by Eric Flint | Jan 17, 2015 | Information Thomas Babington Macaulay Speechs to House of Commons Opposing Proposed Life + 60 Year Copyright Term on 5 Feb. 1841 Favoring a 42-year Fixed Term over a Life + 25 Year Term on 6 April 1842 A Speech delivered in the House of Commons on the 5th of February, 1841 by Thomas Babington Macaulay On the twenty-ninth of January, 1841, Mr. Serjeant Talfourd(1)Â obtained leave to bring in a bill to amend the law of copyright. The object of this bill was to extend the term of copyright in a book to sixty years, reckoned from the death of the writer. On the fifth of February Mr. Serjeant Talfourd moved that the bill should be read a second time. In reply to him the following Speech was made. The bill was rejected by 45 votes to 38. [Note: The law and its amendment may be summarized thus: Existing law: Copyright for life or 28 years, whichever longer. Talfourd: Copyright for life and 60 years Mahon: Copyright for life and 25 years Macaulay: Copyright for life or 42 years, whichever longer] Though, Sir, it is in some sense agreeable to approach a subject with which political animosities have nothing to do, I offer myself to your notice with some reluctance. It is painful to me to take a course which may possibly be misunderstood or misrepresented as unfriendly to the interests of literature and literary men. It is painful to me, I will add, to oppose my honorable and learned friend on a question which he has taken up from the purest motives, and which he regards with a parental interest. These feelings have hitherto kept me silent when the law of copyright has been under discussion. But as I am, on full consideration, satisfied that the measure before us will, if adopted, inflict grievous injury on the public, without conferring any compensating advantage on men of letters, I think it…
from the editor
by Gorg Huff | Dec 28, 2014 | Newsletters | 10 comments Well, I got through the holidays intact. This is always a bit of a dicey proposition because I do most of the cooking over the holidays and while I’m a rather good cook I am not one who is serene and philosophical and maintains his equanimity throughout the process. To the contrary. On those days when the cooking gets concentrated, my kitchen is filled for hours with expletives deleted. Well, actually, not deleted. I daresay I am directly responsible for expanding the vocabulary of my grand-children, something my daughter is not entirely pleased with. But, all’s well that ends well. Everyone got fed and seemed to enjoy the meals, and I made it through another holiday season without suffering a stroke or a heart attack and with no more than a modicum of flesh wounds. and those, quickly healed. So, back to work, which is far more relaxing. I almost never curse in front of computer. Well. Okay. Except when it screws up, which is fairly often. I have told my tech guru Rick Boatright many times that electrons just hate me, for no discernible reason. For years, Rick dismissed that theory as patent nonsense, but I think that lately he’s been reconsidering. He tells me that things go wrong with my computers that he’s never seen happen to anyone else. (I knew it! I knew it! The little bastards have it in for me!) Mike Resnick and I are closing in on finishing “The Gods of Sagittarius.” We’d hoped to have it done by the end of the year, but between the disruption of the (miserable damned) holidays and various other problems, it’s taking longer than we’d projected. (If you’re wondering, ask any publisher or editor: this is not an abnormal state of affairs with authors. For whatever neurological reason, the mental talent involved in being a good scribbler seems to be genetically linked…
by Brad R. Torgersen | Nov 10, 2014 | Newsletters | 26 comments I’m a little behind on this newsletter. To bring everyone up to date, I’ve turned in three manuscripts over the past two months or so. I just turned in the manuscript for the next 1632 series novel, 1636: The Cardinal Virtues. Baen Book has it scheduled for publication in July, 2015. My co-author on the novel is Walter Hunt and it recounts the events leading up to the outbreak of the French civil war. (What? You didn’t see that coming? It’s not as if I haven’t dropped more than, oh, five hundred hints or so across the past half dozen novels.)Earlier, I turned in the manuscript for The Span of Empire, which is the sequel to The Crucible of Empire. David Carrico is my co-author on this novel. I began the series working with K.D. Wentworth, but as many of you already know Kathy passed away a couple of years ago. She’d only written four chapters before she broke off working on the novel due to her illness. I asked David to step in and he did an excellent job of