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 In my years as an unpublished author—we won’t dwell on that miserable period—there was no one…
Blog
by Eric Flint | Jun 9, 2021 | Salvos Against Big Brother I ended my last essay by presenting the general principles needed to answer the question, how long should copyright terms last? For those of you who didn’t read or don’t remember what I said, here it is: First, authors need to have enough protection to enable them to be able to make a living as full-time writers. Second, that protection has to be long enough to provide them with a motivation to write for the public, and see doing so as a possible profession. But that’s it. Those are the only two legitimate concerns. Any term of copyright which exceeds that minimum necessary length, as Macaulay put it in the quote I cited in my last column, has no legitimate purpose. Once you cross that line, a necessary evil has simply become an evil—and the farther past that line you go, the more evil it gets. Now let’s get into the details. The first thing I need to establish are some facts. I need to do that because I’ve found that many people, including many authors, have very unrealistic notions about how long copyright actually protects anything. What happens is that they look only at the law—ignoring all social and economic realities—and say to themselves, “Oh, wow, anything that gets written—including anything I write myself—will be protected by copyright for seventy years after I die.” Uh, no. In the real world—except for intellectual property owned by giant corporations—here is what really happens: The longer copyright lasts, the less likely it is that 99.99% of anything ever written will ever get reissued. What excessively long copyright terms actually do is destroy writing. They don’t protect writing, they ravage it. Why? Well, it’s simple—if you look at writing as a professional craft, subject to economic imperatives like any other form of work, instead of a legal or philosophical abstraction. Here is the cold, hard reality. I call it the ninety-nine percent rule:…
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 | Salvos Against Big Brother Originally published in Jim Baen’s Universe, Vol 1 Num 2, August 2006 I want to continue my discussion of copyright, which I began in last issue’s column, before turning my attention to the issue of so-called “Digital Rights Management” itself. The reason I want to do so is because what lies at the heart of DRM is one set of answers to a few simple questions: 1) What sort of protection do authors require, to make sure that they can and will keep engaging in their labor? 2) Why do they need a particular sort of protection, as opposed to another? 3) For how long do they need it? I’ll address the first two of these questions in this column, and the third one in the next. Let’s start with the first one, whose answer is obvious. If you don’t figure out a way to pay people to do labor such as writing fiction, one of two things will happen: a) Some potential writers won’t do it at all. b) Most will, simply because they feel a personal urge to do so. But, because they can’t make a living as authors, they will—certainly on average—never get all that good at it. The second point, by the way, is much more important than the first. The number of people who set out to become writers for the purpose of making money is miniscule, and always has been. To be blunt, only a moron would take up being an author as a way to make a living, much less a good living. As careers go, for all but a tiny percentage, it is either impossible altogether except as a part-time occupation, or pays dismally and erratically even if you can manage to do it full-time. I know a lot of authors, and I’m an author myself. I do not know a single one who set out to…
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…
by Eric Flint | Jun 9, 2021 | Salvos Against Big Brother I’m going to be writing a regular column on the subject of electronic publishing, and the challenges it poses to modern society—as well as the opportunity it provides. This column will take up a number of related issues, including such matters as the proper length of copyright terms, the nature of Digital Rights Management and why we are opposed to it, and the largely mythical nature of so-called “online piracy.” We decided to keep this column separate from my general editor’s preface for each issue—see “The Editor’s Page”—because we think the issue is important enough for a separate column of its own. Furthermore, there will usually be a number of specific matters relevant to each issue of the magazine that I will need to address in “The Editor’s Page” that would simply get in the way of this discussion. We’re calling the column “Salvos Against Big Brother” because that captures the key aspect of the problem, so far as Jim Baen and I are concerned. Both the publisher of this magazine and its editor believe that so-called Digital Rights Management (DRM)—by which we mean the whole panoply of ever