| |
1632 Eric Flint
"Gently, daughter!" he admonished. He pressed his hand more firmly against his chest. Balthazar's gray-bearded face was drawn and haggard. His breath came short and quick. Rebecca stared at him. Her own heart was racing with a fear so great it bordered on panic. Something was wrong with her father. His heart . . . The sound of a shouting voice came from outside the carriage. Rebecca recognized the voice. It belonged to the leader of the small group of Landsknecht whom her father had hired in Amsterdam to escort them to Badenburg. But the man's German was so thickly accented that she didn't understand the words themselves. In Eric Flint's novel 1632, the fictional town of Grantville, West Virginia and its power plant are displaced in space-time, through a side effect of a mysterious alien civilization. A hemispherical section of land about three miles in radius measured from the town center is transported back in time and space from April 2000 to May of 1631, from North America to central Germany. The town is thrust into the middle of the Thirty Years' War, in the German province of Thuringia in the Thuringer Wald, near the fictional German free city of Badenburg. Grantville, led by Mike Stearns, president of the local chapter of the United Mine Workers of America, must cope with the town's space-time dislocation, the surrounding raging war, language barriers, and numerous social and political issues, including class conflict, witchcraft, feminism, the reformation and the counter-reformation, among many other factors. One complication is a compounding of the food shortage when the town is flooded by refugees from the war. The 1631 locals experience a culture shock when exposed to the mores of contemporary American society, including modern dress, sexual liberation, and boisterous American-style politics. 1632 is available here from the Baen Free Library. And if you want to read an actual book, click on the link below. |