completing the first draft. We don’t have a publication date yet for the book. I also turned in the manuscript for 1637: The Volga Rule, which I co-authored with Gorg Huff and Paula Goodlett. This novel is the sequel to 1636: The Kremlin Games. No publication date has been set yet. Over the summer I also wrote a short novel titled Sanctuary, which will be appearing in the second anthology in the Clan of the Claw setting created by Bill Fawcett. The anthology is titled By Tooth and Claw and it’s coming out in April of next year. Right now I/m working on a novel with Mike Resnick titled The Gods of Sagittarius. We’re about halfway done and we should be turning in the manuscript in a few weeks. Once that’s done I’ll start working on my next solo novel in the 1632 series. Baen Books has…
by Brad R. Torgersen | Sep 17, 2014 | Information There will be a performance next Wednesday of an audio drama based on a novella I write set in the Belisarius universe. The novella and the drama based on it is titled “Islands.” The script was written by Tony Daniel, another author who publishes through Baen Books. Here are the details for anyone interested:https://www.facebook.com/events/289227797946840/ — Eric
by Brad R. Torgersen | Jul 29, 2014 | 1632Snippet | 13 comments Mammoth Screen is renewing their option on the 1632 series for another year. They’ve hired a well-known screenwriter and have the script for the first episode. They’ve also made a deal with ITV Studios for worldwide distribution. This is important because ITV is a big deal in the UK. We’re still a long ways from an up-and-running TV series, but things are looking good. — Eric 13 Comments John Cowan on July 29, 2014 at 8:30 AMOf course, things can stay this way for years. Well, it’s money. Ryk E. Spoor on July 29, 2014 at 10:14 AMExcellent! As John says, either way, it means money. The second way would mean much MORE money, and we’ll hope for that, but at least they’re still paying! Tweeky on July 29, 2014 at 9:27 PMDoes this mean there’s going to be a 1632 TV series? Ryk E. Spoor on July 30, 2014 at 9:31 AMIt means someone is interested in making a series. But an option is a LONG way from actually MAKING anything. The “someone” getting the option, in this case, is a company that actually might be able to do it, but that’s not even close to a guarantee. Cobbler on July 30, 2014 at 12:38 AMI hope Eric maintains some creative control. Though that’s easier said than done.When they made a TV movie of A Wizard of Earthsea, they promised Ursula Le Guin to hew close to the book. Le Guin publically complained about the result. Starting with making Ged a petulant white boy. “Most of the people watching have never read your book, so who cares?â€I can imagine Mammoth turning 1932 it into a time-traveling Beverly Hillbillies. Mark L on July 30, 2014 at 4:28 PMThe comic strip Funky Winkerbean has a thread on one character’s book being turned into a made-for-TV movie. The book was a memoir about the character’s wife’s death from cancer. The movie being made? Not so much…
by Brad R. Torgersen | May 26, 2014 | Newsletters | 11 comments I’ve been feeling a little guilty because it dawned on me a while back that the photograph of myself that I’ve been using on this web page is pretty far out of date. How far? I’m not really sure, but I figure it was taken about a decade ago. Given that I’ve been known to make sarcastic remarks about people who keep public photos of themselves that are ridiculously out of date, I figured I better take care of the problem. So I had the same professional photographer I used then, whose work I like, do a current set of portraits for me. One of them is now being used as my picture on the web site’s home page, and I added several others to the Photo Album section.In other news of the day, I have a novella coming out next month in a volume published by Phoenix Pick titled The Aethers of Mars. Phoenix Pick is an imprint of Arc Manor, and is edited by Mike Resnick. Each volume matches an established writer with a newer writer telling stories set in the same universe. My story, “In the Matter of Savinkov,†is set in a steampunk universe developed by my partner in the project, Chuck Gannon. Here’s the URL, for those interested. In still other news of the day, Baen Books has scheduled a 1632 novel I co-authored with Paula Goodlett and Gorg Huff for publication in November of this year. Paula and Gorg were my partners in writing 1636: The Kremlin Games. The new novel, 1636: The Viennese Waltz, is set in (where else?) Vienna. The new novel involves many of the characters developed by Paula and Gorg for a number of stories published in either the Grantville Gazette magazine or one of the Ring of Fire anthologies. It will also serve to some extent as one of the prequels to my next solo novel in the series. (The title of which I haven’t…
