Customer Reviews

1634: The Baltic War (Ring of Fire)

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

If you liked 1632, you'll love this book. It directly continues the story, as told in 1632 and 1633, so you don't have to worry about all of the other little side stories (i.e. the Grantville Gazette, etc.).

While it starts off a little slowly, it really does an excellent job of tying up many of the loose ends of the story, and there are quite a few of them. It deals with the American captives in the Tower of London, along with the rescue attempt that was launched at the end of 1633. It deals with the Spanish seige of Amsterdam. It deals with the Blockade at Luebeck, and the power of the ironclads, as well as really making Simpson a much more likeable character. It also deals with my favorite two characters, Julie and Alex Mackie, as well as dealing with how the force structure of the army works. And finally, it deals with Denmark and the situation that Eddie Cantrell finds himself in.

All in all, it takes all of those storylines, as well as adding a few more, and weaves them together so that it's neither boring, nor is it overly confusing the way some fo Harry Turtledove's stories can get.

I highly recommend this book, and also 1632 & 1633 as well. 1632 is more of a feel-good book, but Eric (Flint), David (weber) and the late Jim Baen have turned this into a truly worthwhile and entertaining series that will simply keep you turning the pages until is it finished.

I truly hope that they continue the series, as I'd like to see this brave new world continue to evolve and grow. To read this book now, just go to baen.com and sign into the webscriptions.net to read the Advanced Reader Copy. It's well worth it.

This is a very frustrating book to review simply because if I start praising it I'm going to run out of superlatives in a hurry.

It isn't so much a "single novel" as a set of *VERY* well-written novellas and novelettes interweaved with each other, and some of the consequences of actions taken in one story, such as the "Tower of London Rescue", have consequences for others, such as the "Negotiations With Spain" story. Flint and Weber are masters of their craft, and the joints don't show.

Aside from the fact that this book has everything a reader of this kind of story has a right to expect, combat, politics, treachery, honor, courage, and yes, just a dash of "knives in the night," neither author ever lets you forget that history is the ultimate "people-watching."

If you get this book as a hardcover, the publisher has bound a CD into it which has the earlier books in the saga on it in electronic form, so if your local bookstore is unfortunate enough not to carry the other books, you can still catch up on the saga from the eCopies, which are NOT encrypted and can be stuffed into your PDA, read on your laptop, printed, or fed into a text-to-speech engine.

I strongly recommend this book, and I'll leave you with an example of just how good the writing is. The book's ending is absolutely howlingly funny. But, to understand WHY it's so funny that when I got there I spent ten minutes choking on laughter, you have to read the WHOLE book first!

Now THAT'S good writing! Thank you, Eric and David. Please, keep 'em coming.

After 2 year wait 1634: The Baltic War is finally out. This is an interesting marriage of 2 very good authors with different writing styles, life experiences, and (most importantly) politics. Of course in comparison to 17th Century European politics, they seem like radical socialists, nae, almost anarchists. I wish our congressmen would learn from these two politically active authors. I wish I knew how they delegate characters and storylines, although I am sure Stearns is definitely Flint's character, as is the recking crew, and Mr. and Mrs. Simpson are definitely Weber's, they have seamlessly written a very complex novel into one complete whole that ties up most of the loose ends from 1633, of course not all, because I believe they have at least one more novel to go. I think mood has one of the telltale signals to author hints, Weber tends to more seriousness, Flint owns irreverency, although both are guilty of both in this book. I hope the next comes out much faster.

What makes this book, and series fun, is the blending of history, politics, social commentary, and action into one very fun and fast paced story. The use of minor characters throughout the book to flesh out the story, and make political and social commentary is what makes it great.

Baltic War is a grand adventure, with many well-tracked characters and plot twists. It answers a number of questions that we have been waiting on for years, and is filled with interesting developments. I learned a good deal of 17th century history in this book, and Flint really made it come alive in new ways. The book encouraged me to constantly look up Wikipedia entries to understand more of what was really happening at the time. And Flint is to be congratulated for really showing the Downtimers as smart and able to contribute something effective against the Uptimers from the future.

The maps could have been better and more detailed, for those of us who are not experts on 17th century European history. And the book starts off quite slow, as do a number of the 1632 series, and takes a while to get going. Indeed, the writing is rather disjointed, perhaps from being written by two different authors. I felt like there were moments of great writing, alternating with moments written by a beginning author.

I grew tired of nearly every character, whether they had direct contact with the Americans or not, using American colloquial phrases and making an explicit point that they were doing so, on every single phrase. Are there no colloquial phrases in other cultures and languages? Do we truly think that American colloquialisms would spread in 2 years all over the continent, into foreign languages, without modern communications technology? It's simply sloppy writing.