more restrictive laws concerning digital media, including the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)—are the following: First, they represent a growing encroachment on the personal liberties of the American public, as well as those of citizens in other countries in the world; Second, they add further momentum to what is already a dangerous tendency of governments and the large, powerful corporations which exert undue influence on them to arrogate to themselves the right to make decisions which properly belong to the public; Third, they tend inevitably to constrict social, economic, technical and scientific progress; And, fourth, they represent an exercise in mindless stupidity that would shame any self-respecting dinosaur. As this column progresses, in issue after issue, I will wind up spending most of my…
by Eric Flint | Jun 9, 2021 | The Editor’s Page This article was originally published in Jim Baen’s Universe Vol 1, Num 1, June 2006. By Eric Flint In my editor’s remarks for this first issue of Jim Baen’s UNIVERSE, I want to discuss the current state of the short fiction market in science fiction and fantasy. I’m sure most people reading this already know that short form fiction has been declining steadily for decades, in our genre. All four of the major paper magazines still in existence—Analog, Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Realms of Fantasy—have been struggling against declining circulation figures for a long time, with no end in sight. Many smaller magazines have folded altogether. And the one major online F&SF; magazine that had been paying the best rates in the industry, the Sci-Fi channel’s SciFiction, recently closed down. The reasons are complex, and I’m not going to get into them here beyond a few brief remarks. What I want to talk about instead is the impact that the decline of short form fiction has on the field as a whole. That’s true, regardless of what causes it. In a nutshell, it’s extremely damaging, and for two reasons—one which affects authors directly, the other which affects the readership base of the genre and therefore its future. The absence of a large and vigorous market for short form fiction hammers authors directly. That’s because it makes F&SF; authors almost completely dependent on the novel market. And, while the novel market is and always will be intrinsically more lucrative than the short form market, it is also an extremely harsh environment for authors. Why? Well, simplifying a lot, it’s because of the fundamental economics involved. Novels, unlike washing machines and toasters and automobiles, are unique, each and every one of them. Not “unique” in the sense that they don’t have generic similarities, but “unique” simply in the obvious fact that each and every story has…
by webmaster | Apr 24, 2006 | Information The loyal minions have just heard that Eric has accepted an offer to be a guest at Conspiracy 2, the 28th annual New Zealand SF Convention to be held in Wellington over Queen’s Birthday weekend, 1 – 4 June 2007. for more information visit http://conspiracy2.sf.org.nz (NOTE: The link points to the 2007 version of the page via the Wayback Machine at Archive.org.)Â –Loyal Minions (Just for a sense of scale, and to let you know how cool it might be to go to, this year’s New Zealand national SF Convention is being held in a hotel with 68 rooms, and they say that “we should be able to take over a large chunk of it.” The 2007 con hotel has 65 rooms.)
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…
by webmaster | Mar 15, 2006 | Information | 2 comments Travel plans announced to date: I-Con March 24-26 Stoney Brook University, NY Eric Flint and Ryk Spoor (Not a Baen’s Universe event probably; there is not time to set it up) Nebula Awards Weekend May 4 – 7, Tempe, AZ Eric Flint and David Weber will be presenting the first ever Andre Norton award. Sarah Hoyt (Eric’s co-author and a member of the Baen’s Universe editorial board) will be attending. Convergence July 7 – 9, Bloomington, MN Eric Flint and David Weber will be there.. David Weber GoH, Eric Flint “Past GoH” Conestoga July 28 – 30, Tulsa, OK David Drake GoH Rick Boatright & Paula Goodlett will be there. (No they’re not authors, No, Eric won’t be there, but there will be a “Universe” presense and we thought you might want to know.) 1632 Minicon IV – Aug 4-5-6, Mannington, WV Eric Flint, Virginia DeMarce, Paula Goodlett, Rick Boatright, and a host of others. WorldCon August 23 – 27, Los Angeles, CA Eric Flint and countless other authors. Con-Stellation October 20-22, Huntville, AL Eric will be attending, David Drake GoH, with Toni Weisskopf World Fantasy Con November 2 – 5, Austin, Texas. Eric Flint and David Drake and a host of others. Note that membership to WFC is strictly limited. 2 Comments Sea Wasp on March 15, 2006 at 3:23 PMHey, what about I-Con? Coming up the 24 – 26th of March? webmaster on March 15, 2006 at 6:25 PMOk, what about it? — I can only list the things I know about. 🙁 Even loyal minions have their limits you know.
