1634: The Ram Rebellion

Last updated

1634: The Ram Rebellion
1634 The Ram Rebellion-Eric Flint.jpg
Hardcover anthology cover art
Authors Eric Flint
Virginia DeMarce
Cover artist Tom Kidd
LanguageEnglish
Series 1632 series
aka Ring of Fire series
Genre Alternate history
Publisher Baen Books
Publication date
April 25, 2006 (hc)
November 27, 2007 (mmpb)
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePrint (hardback)
Mass Market Paperback
e-book
Pages512 pages, 720 pages (pb)
ISBN 1-4165-2060-0 (hc)
ISBN   1-4165-7382-8 (pb)
ISBN   978-1-4165-7382-1
OCLC 64097638
813/.54 22
LC Class PS3556.L548 A6184 2006
Preceded by 1634: The Galileo Affair  
Followed by 1635: The Cannon Law  

1634: The Ram Rebellion is the seventh published work in the 1632 alternate history book series, [1] and is the third work to establish what is best considered as a "main plot line or thread" of historical speculative focus that are loosely organized and classified geographically. The initial main thread is called the "Western and North-Central Europe thread" (encompassing northern and western Germany, Denmark, England, France, the Low Countries, Sweden and the Baltic); the second plot line, encompassing events in Italy, Spain, the Mediterranean region, and France, the "South European thread", and this book can be considered the starting novel of the "South-Central/South-East thread" being set in southern Germany, Austria, Bavaria, and Bohemia. This geographically organized plot thread actually began in Ring of Fire in Flint's novelette "The Wallenstein Gambit" which is set in Bohemia, Austria, and Germany, which tied into stories in various Grantville Gazettes.

Contents

Contents

The book is hard to classify as it is an oddity, as acknowledged by series creator Eric Flint in the foreword; an anthology in fact, with several longer novelettes sandwiching seemingly unrelated short stories under a (hidden for a while) overarching story line that is capped off by a short novel that finally brings all the seemingly unrelated and disparate contents together in the latter part of the book.

Unlike most works in the 1632 series, much of this book is written from the standpoint of common people "in the street", including Germans trying to cope with Grantville, West Virginia, up-timers trying to cope with their new world around Grantville, and both trying to deal with the problems of two widely different cultures meeting in the new United States of Europe. These merging dynamics are the milieu shaping stories Flint felt necessary to include even though they are set in 1631–1632. Their impact extends throughout the book and into 1634, as well as across political boundaries and battle lines as the historical imperatives developed in this book extend into the direct sequel 1634: The Bavarian Crisis.

Plot summary

The book spot-covers local events and a few related diplomatic discussions from a few days after the Ring of Fire (May–June 1631) to October in the fall of 1634—giving it the largest time footprint of the four—though narrowly focused. The short novel that concludes the work begins in late August 1633 and overlaps many of the shorter works earlier in the book. Two of the three other books set in 1634 refer to the events in the work (usually as the "troubles in Franconia") setting its canonical place in the "greater" neo-historical international politics covered in the other two works.

"Recipes for Revolution"

The two Larkin "Birdie" Newhouse tales along with two flashback vignettes by Flint begin the Ram Rebellion book, all four set in the weeks immediately after the Ring of Fire. In the Flint stories which are sandwiched around the Birdie tales, Mike Stearns goes back to school under the tutelage of Melissa Mailey. Stearns has a problem, he has to get a handle on likely complications from the local population, as the stories are set just a few days after he is elected as Chairman of the Emergency Committee. As a result, Mailey gives Stearns several very thick history books on European history in the era.