by Brad R. Torgersen | Feb 23, 2014 | Newsletters | 5 comments The next stories I have coming out are: I have a novelette coming out next week in an anthology titled MULTIVERSE, which is entirely devoted to the work of Poul Anderson. My story is set in Anderson’s “Operation Chaos” universe. Other authors in the anthology include Larry Niven, Raymond Feist, Nancy Kress, Harry Turtledove, Terry Brooks, Robert Silverberg, S.M. Stirling and Tad Williams. Here’s the URL. In April, Cauldron of Ghosts, co-authored with David Weber. Cauldron is part of the Honor Harrington universe and is a sequel to Torch of Freedom as well as, to a degree, a companion volume to David’s Shadow of Freedom. For those interested, here’s a link to Baen Books’ publishing schedule. As usual, sample chapters are available on the site.In May, I have a novella titled “In the Matter of Savinkov” coming out as one of two stories in a volume titled The Aethers of Mars, published by PhoenixPick. The volume combines two related novellas set in a steampunk universe, one by me and one by Chuck Gannon. Here’s a link to it. I just turned in the manuscript for the next 1632 series novel, 1636: Commander Cantrell in the West Indies, which I co-authored with Chuck Gannon. Chuck was my co-author on a previous 1632 series book, 1635: The Papal Stakes, and will be writing two more novels with me in the future. Commander Cantrell will be coming out in June. I also turned in the manuscript for 1636: The Viennese Waltz, which will be coming out in November of this year. Paula Goodlett and Gorg Huff were my co-authors on that novel, as they were on 1636: The Kremlin Games. The Viennese Waltz is partly based on a number of stories written by Paula and Gorg which were previously published in one of the Ring of Fire or Grantville Gazette anthologies. It also partly serves as one of the prequels for my next solo novel in the series, which I will start writing sometime this summer. Another novel I’ve turned in recently is Castaway Planet, which I co-authored with…
by Eric Flint | Jan 23, 2013 | Information, Writing Dear friends, As many of you know, for the past several years I have been teaching a seminar once a year on the business of being a professional writer. This is a three-day seminar that I do with Kevin Anderson, Rebecca Moesta, Dave Wolverton (who often writes under the name of David Farland) and various special guests who vary from one year to the next. This is not the usual writer’s workshop. We assume that those people who take the seminar have the skills to be professional writers. What we spend three days doing is teaching you everything you need to know about the business of becoming a writer. That includes strategies for getting published, the use of agents, electronic publishing, how to read and understand contracts and royalty statements, and so on. People who’ve taken this seminar in the past have uniformly told us that they found it very helpful. Many of them take the seminar a second or even a third time-so many, in fact, that we now have a special lower rate for alumni. This year, in 2013, we will be holding the seminar on May 14-16 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. (Past venues have includes Pasadena, California; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Las Vegas, Nevada.) Special guests will include Jim Minz, the chief editor for Baen Books; Joan Johnston, a bestselling romance author; James Owen, a bestselling storyteller and illustrator; and Mark Leslie LeFebvre, the Director of Self Publishing and chief of author relations for Kobo.If you’re interested in looking further into the seminar, please look at our URL: http://superstarswriting.com/ POST HOC: I also participated in a different sort of seminar this year for the first time. This was a more traditional writers workshop, although it also covered aspects of the business of publishing. The workshop was held on a Caribbean cruise liner to the Bahamas and lasted for four days: December 2 through December 6.…