by webmaster | Mar 13, 2006 | Welcome | 50 comments Hi. I’m Eric Flint, a writer of science fiction and fantasy. This web page was set up for those people who might be interested in finding out more about my work than they can obtain from book covers or blurbs. a complete bibliography of all my writings, either solo or in collaboration with other authors, and the projects I’m editing, which right now consist of major re-issues of the writings of James H. Schmitz and Keith Laumer; a short personal biography regular updates on forthcoming books and work in progress; regular updates on where I’ll be making public appearances; various means by which you can correspond with me if you choose to do so; and whatever odds and ends might strike my fancy. (And, hopefully, yours.) Thanks for dropping by, and I hope you enjoy my web site. 50 Comments Tom Dooley on March 24, 2006 at 7:20 AMHi – More of a question than a comment…. I wondered what happended to the Cannon Law book – I thought it was scheduled and then it wasn’t?? Is Baen Books having 2nd thoughts about the series or ? I was more interested in the Cannon Law snippets than the Ram Rebellion snippets – I’ll probably buy both books but I found the Ram Rebellion tougher to plow thru reading …. too many characters to keep track of at least while reading semi-disjointed snippets.Cheers, Tom webmaster on March 24, 2006 at 8:43 AMNo, Baen is not having second thoughts. I don’t know that I have ever seen a publication schedule for CL. The snippets you were reading were from Andrew’s draft he turned into Eric. Eric still needs to take a pass through it. — it hasn’t been turned into Baen yet. What Eric was doing was being nice, and previewing. Same thing he did for Bavarian Princess.— Ye Loyal Minion Eric on April 26, 2006 at 8:05 PM1635: THE CANNON…
There is much to be said for inventiveness and imagination. Given our head, half the population of Grantville at the moment of the Ring of Fire would have contained exactly the right mix of characters and equipment to make our story a real whiz bang yarn. Hence the need for Virginia’s Grid. Unfortunately there too many of us and too many of these halves. Chaos is an ugly word. It’s worse than that. In addition to the half who are rocket scientists and the other half who are SEALS, Eric has provided us a list of the following additional halves: The half who are engineers, which are in turn divided into half electrical engineers, half locomotive engineers, half chemical engineers, half mechanical engineers, and too many thirds and quarters to count. The half who are collectors of all forms of weapons, including the third who collect Abrams tanks and Predators. The half who have a library larger than the Library of Congress. The half who have a library smaller than the Library of Congress, but significantly larger than the Great Library of Alexandria. The half who are above the age of 18 and below the age of 21. The half who are above the age of 21 and below the age of 23. The half who are above the age of 23 but below the age of 25. The half who are college graduates. The half who are one month away from graduating from college. The half who are one year away from graduating from college. The half who have advanced degrees in (see above, not forgetting the thirds and quarters). There is, I believe — at last count — exactly one person in everybody’s fantasy Grantville who is elderly and illiterate. Of course, he’s also the son of Alvin York and shoots even better than his daddy.
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: 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: 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. 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…
This is how it all started, with a post from Eric Flint to the “Authors” conference in Baen’s Bar. This was before there was such a thing as a “1632 Tech Manual” conference, and the proposed title was “Fire in the Hole” (later changed to 1632). Topic: Fire in the Hole (1 of 353), Read 501 times Conf: Authors From: Eric Flint Date: Tuesday, March 02, 1999 09:00 AM I’m posting a new topic in a shameless bid to enlist aid and assistance in my next book. Y’all understand this is a serious and solemn project and there’ll be none of the usual badinage, disrespect, wild-eyed-opinion-spouting, surly remarks and the other stuff that routinely transpires in the Bar. (Yeah, sure. And pigs will fly.) OK, here’s the problem. The novel I’m starting on, Fire in the Hole, requires a wide range of knowledge to write properly. Some of that I have (the history of the period, for instance). Some I can get, from friends. But some of it requires me to scramble like a monkey. Any help I can get will be appreciated. The setting of the novel is as follows: For reasons I won’t go into here (read the book when it comes out, heh heh), a small town in West Virginia finds itself transposed in time and place into Germany in the middle of the Thirty Years War. The time is spring/summer of l630 AD. The place is Thuringia, in central Germany. The Americans are in the middle of one of history’s worst wars and they have to survive (and hopefully, prosper). In order to do that, they have the resources available to them which would be in any small town in the area. I’m going to be leaving in three days to spend some time there (I used to live in the area — near Fairmont and Morgantown — but it was twenty years ago; things change).…