Birdie Newhouse has an immediate problem, he's a farmer with most of his farm's arable land 300 years off and a continent away. The stories by Gorg Huff and Paula Goodlett explore the alien land practices and ownership of down-time Germany as Birdie seeks to gain additional lands. Land sales are rare; worse, the lawyers are in control and there are three general levels of vested interest: The owners-in-fact, a variable number of other claimants, and the tenants. The tenants have certain rights and obligations over and above monetary rent while leases are generally for the lesser of three generations or 99 years. In between the owner in fact and the tenants is usually a monetary transaction which gives the rents to any number of claimants—depending upon the finances of the landholding family. The claimants all have a say in the farm operation to some extent, as do the occupants of the farm villages, which also have the right to disapprove or accept new co-farmers, for the land is farmed cooperatively with another set of obligations and entitlements. Birdie can't just go and buy a piece of land, he has to buy it from three different and diverse groups of people... and get them all to agree to terms. As the story notes, seventeenth century Germany was a lawyer's paradise.

"Enter the Ram"

Flo Richards is a farmer's wife with four grown children who had bought a small flock of type C Delaine Merino sheep and some angora rabbits before the Ring of Fire in the hope that she'd see more of her youngest daughter, Jen, once she'd finished her studies out of town. The Ring of Fire had consequently left Jan behind in the present in which Flo dealt with this loss by concentrating on her livestock. She and her husband JD have local Germans living with them as partners now that farming has become more labour-intensive. Flo's laments about the poor quality wool from the locally obtained ram (who comes to be known as Brillo for that reason) strike a chord with someone and subsequently a number of 'Brillo fables' start to appear in the local broadsheet; the fables concern the titular ram escaping from his pen and interfering with her merino breeding program. The ram's fame spreads through Grantville out into the rest of Germany. The Women's League of Voters uses a Ram's Head as its emblem, schoolchildren sing songs about Brillo, and even adapt it into a ballet.

"The Trouble in Franconia"

With the example of future Grantville, a peasant revolt becomes a revolutionary movement in the fractured Holy Roman Empire south and east of Thuringia while the Machiavellian maneuvers in the neo-historical governments and various field armies now dance to counter-act those aimed at the Americans' new heartland. Up-timers, from the original USA space-time want the serfs to succeed and liberate themselves—but also know what a bloodbath the French Revolution became and various individuals act to help one and prevent the others. Avoiding that path will take all sorts of resources and efforts, and Americans from both uptime and down-time act resolutely to mitigate the problems, diplomacy to head off wars headed by authoritarians threatened by the new American ideals, and a deft appreciation of when not to fight and dangle an irresistible carrot instead.

"The Ram Rebellion"

In Franconia, schoolteacher Constantin Ableidinger has been reading Common Sense by Thomas Paine. He also finds the Brillo stories interesting. The farmers in Franconia (and Thuringia for that matter) have a history of dissent concerning serfdom and Mike Stearns has hopes of getting some fundamental changes made in the way that Franconia is run as a result of a farmer's rebellion of sorts. He neglects to include this in the briefing given to the civil servants sent down to administer Franconia although these people, Johnny F. and Noelle Murphy, among others have an effect on the schoolteacher's "Ram rebellion".

Literary significance and reception

Dana Blankenhorn of ZDNet called the book "a sort of open source novel" as a way of describing how Eric Flint invited other authors to contribute stories to this book in which it extends the franchise. [2] Another reviewer wrote that "the book gets mired down in detail. It was just too much information." [3]

1634: The Ram Rebellion was listed on the Locus (magazine) Hardcovers Bestsellers List for two months in a row during 2006, topping at number 2. [4] [5]

Related Research Articles

<i>1632</i> (novel) 2000 novel by Eric Flint

1632 (2000) is an alternate history novel by American author Eric Flint, the initial novel in the best-selling series of the same name.

<i>The Grantville Gazette</i> 2004 anthology of fan fiction stories

The Grantville Gazette is the first of a series of professionally selected and edited paid fan fiction anthologies set within the 1632 series inspired by Eric Flint's novel 1632. The electronically published the Grantville Gazettes, which are reaching long novel length with regularity, now make up the majority of the series in terms of words in print. Flint as series owner and editor accounts all as canonical. The Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) recognizes published stories within the Gazettes as qualified credentials for membership—which membership requires a writer to have three published works as prerequisites.

<i>1632</i> series Novel series

The 1632 series, also known as the 1632-verse or Ring of Fire series, is an alternate history book series and sub-series created, primarily co-written, and coordinated by American author Eric Flint and published by Baen Books.