by Eric Flint | Jul 19, 2012 | Information | 24 comments A number of people have asked me if I’ll be continuing the Jao Empire series I’ve been doing with Kathy Wentworth, now that Kathy has passed away. (She died in April from complications following cancer surgery.) The first two books in that series were THE COURSE OF EMPIRE and THE CRUCIBLE OF EMPIRE. Kathy and I had started a third book in the series, with the working title of THE SPAN OF EMPIRE. She wrote the first two chapters and sent them to me last summer. I rewrote the chapters, added a third chapter, and sent them back to her along with a further development of the plot outline (which by now comes to about 6000 words and isn’t finished). I told Kathy to set aside three more chapters for me to finish the battle scene I started in Chapter 3. She then wrote two more chapters (7 and 8, leaving aside chapters 4-6 for me) and had started on Chapter 9 when she broke off due to her illness. And that’s where things stand in terms of the manuscript. Contractually, the situation is complicated because Kathy and I didn’t yet have a contract for SPAN OF EMPIRE but we did have a very old contract for a novel called COLDFIRE. That was a story Kathy started many years ago and then got stalled on. I agreed to finish it with her and we got a contract from Baen. That story is really Kathy’s, though, not mine, and it’s not something I want to try to finish on my own. I do, however, want to finish SPAN OF EMPIRE. So… I’ve been discussing the situation both with Kathy’s husband, who controls her estate, as well as Baen Books. I think we’ll be able to work something out to everyone’s satisfaction so that work can resume on THE SPAN OF EMPIRE. As soon as anything gels,…
by Eric Flint | Feb 13, 2012 | Information Eric will be the guest of honor at SoonerCon 21, June 15-17 2012 in Oklahoma City, OK. http://www.soonercon.com/ Eric will be the master of ceremonies at LibertyCon 25, July 20-22 2012 at the Chatanooga Choo Choo hotel in Chatanooga, TN http://www.libertycon.org/ Eric, and the entire 1632 crew will be holding the 2012 edition of the 1632 Minicon at WorldCon 70 / Chicon 7 Aug 30 through Sept 3 2012 in Chicago. http://chicon.org/ More appearances will be listed as we know them.
by Eric Flint | Apr 13, 2011 | Information | 3 comments For those of you with Kindle e-books, I recently put up a collection of my short fiction in the Kindle store at Amazon. The title of the volume is The Flood Was Fixed & Other Stories>. Some of these are reprints from various magazines but others have never been published before. Included in the collection are three stories that were my initial stab at developing what eventually became the novel Boundary. Dave Freer and I also put up a collection of stories we’ve written together over the years in the Kindle store. The title of the collection is Crawlspace & Other Stories. It includes the long novella “The Genie Out of the Vat” which is the first of the stories in the Rats, Bats & Vats series. The stories in Crawlspace are available for individual purchase as well. Right now, the individual stories in The Flood Was Fixed aren’t available separately, but we’ll be adding that before too long. We’ll also be making the collections available in several other e-book formats, within a short time. We’ll post that here when it’s done. 3 Comments Timothy Edwards on August 30, 2011 at 3:56 PMWhen I heard about Orwell’s 1984 being “retrieved” from the Kindles of purchasers, I decided against _EVER_ having a Kindle – if you don’t want to sell your e-books without DRM, at least provide one I can read on my Nook. Bret Hooper on September 2, 2011 at 10:15 PMDear Eric:Like many others, I am looking forward to the publication, under whatever name, of “1636: Drums Along The . . . .” But please, try to avoid what was a fairly common; no, UNFAIRLY common colonial practice of asking a member of one tribe for the name of an enemy tribe, and then using that name, e.g. the tribal pejorative “mohawk” (cannibal) which a neighbor tribe used for the Kanyengahaga nation, which was the northeasternmost of the five nations,…
by webmaster | Apr 29, 2007 | Eric’s enterprises, Information, SF Sites | 9 comments From Eric Flint: I’m sending this letter to everyone who has at one time or another bought an issue of the Grantville Gazette, the electronic magazine devoted to the 1632 series, or purchased one of the various multi-issue packages we offer. Many of you are regular readers of the magazine. The purpose of this letter is to tell you that we are making a number of major and exciting changes to the magazine, beginning with the next issue. That’s Volume 11, which will be coming out on May 1st. The Grantville Gazette, which Jim Baen and I began as an experiment, has proven to be a very successful venture in electronic publishing. Successful enough, in fact, that beginning with Volume 11 we will doing the following: We’re raising the pay rates for the authors. Up until now, the pay rates for the Gazette have only been semi-pro rates. Beginning with Volume 11, we’ll be paying rates that meet—exceed, in fact—the minimum rates set by Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. SFWA is and has been for decades the recognized professional association for science and fantasy authors. We’re moving to a regular bi-monthly publication schedule. Up until now, the Gazette has been published on an “occasional” basis—meaning whenever we had enough good stories in stock to put out another issue. In practice, for the past year and half, we’ve been maintaining a quarterly schedule, and we’re now at the point where we have more good stories and articles than we can handle without shifting to a bi-monthly publishing schedule. Beginning May 1, therefore, the Gazette will now be published regularly on the first day of the following months: May, July, September, November, January and March. I will start writing a regular serialized story of my own, beginning with Volume 12, coming out in July. An episode of that story will appear in each succeeding…
