1636: The Saxon Uprising-ARC (45 page)

She stirred, half-asleep, and nuzzled him. “Of course you should,” she said.

The next morning, at breakfast, his daughter Sepharad weighed in.

“Barry thinks you need a brass band, Daddy.”

He gave Becky an accusing glance.

“I said nothing to them,” she insisted. “It’s obvious to all.”

He looked at Baruch. The three-year-old philosopher-to-be gazed back at him solemnly.

“It’s just in the nature of things, Daddy,” he explained.

“I knew it!” exclaimed his wife.

It was a little unsettling, in fact. Mike steeled his resolve again. As soon as possible, that kid needed to get a Harley-Davidson patch for his jacket.

Jeff Higgins swore he had one, buried somewhere in his old junk. He thought he might have a Cat cap too.

His wife was now giving him a suspicious look. “Hillbillies!” she accused.

“Hey, hon, I was just thinking about how many instruments I should get,” he protested.

“You have no respect!”

Cast of Characters

Afterword

The 1632 series, also sometimes called the Ring of Fire series, is now up to nine novels and nine anthologies of short fiction. That’s what has been produced in paper editions. There is also a bi-monthly electronic magazine devoted to the series, the
Grantville Gazette
. As of the month this novel comes out, the magazine will have published thirty-four issues. If you measure things by word count, which is how authors tend to think, almost three million words have so far been published in paper editions—1,674,000 words in the novels and 1,312,000 in the anthologies. A little over two million words have also been published in purely electronic format in
Gazette
stories and articles, not counting the stories and articles that were reissued in paper editions.

About five million words, all told. To make things still more complicated, the story line of the series is very far from linear. The 1632 series isn’t so much “a” story as it is a complex of stories. (See below for my suggestion for the order in which to read the various volumes.) Any given character is likely to weave in and out of both novels and short fiction, in stories which are often written by several different authors or collaborations of authors.

To give an example of a character who appears in this novel:

Denise Beasley’s best friend Minnie Hugelmair was first introduced into the series in Virginia DeMarce’s story in the first
Grantville Gazette
paper edition, “The Rudolstadt Colloquy.” Thereafter, she reappears in Virginia’s “Mule ‘Round the World” (
Grantville Gazette #7,
electronic edition; Gorg Huff and Paula Goodlett’s “Trommler Records” (in the same electronic issue of the
Gazette
); my story “The Austro-Hungarian Connection” in
Ring of Fire II
; Wood Hughes, “Turn Your Radio On, Episode Three” (
GG
#21, electronic edition); Virginia DeMarce, “Franconia! Parts II and III,” (
GG
#25, electronic edition); my story “Steady Girl” in
Grantville Gazette V
(paper edition); Eric Flint and Virginia DeMarce,
1635: The Dreeson Incident;
Virginia DeMarce, “Or the Horse May Learn to Sing” (
GG
#28, electronic edition; and my
1635: The Eastern Front.
In some of these stories she is simply mentioned, but even so her appearance is a matter of record.

People ask me rather frequently: “How do you keep track of all that?”

The answer is: I don’t.

I couldn’t possibly keep track of it. The 1632 series began with the publication of my novel
1632
in February of 2000. But years ago it became transformed into a collective enterprise. I remain the major author in the series, of course. All of the novels are either written or co-authored by me, and I have stories in all but one of the anthologies. (The one exception is
1635: The Tangled Web.
The stories in that anthology are all written by Virginia DeMarce.) And I have the final say-so over anything that gets published as an editor, or as the publisher, in the case of the electronic magazine.

The analogy I tend to think of is that I’m the old-style conductor of a piano concerto, where I’m both the pianist and the conductor.

Still, there is no way I could possibly keep track of everything. I rely heavily on a group of people who consist of the editorial board of the
Gazette
—that’s the editor herself, Paula Goodlett, along with Karen Bergstralh, Laura Runkle and Rick Boatright—and many of the authors who have been published frequently in the series. Those include Virginia DeMarce, Iver Cooper, Kerryn Offord, Walt Boyes, Gorg Huff, David Carrico, Kim Mackey and Chuck Gannon.

I need to take the time here to thank all of them once again.