<i>Ring of Fire</i> (anthology)

Ring of Fire is the third published book by editor-author-historian Eric Flint of the 1632 series, an alternate history series begun in the novel 1632. The Ring of Fire is both descriptive of the cosmic event as experienced by the series' characters, but also is at times used as the name for the series itself. The series is set in war-torn Europe during the middle of the Thirty Years' War.

<i>1633</i> (novel) 2002 novel by David Weber and Eric Flint

1633 is an alternate history novel co-written by American authors Eric Flint and David Weber published in 2002, and sequel to 1632 in the 1632 series. 1633 is the second major novel in the series and together with the anthology Ring of Fire, the two sequels begin the series hallmarks of being a shared universe with collaborative writing being very common, as well as one that, far more unusually, mixes many canonical anthologies with its works of novel length. That is because Flint wrote 1632 as a stand-alone novel, though with enough "story hooks" for an eventual sequel, and because Flint feels "history is messy" and the books reflect that real life is not a smooth, polished linear narrative flow from the pen of some historian but is instead clumps of semi-related or unrelated happenings that somehow sum up how different people act in their own self-interests.

The Grantville Gazettes were a series of anthologies of short stories set in the 1632 universe introduced in Eric Flint's novel 1632 that was published as a bi-monthly electronic magazine from 2003 until shortly after Flint's death in 2022.

<i>Grantville Gazette II</i> 2006 anthology of fan fiction stories

Grantville Gazette II is the third collaborative anthology published in print set in the 1632-verse shared universe in what is best regarded as a canonical sub-series of the popular alternate history that began with the February 2000 publication of the hardcover novel 1632 by author-historian Eric Flint. Baen Books and Flint decline the distinction, counting this book as the sixth published work. Overall it is also the third anthology in printed publication in the atypical series, which consists of a mish-mash of main novels and anthologies produced under popular demand after publication of the initial novel, which was written as a stand-alone work.

<i>1634: The Galileo Affair</i> 2004 novel by Eric Flint

1634: The Galileo Affair is the fourth book and third novel published in the 1632 series. It is co-written by American authors Eric Flint and Andrew Dennis and was published in 2004. It follows the activities of an embassy party sent from the United States of Europe (Grantville) to Venice, Italy, where the three young Stone brothers become involved with the local Committees of Correspondence and the Inquisition's trial of Galileo Galilei.

<i>1634: The Baltic War</i> 2007 novel by David Weber and Eric Flint

1634: The Baltic War is a sequel to both the first-of-type sequels, Ring of Fire and 1633, co-written by American authors Eric Flint and David Weber published in 2007. It had to await schedule co-ordination by the two authors, which proved difficult and delayed the work by nearly two years. It continues theMain or Central European thread centered on the newly organized United States of Europe birthed in Central Germany under the protection-by-arms of Emperor Gustavus Adolphus and in particular, the role of the citizens of Grantville, now of Thuringia, and the capital city of Magdeburg have to play on the world stage. With the stability imposed by the protection of Gustavus's armies, up-timers began migrating to other locales in the "neohistories" world as the year 1633 closed.

<i>Grantville Gazette III</i> 2004 anthology of fan fiction stories

The Grantville Gazette III is the third collaborative and the fourth anthology in the 1632 series edited by the series creator, Eric Flint. It was published as an e-book by Baen Books in October 2004. It was released as a hardcover in January 2007, and trade paperback in June 2008 with both editions containing Flint's story "Postage Due".

<i>1634: The Bavarian Crisis</i> 2007 novel by Virginia DeMarce and Eric Flint

1634: The Bavarian Crisis is a novel in the alternate history 1632 series, written by Virginia DeMarce and Eric Flint as sequel to Flint's novella "The Wallenstein Gambit"; several short stories by DeMarce in The Grantville Gazettes; 1634: The Ram Rebellion; and 1634: The Baltic War. The novel's first draft was completed in 2005, before work on The Baltic War began. Many chapters of that "early draft version" were available on line, but the final production reached print on October 1, 2007.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Virginia DeMarce</span> American historian and science fiction author

Virginia Easley DeMarce is an American historian who specializes in early modern European history, as well as a New York Times Best Selling author in the 1632 series collaborative fiction project. She has done genealogical work on the origins of the Melungeon peoples.

