1634: The Baltic War (Ring of Fire)
by David Weber, Eric Flint
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Book Summary Information
Author: David Weber, Eric FlintEdition: Hardcover
Published: 2007-05-01
ISBN: 141652102X
Number of pages: 752
Publisher: Baen
Book Reviews of 1634: The Baltic War (Ring of Fire)
Book Review: Not quite as good as earlier 163x books
Summary: 4 Stars
1634: The Baltic War continues the story of Grantville, a small town from West Virginia thrown back in time to the middle of the Thirty Years' War. It's now three years since Grantville was transported, and the Swedish-led state built around the new town is facing a tumultuous series of battles against its multifarious enemies, the League of Ostend, an alliance of Spain, France, England, and Denmark.
The book deals primarily with events along the Baltic coast, where the new American-built ironclads put to sea, have to run a gauntlet of fire, and eventually engage the Danish fleets that disrupt traffic between Sweden and Germany. As you might expect, there's plenty of action, and readers who have been disappointed with the lack of explosions in the last few installments of the series may be pleasantly surprised. If you haven't read the previous books, read those first. There's a CD inside the front cover of the hardcover that contains electronic versions of the previous books, or they can be downloaded from Baen's website. Any reader that jumps into this book without having read the previous volumes is going to be confused and won't get as much out of it.
So let's get into the good and bad.
The Good:
It's action-packed, and for people who tired of the small-town feel of The Ram Rebellion and most of the Grantville Gazette stories, that may be a welcome change. It's written by Eric Flint, so the writing is on the whole better than in any of the fan-written works. It's fast-paced, and gives an excellent overview of almost everything going on in northern Europe during this time. It flows quickly and is a quick read -- I was able to finish it in approximately 7 hours of reading, but I'm a fairly fast reader. It provides a lot of detail for people new to the series, and for people who have read everything written in the 163x series, it's definitely recommended. Easily the third-best book in the entire series, if not second.
The Bad:
If anything, the story may move too quickly. There are (at last count) four main plot lines, and numerous minor ones working in the book. New readers will be thoroughly confused, and you have to have read previous books to fully understand what's going on. Because of the many plots, each plotline gets a somewhat light treatment. There's not enough fleshing out of the various plots taking place. If you understand that this book is only one part of a whole series, it makes more sense, but it's still somewhat annoying.
There was originally supposed to be a separate book dealing with the events in the Tower of London and the people imprisoned there, but that plot was folded into this book. I think it was a mistake to do so -- it crowds this book and makes you hurry through that story, which really deserves its own book.
Another complaint is that it wraps things up too easily. The main plots -- that of Denmark, England, and France, are largely wrapped up at the end of this book, and I got the sense that Eric Flint seemed to be tiring of the whole thing. He seems to be simply setting the stage for the fan-written associate books to continue the Italian, Bavarian, and other plot lines without his assistance. Given that he's probably been consumed with this story for almost a decade now, it's understandable, but doesn't increase my enjoyment of this particular book.
The Mary-Sue factor is an additional problem. With any long-running series of books, there's a tendency to keep promoting your characters, rather than have them face setbacks in their career that might otherwise limit their point of view. That's something that's true here. There aren't that many ordinary-people point of view characters anymore. In this book, it's almost entirely about great leaders, people at the forefront of battles, or at momentous turning points. For this series, that attitude makes a certain kind of sense. Flint takes care of the main characters, and his associate writers cover everything else, and that's that.
But that attitude won't help new readers to the series, and even for me, it felt somewhat odd. We do see Frank Jackson, a prominent general in the first two books, reduced to an up-time advisor to the Swedish commander, something completely plausible given the circumstances, but given the fact that he has but a few paragraphs in the entire novel, it doesn't make much of an effect, and only serves to emphasize the lack of other characters' faults.
The death of one of the "major" uptime characters also serves to highlight this absence. It's an often-referred to character, but not a POV one, and one who was universally disliked by the POV characters. His loss doesn't resound in the way the loss of a POV character might. That's one thing I do enjoy about Turtledove's books -- you're never certain when someone might be written out of the story. Here, there's a fairly strong expectation that we're going to be dealing with these people throughout the life of the series.
One thing that I had been expecting from snippets and previews -- the death of Gustavus Adolphus -- did not come to pass, something I felt would've helped the story along. Hopefully, a major character will die in the next book and serve to detract from the feeling of Mary-Sueism that I got from this book.
One final problem, though minor at this point, is that Flint seems to be falling into Harry Turtledove's problem of repeating dialogue and description. At points in the story, I had the feeling that I had read a particular line before. I would look back at previous chapters (Thank God for the search function in the electronic version) and find the same words or almost the same words having been in another section. I fear that some of the problem is the fact that Flint doesn't seem to be trying as hard with this story as he did with 1632 and 1633. If that's the case, I almost hope that he leaves future books in the hands of his associate writers.
Summary of 1634: The Baltic War (Ring of Fire)
The Baltic War which began in the novel 1633 is still raging, and the time-lost Americans of Grantville?the West Virginia town hurled back into the seventeenth century by a mysterious cosmic accident?are caught in the middle of it. Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden and Emperor of the United States of Europe, prepares a counter-attack on the combined forces of France, Spain, England, and Denmark?former enemies which have allied in the League of Ostend to destroy the threat to their power that the Americans represent?which are besieging the German city of Luebeck. Elsewhere in war-torn Europe, several American plans are approaching fruition. Admiral Simpson of Grantville frantically races against time to finish the USE Navyhips?desperately needed to break the Ostender blockade of the Baltic ports. A commando unit sent by Mike Stearns to England prepares the rescue the Americans being held in the Tower of London. In Amsterdam, Rebecca Stearns continues three-way negotiations with the Prince of Orange and the Spanish Cardinal-Infante who has conquered most of the Netherlands. And, in Copenhagen, the captured young USE naval officer Eddie Cantrell tries to persuade the King of Denmark to break with the Ostender alliance, all while pursuing a romantic involvement with one of the Danish princesses.General Books
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