THE MAELSTROM THAT IS EUROPE,
COMPLICATED BY IRON,
LOVE AND 20TH CENTURY AMERICANS

The Thirty Years War continues to ravage 17th century Europe, but a new force is gathering power and influence: the United States of Europe, forged from an alliance between Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, and the West Virginians from the 20th century, led by Mike Stearns, who were hurled centuries into the past by a mysterious cosmic accident.

This troubled century was full of revolutions and plans for more revolutions before the Americans arrived, and gave every would-be revolutionary an example of a revolution that succeeded. Europe is a pot coming to a boil, and Mike Stearns finds himself walking the fine line between keeping the pot boiling while keeping it from boiling over and destroying the USE in the process.

The USE has the know-how of 20th century technology, but needs iron and steel to make the machines. The iron mines of the upper Palatinate were rendered inoperable by wartime damage, and American ingenuity is needed on the spot to pump them out and get the metal flowing again—a mission that will prove more complicated than anyone expects. First, because the expedition sent to revitalize the mining industry in the upper Palatinate walks into the middle of a ferocious battle between the USE and the Duke of Bavaria. Second, because in the maelstrom that is Europe, even a 20th century copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica can precipitate a crisis from the most unexpected quarters. The young and beautiful daughter of the Austrian emperor, sent to marry the Duke of Bavaria for reasons of state, comes to an unforeseen conclusion based on her study of up-time history. The decision she makes as a result transforms the Bavarian war into a crisis for all of Europe.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Eric Flint is a popular star of SF and fantasy. 1634: The Baltic War, a collaboration with David Weber, was the latest New York Times best seller in the Ring of Fire series. His first novel for Baen, Mother of Demons, was picked by Science Fiction Chronicle as a best novel of the year. His novel 1632, which launched the Ring of Fire series, won widespread critical praise, as from Publishers Weekly, which called him "an SF author of particular note, one who can entertain and edify in equal, and major, measure." A longtime machinist, and labor union activist with a master's degree in history, he currently resides in northwest Indiana with his wife Lucille.

Virginia DeMarce, after jobs as peculiar as counting raisins for the Calif. Dept. of Agriculture, received her Ph.D. in Early Modern European History from Stanford University. She has published a book on German military settlers in Canada after the American Revolution and has served as president of the National Genealogical Society. She taught at Northwest Missouri State University and at George Mason University. She has had stories in the Ring of Fire anthology and Grantville Gazette (#1), and more stories in the online Grantville Gazettes. She has three grown children and five grandchildren, and lives in Arlington, VA, with her husband.

The Great Revolt is On!

Europe, 1634. With the example of future Grantsville, U.S.A., a small town thrown back in time by a cosmic accident, a peasant revolt becomes a revolutionary movement. You're from the future. You want the serfs to liberate themselves-but you also know what a bloodbath the French Revolution became. Avoiding that possibility will take all American horse-trading diplomacy you can muster. The stakes: an explosion that could cover half the continent in blood!

Alternate history master Eric Flint and exciting newcomer Virginia DeMarce fire another exciting volley in Flint's engrossing "Grantsville" chronicles.

"[W]itty, tightly written alternative history."
—Publishers Weekly on Eric Flint

The Thirty Years War continues to ravage 17th century Europe, but a new force is gathering power and influence: the Confederated Principalities of Europe, an alliance between Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, and the West Virginians from the 20th century led by Mike Stearns who were hurled centuries into the past by a mysterious cosmic accident.

While the old entrenched rulers and manipulators continue to plot against this new upstart nation, everyday life goes on in Grantville, the town lost in time, with librarians, firefighters, and garbage collectors trying to make do under unusual circumstances. And what better place for an undercover spy from France than working with the garbage collectors, examining 20th century machines that others throw out and copying the technology (though he wishes one device—the paper shredder—had been left behind in the future).

There are more sinister agents at work, however. One of them, Ducos, almost succeeded in assassinating the Pope, but his plan was ruined by quick action by a few Americans. Now, the would-be assassin not only has a score to settle, but has also decided on two excellent targets: Grantville's leader Mike Stearns and his wife Rebecca. . . .

Though the Thirty Years Wars continues to ravage 17th century Europe, history as it once happened has been strongly deflected by the new force which is rapidly gathering power and influence: the United States of Europe, an alliance between Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, and the West Virginians from the 20th Century led by Mike Stearns who were hurled centuries into the past by a mysterious cosmic accident-the Ring of Fire.

The USE has know-how of 20th century technology, but the American traditions of freedom and justice is having an even stronger impact on Europe, and the rulers of Europe are powerless to stuff the Grantville genie back into the bottle.