<i>Ring of Fire II</i> 2008 anthology by Eric Flint

Ring of Fire II is a 2008 anthology created by editor-author-historian Eric Flint. It is the second anthology in the 1632 series following after Ring of Fire (2004).

<i>1635: The Dreeson Incident</i> 2008 novel by Eric Flint

1635: The Dreeson Incident (2008) is a novel in the alternate history 1632 series, written by Virginia DeMarce and Eric Flint, as a sequel to Flint's novella 1634: The Bavarian Crisis.

<i>1635: The Tangled Web</i> 2009 novel by Virginia DeMarce

1635: The Tangled Web is a novel in the alternate history 1632 series, written by Virginia DeMarce.

<i>1636: The Saxon Uprising</i> 2011 novel by Eric Flint

1636: The Saxon Uprising is an alternate history novel by Eric Flint in the 1632 series, first published in hardcover by Baen Books on March 29, 2011, with a paperback edition following from the same publisher in March 2012. It is a direct continuation of 1635: The Eastern Front. The threads mentioned in this novel are taken up in 1637: The Polish Maelstrom.

<i>1635: The Eastern Front</i> 2010 novel by Eric Flint

1635: The Eastern Front is an alternate history novel by Eric Flint in the 1632 series, first published in hardcover by Baen Books on October 5, 2010, with a paperback edition following from the same publisher in November 2011. It is a sequel to 1635: The Tangled Web and is directly continued by 1636: The Saxon Uprising.

<i>1636: The Kremlin Games</i> 2012 alternative history novel

1636: The Kremlin Games is a novel in the 1632 series written by Gorg Huff and Paula Goodlett along with Eric Flint. It is the fourth book in the series to be listed on the New York Times bestseller list for hardcover fiction. This book reached number 30 on the NY Times list during a single week in June 2012. Besides being listed on the NY Times Best Seller list, 1636: The Kremlin Games was also listed on the Locus Hardcovers Bestsellers List for the month of September in 2012 at number 6.

<i>1636: The Devils Opera</i> 2013 novel by David Carrico and Eric Flint

1636: The Devil's Opera is a stand-alone novel in the alternative history 1632 series with minor character overlaps. Published on October 1, 2013 the book is written by David Carrico and Eric Flint. It is a semi-detective novel set in a growing industrial city that is a continuation of two series of stories that David Carrico had originally written in the electronic versions of the Grantville Gazette that were serialized over several issues and later compiled into the compilation 1635: Music and Murder, one series involving criminal investigation and crime fighting and other series involving music and social revolution.

<i>1636: Seas of Fortune</i> 2014 anthology of stories by Iver Cooper

1636: Seas of Fortune is an anthology of short stories written by Iver Cooper and set in the 1632 series. The anthology was released in the United States on January 7, 2014. It is divided into two roughly equal novella-length parts, Stretching Out and Rising Sun. Each part ("braid") consists of several linked ("braided") short stories, seven in the case of Stretching Out and five in Rising Sun. The compilation was published in trade paperback in 2014 and in mass market paperback in 2015. The book received moderate reviews, with respectable sales. Stretching Out is set in northern South America and the Caribbean while Rising Sun is set in Japan, in the North Pacific, and on the west coast of North America.

References

  1. "Uchronia: The Assiti Shards (1632) Series". www.uchronia.net.
  2. Blankenhorn, Dana (July 18, 2007). "Open source content moves forward". ZDNet . Archived from the original on August 11, 2011.
  3. Linger, Doug. "1634: The Ram Rebellion". Doug's Book Reviews. Archived from the original on April 29, 2014. Retrieved April 29, 2014.
  4. "Locus Bestsellers, July 2006". Locus . July 2006.
  5. "Locus Bestsellers, August 2006". Locus . August 2006.