In addition, at any given time, many other people have helped me with specific issues. For this volume and the one which preceded it,
1635: The Eastern Front
, I need to extend special thanks to two people:

Danita Ewing provided me with a great deal of help with the medical issues involved with Gustav Adolf’s head injury and the resulting symptoms.

Stanley Roberts has been a big help with Ottoman history, which is a particularly thorny and difficult one for authors of historical fiction. He also wrote the first draft of what became Chapter 30 of this novel. I rewrote that draft and expanded it, but most of Stanley’s prose remains in the text as he originally wrote it.

Whenever someone asks me “what’s the right order?” for reading the 1632 series, I’m always tempted to respond: “I have no idea. What’s the right order for studying the Thirty Years War? If you find it, apply that same method to the 1632 series.”

However, that would be a bit churlish—and when it comes down to it, authors depend upon the goodwill of their readers. So, as best I can, here goes.

The first book in the series, obviously, is
1632.
That is the foundation novel for the entire series and the only one whose place in the sequence is definitely fixed.

Thereafter, you should read either the anthology titled
Ring of Fire
or the novel
1633
, which I co-authored with David Weber. It really doesn’t matter that much which of these two volumes you read first, so long as you read them both before proceeding onward. That said, if I’m pinned against the wall and threatened with bodily harm, I’d recommend that you read
Ring of Fire
before you read
1633.

That’s because
1633
has a sequel which is so closely tied to it that the two volumes almost constitute one single huge novel. So, I suppose you’d do well to read them back to back.

That sequel is
1634: The Baltic War
, which I also co-authored with David Weber
. 1632,
1633, 1634: The Baltic War, 1635: The Eastern Front
and this novel
constitutes what can be considered the “main line” or even the spinal cord of the entire series. Why? First, because it’s in these five novels that I depict the major political and military developments which have a tremendous impact on the entire complex of stories. Secondly, because these “main line” volumes focus on certain key characters in the series—Mike Stearns and Rebecca Abrabanel, first and foremost, as well as Gretchen Richter and Jeff Higgins.

Once you’ve read
1632, Ring of Fire, 1633
and
1634: The Baltic War,
you will have a firm grasp of the basic framework of the series. From there, you can go in one of two directions: either read
1634: The Ram Rebellion
or
1634: The Galileo Affair.

There are advantages and disadvantages either way.
1634: The Ram Rebellion
is an oddball volume, which has some of the characteristics of an anthology and some of the characteristics of a novel. It’s perhaps a more challenging book to read than the Galileo volume, but it also has the virtue of being more closely tied to the main line books.
Ram Rebellion
is the first of several volumes which basically run parallel with the main line volumes but on what you might call a lower level of narrative. A more positive way of putting that is that these volumes depict the changes produced by the major developments in the main line novels, as those changes are seen by people who are much closer to the ground than the statesmen and generals who figure so prominently in books like
1632, 1633,
and
1634: The Baltic War.

Of course, the distinction is only approximate. There are plenty of characters in the main line novels—Thorsten Engler and Eric Krenz spring immediately to mind—who are every bit as “close to the ground” as any of the characters in
1634: The Ram Rebellion.

Whichever book you read first, I do recommend that you read both of them before you move on to
1634: The Bavarian Crisis.
In a way, that’s too bad, because
Bavarian Crisis
is something of a direct sequel to
1634: The Baltic War.
The problem with going immediately from
Baltic War
to
Bavarian Crisis
, however,
is that there is a major political development portrayed at length and in great detail in
1634: The Galileo Affair
which antedates the events portrayed in the Bavarian story.

Still, you could read any one of those three volumes—to remind you, these are
1634: The Ram Rebellion, 1634: The Galileo Affair
and
1634: The Bavarian Crisis
—in any order you choose. Just keep in mind that if you read the Bavarian book before the other two you will be getting at least one major development out of chronological sequence.

After those three books are read…

Again, it’s something of a toss-up between three more volumes: the second
Ring of Fire
anthology and the two novels,
1635: The Cannon Law
and
1635: The Dreeson Incident.
On balance, though, I’d recommend reading them in this order because you’ll get more in the way of a chronological sequence:

Ring of Fire II

1635: The Cannon Law

1635: The Dreeson Incident

The time frame involved here is by no means rigidly sequential, and there are plenty of complexities involved. To name just one, my story in the second
Ring of Fire
anthology, the short novel “The Austro-Hungarian Connection,”
is simultaneously a sequel to Virginia’s story in the same anthology, several stories in various issues of the
Gazette—
as well as my short novel in the first
Ring of Fire
anthology,
The Wallenstein Gambit.

