe was one. And by no means the smallest, either. For Jim, the magazine was both a return to his own origins—he was the editor of Galaxy back in the mid-seventies, early in his career—and a continuation and expansion of a policy he had made central to Baen Books since the onset of the electronic era. That was his complete and total opposition to so-called Digital Rights Management and all the panoply of laws, regulations and attitudes that surround it. One of the reasons he asked me to be the editor of Jim Baen’s Universe is because he knew I shared, in full, his hostility toward DRM. He wanted Universe, among other things, to be a showcase demonstrating that it was perfectly possible for a commercial publisher to be successful without soiling themselves with DRM. (“Soiling” is the genteel way to put it. Jim was far more likely, in private correspondence and conversation, to use a simpler Anglo-Saxon term.) There are a lot of ways you can examine Jim Baen’s life and his career. I spent some time thinking about how I…