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April 30, 2007
Eric Flint: A Liberal Hawk Novelist?
Over the weekend I finished reading the alt-history novel "1632" by Eric Flint. About a town in West Virginia that gets hurled back in time to Germany in 1632, the book has spawned sequels, fan sites and a whole sub-culture, as this site shows. The first book was a fast read, sometimes fun, sluggish in other places, reminding me of Stephen King's "The Stand" in that it could benefit from judicious editing. Still, I can't argue with success.
The book also has a strong Jewish angle, involving a Sephardic family with a dark-haired, olive-skinned, spirited lass, Rebecca Abrabanel, who plays a major role in the book.
What really interested me was Flint's "Author's Afterward." He made some points that qualify him as a novelist of the Liberal Hawk persuasion -- in fact, his gun-toting characters would probably enjoy reading Kesher Talk and some of the more Second Amendment-oriented blogs.
Flint wrote,
Part of the reason I chose to write this novel is because I am more than a little sick and tired of two characteristics of most modern fiction, including science fiction.
The first is that the common folk who built this country and keep it running -- blue-collar workers, schoolteachers, farmers, and the like -- hardly ever appear. If they figure at all, it is usually as spear carriers -- or, more often than not, as a bastion of ignorance and bigotry. That is especially true of people from such rural areas as West Virginia. Hicks and hillbillies: a general, undifferentiated mass of darkness.The second is the pervasive cynicism which seems to be the accepted "sophisticated" wisdeom of so many of today's writers. (Not all, thankfully.) I will have no truck with it. . . .
As for the coal miners who are central to the story, people may think the portrait unrealistic. That is their problem, not mine.
As Flint's website shows, the guy is a writing machjne, and I'm eager to see how his style develops as the 1632 series unfolds.
Van | 04/30/07 at 06:28 AM | Categories: Liberal hawks and friends
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Comments
The whole series is pretty good. I'd put in the same class politically as Card and Simmons.
epaminondas | April 30, 2007 07:18 PM
Flint is a Trotskyist. I've met him at sf conventions.
Joseph T Major | April 30, 2007 08:59 PM
Flint is a Trotskyist.
I had the general impression he was pretty left, both from his bio and from the book, but I couldn't pin down which particular denomination he belonged to.
chuck | May 1, 2007 12:45 AM
I really like his fiction, but not his politics on the Baen.com discussion board he has been referred to as Eric the Red LOL
But credit where credit is due he types some wicked prose and has been the driving force behind the Baen Free Electronic Library.
So if you go here
click on Authors and then on Eric Flint you can access 4 of the 1632 universe books a lot of other good reading by him and other Baen Authors too.
On the Baen's Bar he hangs out at
Mutter of Demons
Eric Flint mutters about his books
Dan Kauffman | May 2, 2007 03:46 AM
The 1632 universe is a very good read and, because of the number of people involved, promises a new type of ongoing, collaborative and yet highly coordinated universe for some time yet. The strength is not in the first book, which can be quite fun, but in the depth in which the entire course of human events are explored. It has been some time since we have seen the common man put into strange places... Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen from H. Beam Piper comes immediately to mind, as well as the Fuzzy books from the same author with a prospector as the central protagonist, but then an interesting gamut from thereon out.
The other series that just finished up was the collaboration between David Drake and Eric Flint which plays to the strength of both authors: the Belisarius series. Excellent work in forethought and plotting, and giving a good range of interesting characters and fascinating look at that era in history.
As for the rest of Flint's work... from the three or four other novels I've read... it suffers and badly. He will show a spark here and there, but beyond that, little of interest. Never met the man, so can't say much on that.
A bit more to my liking was the SWORDS science-fantasy series (part of the larger Ardneh/Black Throne world) by Fred Saberhagen, which was slow for the first three books, but then quite fast paced as he hit his stride for the rest of that long series. His Mask of the Gods series, or whatever it is, is far more light-hearted and a good romp through mythology with a twist to it. And many of the Berserker books are just plain excellent. His Dracula books vary, widely, but the Holmes/Dracula file and An Old Friend of the Family are some of the better on the more realistic side of the vampire genre.
Alan Dean Foster, features future ordinary people in the extraordinary and often the well seasoned veterans totally out of their depth. Nothing like a lethal planet to strip hubris away from a person! And the Damned series does, indeed feature ordinary Americans put into a nasty interstellar war situation... little did those aliens ever suspect what they had stumbled across.
There is some truth to the stereotyping of rural America in literature, but SF has had a wide and varied presentation of it through the decades often adhering to common values through extraordinary events to find a way through. A concentration on rural America like the 1632 series is unique, however, and diverse because of the community backing it and gets more interesting as time goes on...
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| May 3, 2007 07:36 PM
