The Simpsons

This is an interesting family. These characters really aren’t written about outside of the mainline Baen novels. Even passing mentions are rare. As high-level characters with major political implications in pretty much anything they do, that makes sense, but they really are incredibly well-developed and interesting, given how little “screen time” they really get.

– Bethanne Kim (Publisher, Eric Flint’s 1632 & Beyond magazine)

Baen’s Bar

Comment: David Weber needed a character to become a serious naval expert and influence in 1633, and Simpson was the best choice. That led to Simpson and his wife, Mary, being “rehabilitated.”

12 October 2018 04:44 

It’s more complicated than that. I would have “rehabilitated” Simpson even without the naval and ironclad developments. In 1632, he’s simply a foil for Mike Stearns. He and Mary only appear on stage in two chapters out of 61. For a stand-alone novel, that’s fine. But once the decision was made to turn this into a series, keeping Simpson and his wife Mary as the one-dimensional characters they were in 1632 would have just gotten boring after a while.

Keep in mind that Simpson’s “villainy” in 1632 was not really all that villainous. It’s not as if he betrayed anyone or gave aid and comfort to the enemy. All he did was advance a political program for Grantville that was wrong-headed. So it wasn’t really that big of a stretch to have him get reconciled with Mike by the end of 1633. The ironclad program and the navy was just a very convenient way to do it, as well as killing two birds with one stone since we needed a naval expert anyway. But I would have done it anyway.

About the only major American character in 1632 who winds up drifting the other way was the mine manager, Quentin Underwood. But even that was a pretty limited “drift.” At no point did he betray anyone and he winds up getting killed in BALTIC WAR simply because he’s an arrogant fellow, not because he does anything morally reprehensible.

One of the things I’ve tried not to do in the Ring of Fire series is make anyone a mustachio-twirling “villain,” even though some of the characters like Richelieu and Wallenstein can be utterly ruthless. About the closest we come to outright villains are Duke Maximilian of Bavaria and Richard Boyle, the Earl of Cork. (Leaving aside some minor characters who are just thugs.)

That’s because I have long felt that the worst developments in human history are usually the result of nothing more elevated (or lowered, if you prefer) than greed, selfishness and callousness. People like to claim that the worst developments in human history are the product of “ideology,” be it political or religious. And it’s certainly true that many horrors have been perpetrated by ideology — the Holocaust being probably the most extreme but hardly the only example.

But those sorts of flamboyant evils are like plane crashes. They get all the publicity — but a hell of a lot more people get killed in mundane traffic accidents. It’s the same way with human history. For every person shoved into a gas chamber or shot in the back of the head, at least ten people die from simple neglect, usually the product of someone else’s greed and selfishness. Consider that even today an estimated 3,000,000 children die every year from hunger and malnutrition. There is absolutely no objective excuse for this, since the world has plenty of food — so much, in fact, that governments (including the U.S.) pay farmers NOT to grow food.

What it took Hitler several years to accomplish happens routinely, year after year, due to nothing more than selfishness, indifference, “it ain’t my problem,” narrow-mindedness and callousness. That’s part of what I’ve tried to capture in the Ring of Fire series — allowing, I admit, for the dramatic necessity of emphasizing the more Sturm und Drang aspects of the story.

(If you don’t know what that very handy German expression means, here ’tis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturm_und_Drang)