Afterword
Rick Boatright
March 19, 1955–July 22, 2021
We dedicated this book to Rick Boatright, partly in the hope that he would live long enough to see it when it was published. Sadly, he didn’t. He didn’t even live long enough to see his own novel, 1637: Dr. Gribbleflotz and the Soul of Stoner, when it came out in September. He died from complications due to pancreatic cancer, and of all cancers pancreatic is probably the most savage and relentless. Less than two months passed between the time Rick was diagnosed with the disease and the time it killed him.
I lost a very good friend on July 22, and I was by no means the only one who did. It is not an exaggeration to say that Rick Boatright was one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. If anyone disliked him, they kept it to themselves—which would have been a very wise move on their part. But I doubt any such person exists. Rick wasn’t “nice” simply in the sense of being courteous and considerate. He was invariably helpful to people.
I won’t say “helpful to me above all,” but I’m in a select group of people whom Rick helped enormously for years—two decades, in my case. I met him not long after the publication of my novel 1632 in February of 2000. I hadn’t originally intended the book to be the beginning of a series. I certainly had no inkling of the huge project it would turn into. (As of now, the Ring of Fire series comprises twenty-six novels of which I am either the author or co-author, thirty-seven novels written by other authors, seventeen anthologies of short fiction, and an electronic magazine that has been in continuous publication since May of 2007 and is now up to ninety-eight issues.)
One of the reasons I hesitated before deciding to create a series based on 1632 was that I knew just how daunting the task of researching the needed material was going to be. I was confident I could handle the historical material, but there was a tremendous amount of technical and scientific material I would also need to . . . Well, I won’t say “master,” because there was no chance of that. But I’d at least need to be knowledgeable enough that I could produce a work of fiction that didn’t quickly become a source of derision and ridicule.
One of those technical fields that I was going to have to learn quickly because it would figure in the second novel of the series (1633, which I co-authored with David Weber) was radio. I’d been listening to radio since I was a toddler. But what did I actually know about it? How ham radio works, the impact of the Maunder Minimum on transmission in the seventeenth century, what sort of aerials my characters would need under conditions X, Y and Z (not to mention A, B and C)—oh, it went on and on and on.
Zip. That’s what I knew. My ignorance was of that profound nature where the ignoramus has no idea where he or she can even start to learn about the subject.
Happily, I had noticed there was this fellow named Rick Boatright who’d been participating actively in the discussion conference on Baen Books’ website that was devoted to the nascent Ring of Fire series. He seemed to know quite a bit about radio. So I got hold of his phone number and called him, asking for his help.
Rick told me later he thought at first that someone was playing a practical joke on him. Since when do authors call members of the hoi polloi on the telephone? (In fact, we do it all the time. One of the things a successful author learns very soon is that you’re dead in the water unless you can build a network of people around you who can compensate for your own folly in presuming you could write a book involving a lot of stuff you don’t have a clue about.)
Rick proved to be invaluable on the subject of radio—and you can find his knowledge and influence concerning radio in many of my books. But what I also realized quickly was that the man’s knowledge was incredibly vast. I don’t remember when I first ran across the term “polymath,” but what I do remember is that I was skeptical of the concept—until I met Rick Boatright.
He liked to share his knowledge, too, and he was very adept at transmitting it in ways that nonpolymaths like myself could grasp relatively quickly and easily. His first career had been that of a high school science teacher, and I think it may well have been his favorite one. (Alas, it doesn’t pay well, especially in some states, so eventually he moved on and set up his own business.)
As the years went by, Rick became a major figure in the fluctuating group of people who are the center of what we often call “the 1632 community” for lack of a better term. And it is a collective enterprise. I occupy a central position in it, true, but it long ago became a literary project that expanded far beyond me.
Rick didn’t write much fiction. A few short stories and vignettes, and he worked with Kerryn Offord in developing the two Doctor Gribbleflotz novels, 1636: The Chronicles of Dr. Gribbleflotz and 1637: Dr. Gribbleflotz and the Soul of Stoner. But his knowledge and many contributions to the series can be found everywhere.
I’m writing this essay of appreciation just one month after Rick passed away. Even in that short span of time, there must have been a dozen times—at least—when my hand started to reach for a telephone so I could call Rick and ask him a question. Nine times out of ten he’d have the answer, and the tenth time he’d know where to look for it. And the conversation itself would be a pleasure to have.
That was Rick Boatright.
Eric Flint
August 24, 2021