What can I say? It’s a messy world—as is the real one. Still and all, I think the reading order recommended above is certainly as good as any and probably the best.

We come now to Virginia DeMarce’s
1635: The Tangled Web.
This collection of inter-related stories runs parallel to many of the episodes in
1635: The Dreeson Incident
and lays some of the basis for the stories which will be appearing in the next anthology,
1635: The Wars on the Rhine.
This volume is also where the character of Tata who figures in
Eastern Front
and
Saxon Uprising
is first introduced in the series.

You can then go back to the “main line” of the series and read
1635: The Eastern Front
and the volume you hold in your hand,
1636: The Saxon Uprising.
(Yes, I realize how silly it is to tell someone to read a novel who presumably just got finished doing so. But you never know. There are people in the world—I’m one of them, as it happens—who read afterwords before they read the book they’re in.)

That leaves the various issues of the
Gazette,
which are
really
hard to fit into any precise sequence. The truth is, you can read them pretty much any time you choose.

It would be well-nigh impossible for me to provide any usable framework for the thirty-four electronic issues of the magazine, so I will restrict myself simply to the five volumes of the
Gazette
which have appeared in paper editions. With the caveat that there is plenty of latitude, I’d suggest reading them as follows:

Read
Gazette I
after you’ve read
1632
and alongside
Ring of Fire.
Read
Gazettes II
and
III
alongside
1633
and
1634: The Baltic War
, whenever you’re in the mood for short fiction
.
Do the same for
Gazette IV,
alongside the next three books in the sequence,
1634: The Ram Rebellion, 1634: The Galileo Affair
and
1634
:
The Bavarian Crisis.
Then read
Gazette V
after you’ve read
Ring of Fire II,
since my story in
Gazette V
is something of a direct sequel to my story in the
Ring of Fire
volume. You can read
Gazette V
alongside
1635: The Cannon Law
and
1635: The Dreeson Incident
whenever you’re in the mood for short fiction.

And…that’s it, as of now. There are a lot more volumes coming. The next volume of the 1632 series which will be appearing in print is
Ring of Fire III
, in July of this year. My story in that volume is directly connected to this novel and will lay some of the basis for the sequel to this novel. The discerning (that’s a polite way of saying fussbudget) reader will have noticed and perhaps been disturbed by the fact that the Bavarian invasion of the Overpfalz vanished from this novel almost as soon as it was reported in Chapter 21.

That’s because if I’d included that episode in this book it would have loaded it down with a large and unwieldy—and unresolved—sub-plot. So, instead, I will tell that story in
Ring of Fire III.

I’m not sure yet the order in which I will write the next two novels in the series. The direct sequel to this book will pick up from the end of my story in
Ring of Fire III
and cover Mike Stearns’ handling of the assignment which Gustav Adolf gave him in the last chapter of this novel—crush Maximilian of Bavaria. New developments involving mumble mumble will also require Mike to mumble mumble in the course of which he winds up mumble mumbling. The working title of that novel is
1636: Tum te Tum te Tum.

Or I might decide instead to finish a novel I began a while ago and set aside when I realized I was getting ahead of myself. The title of that novel is
1636: The Anaconda Project.
That book will serve as a sequel to my short novel “The Wallenstein Gambit,” which was published in the first of the
Ring of Fire
anthologies, and will tell the story of how Wallenstein—working mostly through Morris Roth—begins the expansion of his new kingdom to the east, by encroaching on the Ruthenian territory under Polish-Lithuanian rule. It will also serve as a companion volume to this novel, by recounting some of the developments in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth which were left offstage here. The attentive reader of this volume will recall that it was mentioned that the hussar Lukasz Opalinski’s older brother Krzysztof and the notorious up-time radical Red Sybolt were off somewhere in Ruthenia stirring up trouble for the Polish powers-that-be. That tale will be told in
1636: The Anaconda Project.