by webmaster | Jan 17, 2007 | Information, Writing | 14 comments The forthcoming page is somewhat out of date, but until we can get it fixed up, here’s the master’s schedule in his own words, quoting from a Baen’s Bar post on Jan 17, 07 — Loyal Minions Here’s my complete publication schedule for the next year, if you’re interested: January 2007 Flint, editor Grantville Gazette III February 2007 Laumer The Long Twilight & Other Stories Lackey Bedlam’s Edge (Red Fiddler story) May 2007 Flint & Weber 1634: The Baltic War July 2007 Flint, editor The Best of JBU 2006 Flint & Drake The Dance of Time (pb reissue) August 2007 Flint & Freer Pyramid Power Anvil The Trouble With Humans October 2007 Flint & DeMarce 1634: The Bavarian Crisis November 2007 Flint, editor Grantville Gazette II (pb) December 2007 Flint & DeMarce 1634: The Ram Rebellion (pb) January 2008 Flint, editor RING OF FIRE II Laumer Earthblood & Other Stories They originally had BOUNDARY scheduled to come out in paperback in October, but then Toni decided the second half of the year was getting absurdly overloaded with Flint titles (_I_ didn’t think so, whine), so it’ll now come out sometime right after January of 2008. 14 Comments Mark L on January 18, 2007 at 11:19 AMWhat is the difference between the Ring of Fire series and the Grantville Gazette? I am writing a review of GGIII for the Galveston newspaper, soon, and I would like to know. David on January 18, 2007 at 12:00 PMAlso, what is planned for the next Trail of Glory/Arkansas story?David Walters Walt Boyes on January 18, 2007 at 10:08 PMI have a story in Ring of Fire (I), and one coming in Ring of Fire II. The difference between the two Ring of Fire volumes, and the Grantville Gazettes is this: the Gazettes are intended to be a magazine, published first online, and then going to print. Also, the RoF stories are mostly by…
by Eric Flint | Jun 9, 2021 | Salvos Against Big Brother Although this column addresses the controversy surrounding so-called Digital Rights Management, I devoted my first three essays to a discussion of the general principles concerning copyright as such. As I explained, I did that because it’s impossible to discuss DRM intelligently without understanding that all the issues involved are couched within—derive from, actually—the general principles in our society that govern copyright as a whole. Copyright is not an issue sitting over here, with DRM being a different issue sitting over there. In reality, DRM sits right inside of copyright. The link between the two—the cushion that DRM sits on, if you will allow me to develop this into a metaphor—is called “fair use.” It is one of the most critical aspects of copyright law, and has been since the inception of the copyright era in the early eighteenth century. And my metaphor is actually a good one, because “fair use” is exactly that—a cushion. It’s the provision in copyright law—I’m about to lower the bar for this metaphor—that keeps society’s buttocks from getting too badly bruised by the hard limits that copyright places on society’s ability to benefit from creative intellectual or artistic work. But DRM is too heavy. It’s steadily squeezing all of the real substance out of society’s fair use cushion. By now, that cushion isn’t much more than a skimpy little pad. Before too long, the way things are going, it will be gone entirely. The definition of “fair use” is slippery in copyright law, and always has been. In the nature of things, it’s a gray area rather than a sharp line. Trying to define it precisely, in legal terms, poses much the same problem that trying to define pornography does. One person’s filthy disgusting story is another person’s literary masterpiece. Terms which have both been applied, to give just one example, to James Joyce’s famous novel Ulysses. Whatever the…
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 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: 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. 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).…