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Grantville Gazette III by Eric Flint — book cover

Grantville Gazette III

by Eric Flint
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Overview

A mysterious cosmic force—the “Ring of Fire”—has hurled the town of Grantville from 20th century West Virginia back to 17th century Europe, and into the heart of the Thirty Years War. With their seemingly magical technology, and their radical ideas of freedom and justice, the time-lost West Virginians have allied with Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, to form the United States of Europe, changing the course of history—in ways both small and large. University students, a restless breed in all centuries, become even more rambunctious in Cambridge, England because of the personal and theological impact of the time-lost Americans. At the same time, American teenagers conquer new financial worlds when their elders are looking the other way. A Lutheran pastor schemes to gain new adherents among the Americans. A Benedictine monk finds a new calling for his order. Practitioners of 20th century medicine and its 17th century counterpart struggle to find common ground in healing the sick and injured. These and other new stories—including a new story by Eric Flint himself—return the reader to one of the most popular series in alternate history science fiction.

Synopsis

A mysterious cosmic force—the “Ring of Fire”—has hurled the town of Grantville from 20th century West Virginia back to 17th century Europe, and into the heart of the Thirty Years War. With their seemingly magical technology, and their radical ideas of freedom and justice, the time-lost West Virginians have allied with Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, to form the United States of Europe, changing the course of history—in ways both small and large. University students, a restless breed in all centuries, become even more rambunctious in Cambridge, England because of the personal and theological impact of the time-lost Americans. At the same time, American teenagers conquer new financial worlds when their elders are looking the other way. A Lutheran pastor schemes to gain new adherents among the Americans. A Benedictine monk finds a new calling for his order. Practitioners of 20th century medicine and its 17th century counterpart struggle to find common ground in healing the sick and injured. These and other new stories—including a new story by Eric Flint himself—return the reader to one of the most popular series in alternate history science fiction.


Publishers Weekly

Offers short pieces, both fictional and factual, inspired by Flint's popular alternative-history Ring of Fire series. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

About the Author, Eric Flint

Eric Flint is the author/creator of the New York Times best-selling Ring of Fire series. His  impressive first novel, Mother of Demons (Baen), was selected by SF Chronicle as one of the best novels of 1997. With David Drake he has written six popular novels in the Belisarius series, including the new novel The Dance of Time, and with David Weber collaborated on 1633, and 1634: The Baltic War, two novels in the Ring of Fire series, and on Crown of Slaves, a best of the year pick by Publishers Weekly. Flint received his masters degree in history from UCLA and was for many years a labor union activist. He lives in East Chicago, IL, with his wife and is working on more books in the best-selling Ring of Fire series.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly

Offers short pieces, both fictional and factual, inspired by Flint's popular alternative-history Ring of Fire series. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

VOYA - Marsha Valance

This third story collection is a welcome addition to the Ring of Fire series about the small twenty-first-century West Virginia town transported to seventeenth-century central Germany. Stories in this new collection, many first written as "fanfic," date from the original cosmic incident that began 1632 (Baen, 2000/VOYA August 2000) and involve many of the same characters. Some stories focus on the porous boundary between these worlds' beliefs and values, such as Virginia DeMarco's amusing Pastor Kastenmayer's Revenge in which a Lutheran minister encourages his younger female congregants to practice conversion through marriage. In Francis Turner's Hobson's Choice, the merchants surrounding Cambridge University send out an innkeeper's daughter to bring news of Grantville, not trusting scholars to know what is important. Other stories examine the adaptation of twenty-first-century ideas to seventeenth-century Germany, such as Wood Hughes's Hellfighters, in which Benedictine monks study modern firefighting techniques. Despite the variety of authors, the tales hold together well, with a solid sense of place and time. Although there are a few weak links among the stories that make up this collection, the credible essays explaining seventeenth-century use of iron and alchemical distillations and the reaction to flintlocks and agricultural mechanization are well worth reading. The stories and essays work together and with the prior novels, setting the stage for future developments. High school and public libraries that purchased the earlier novels should not neglect this anthology, although students without exposure to those books probably will not be interested.

Book Details

Published
May 1, 2008
Publisher
Baen Books
Pages
464
Format
Mass Market Paperback
ISBN
9781416555650

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