Virginia DeMarce, a trained historian and co-author of the New York Times best seller, 1635: The Bavarian Crisis, continues the saga of the time-lost Americans as seen through the eyes of both Americans and Europeans, as the Americans try to make sense of the strange world into which they have been hurled, and the Europeans try to understand the abilities and behavior of the visitors from the future. The result is a volume that will be irresistible to the thousands of fans of the Ring of Fire series.

"In the world the West Virginians of Grantville came from, the borderlands between France and Germany had been a source of turmoil for centuries. In the new universe created by the Ring of Fire, the situation isn't any better. The chaotic condition of the German lands has been ended--for a time, at least. And the near-century long war between Spain and the Netherlands has finally been resolved.

But now France is unstable. The defeat of Richelieu's forces in the Ostend War has weakened the Red Cardinal's grip on political power and emboldened his enemies, Foremost among them is King Louis XIII's ambitious younger brother, Monsieur Gaston. An inveterate schemer and would-be usurper, Gaston's response to the new conditions in France is to launch a military adventure. He invades the Duchy of Lorraine. Soon, others are drawn into the conflict. The Low Countries ruled by King Ferdinand and Duke Bernhard's newly formed Burgundy, a kingdom-in-all-but-name, send their own troops into Lorraine. Chaos expands and spreads up and down the Rhine.

It isn't long before the mightiest and most deadly army enters the fray--the legions of pestilence. Bubonic plague and typhus lead the way, but others soon follow: dysentery, deadly and disfiguring smallpox, along with new diseases introduced by the time-displaced town of Grantville. The war is on. All the wars--and on all fronts. Can the medical knowledge of the up-time Americans be adapted and spread fast enough to forestall disaster? Or will their advanced military technology simply win one war in order to lose the other and much more terrible one? "

Ever since the assassination of King Louis XIII and the overthrow of his chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu, France has been in political and military turmoil. The possibility—even the likelihood—of revolution hovers in the background. The new king Gaston, whom many consider an usurper, is no friend of France’s Protestants, known as the Huguenots. The fears and hostility of the Huguenots toward the French crown have only been heightened by the knowledge brought back in time by the Americans of the town of Grantville. Half a century in the future, the French king of the time would revoke the Edict of Nantes of 1598, which proclaimed that the rights of Huguenots would be respected. At the center of all this turmoil is the universally recognized leader of the Huguenots: Duke Henri de Rohan. He knows from the same up-time history books that he is “scheduled” to die less than two years in the future and he has pressing problem on his hands. His estranged wife and brother are siding with the usurper Gaston and plotting against him. Still worse, his sole child and heir is his nineteen-year-old daughter Marguerite. He believes he has less than two years to find a suitable husband for her—but acceptable Calvinist noblemen, French or foreign, are sparse at the moment. What’s a father to do?

How to succeed at spying without really trying

Pranksters and scammers from way back, Paolo Fucilla and Carlo Rigatti fought for Spain at the Wartburg and survived.

Curious about the people who had beaten them so handily, they went to Grantville. Whatever their other faults, they were serious about keeping their oaths. When they promised not to take up arms they meant it. In Grantville, they got in trouble again and skipped town.

Looking for a job that didn’t include being shot at with napalm, they decided to try their hand at spying. It was a “Here, hold my beer and watch this” inspiration. It wasn’t their first, and it wouldn’t be their last.

They went to work for the Archbishop of Salzburg. But spies need cover stories, so they decided to sell office supplies. It was supposed to be a single job, so they didn’t bother to tell the manufacturer that they were now the sales reps for Vignelli Business Machines.

Watch as Paolo and Carlo demonstrate the kind of trouble they can get into.

The Ring of Fire that transported the town of Grantville from West Virginia in the year 2000 to the region of Thuringia in the middle of Europe in the year 1631 produced an enormous cascade of changes in world history. Some of those changes were big, others were huge—and some were more modest in scale. Modest, at the least, to the universe, if not necessarily to those immediately affected.

Count Ludwig Guenther of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt builds a Lutheran church on his own land, not far from Grantville, and calls in a Saxon pastor of a Phillipist bent to serve the Lutheran refugee population of the area. Shortly thereafter, in April 1634, the pastor's older daughter meets and elopes with a Catholic up-timer, which prompts Kastenmayer to get Lutheran girls to marry unchurched up-timers and thereby recruit them into the parish.

In the years that follow, Pastor Kastenmeyer copes with both existing ecclesio-political strands of down-time religion (from Stiefelite Lutheran heretics to Flacian Lutheran ultra-orthodox) and the strange new up-time world of shorts, blue jeans, and unknown religious denominations. His struggles and travails have a surprisingly revolutionary impact on seventeenth-century Lutheranism—perhaps to no one’s greater surprise than the pastor himself.