A bit of a surprise, and a nice addition, is the CD at the back of the book, *with every single previous book Flint's every written* on a CD that opens as web browser. I have no idea how he will continue to make money in doing this, but it's like buying one book and getting another 50, including all of the Ring of Fire series.

This is a good addition to the series. Better than some of the other recent ones. It would have been better if 1634: Cannon Law hadn't been out already for a year, and taking place after the events of Baltic War, revealing what had already happened and who had survived. Sometimes I get the impression that Flint is so eager to try out new publishing tricks (multiple authors, amateur web writing, later chronological books being published earlier) that he sacrifices writing quality. You should read this book. Enjoy the excitement of a European war fought before there was nation states, with ironclad ships and repeating rifles. But Flint & Weber can do better. The promise once offered in 1632 does not match what we have today. 3 stars for the writing, an extra one for the publishing idea of adding in 50 books for the price of one.

In the past, I would have said that if you haven't read the PRIOR books in this series, you should not buy this particular book. But, they provided the previous books in a CD packaged with the book. A great idea in my opinion; In fact, absolutely essential considering how complex and convoluted this story has become. Overall, I liked the book and found it as interesting and as much fun as the previous books. My only major criticism is the aforementioned convoluted plotline and the large number of characters to track across the entire series of novels. However, it is difficult to argue that they haven't created a complete and fully detailed universe around this concept. If you like a compact and efficient writing style, this is not the book for you. But, I've grown quite fond of the characters in this series and I look forward to further adventures in the next book(s) in the series. But, as a West Virginian, I'm biased. Question is, how long can supplies of "up-time" technologies brought along from a small town in WV last in the 17th century?

I've been following this series for quite some time-- and I love how fun, how interesting, these alternate histories can be.

That said, I'm dead sick of how interchangable these characters are.

You have two types of bad guys: real bad guys and competent bad guys.

You have only ONE type of woman: screamingly strongwilled (a nice way to say overbearing), the female version of the archetypal omnicompetent man.

And the heroes are all of the "I'm savage but smart" variety.

Seriously, Weber and Flint, how many times can you use the word "Grin" in a single book? How many goofy placements of modern phrases into the mouths of 16 century-- non "uptime"-- characters?

I love this series but I want to stop right here, if only because I can only tell the characters apart by their names and-- besides Melissa, the Richter woman and Abranel (sp?) I literally can not tell these women apart! And the men? Forget it! There's Mike Stearns, there's Admiral Simpson and there's a thousand other characters who act and talk the exact same way-- sometimes even characters who aren't American.

PLEASE gentleman, learn something about complexity!

A bit more than two years after the West Virginia town of Grantsville has been pulled into the middle of the 30 years war in what became Germany, the war wages on. The Americans quickly joined up with Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus against the Spanish and their allies, but France under Richelieu, always anxious to provide a counterweight, joined with Spain, England, and Denmark to offset the high-technology the Americans have brought. Meanwhile, French labs have begun to churn out their own technical advances--owing in part to Grantsville leader Mike Stearns's decision to let most information flow freely in his technological-deterministic certainty that modern technology will bring about democracy.

Fortunately for the increasingly united Germany being created by Gustavus Adolphus and Stearns, Their nation can tackle each of its opponents individually. In 1634: THE BALTIC WAR, the major requirements are to break the siege of the Baltic ports, free the Grantsville team being held in the Tower of London, and (mainly for the pleasure of the Swedish King) defeat Denmark so totally that it will agree to become part of a new pan-Scandinavian union.

Readers of David Weber's Honor Harrington series will recognize the familiar pattern of a technological advance by the goodguys (Grantsville or Manticore) being overwhelming despite an apparently offsetting advance made by the enemy (France or Haven). In this case, the overwhelming advance is Grantsville's navy. No contemporary navy, and no coastal fortifications can stand against either the new ironclads, equipped with ten inch guns or even the timberclad battleships. Unfortunately for the French, their breech-loading rifles enabled only a minor raid, eliminating an annoying up-time character.

The Flint and Weber books in this series seem to have taken an unfortunate direction, with more of the characters lecturing one another, and long contemplative passages where Flint and Weber bring the reader up to date on what's happening. In fact, there isn't a lot of action in this entire 700+ page novel. One can imagine Flint and Weber snickering over which Americanisms they'd have the different down-time characters use, but the entire novel could have used some major pruning--and a lot more concentration on what is happening and why we should care. Rescuing the captive ambassarors from the Tower of London is fine, but really, they were in no particular danger and the rescue provides only personal satisfaction to Stearns and some of the other Grantsville types. If Stearns had gone in with the intent to rescue Cromwell, to launch a more sophisticated version of the Glorious Revolution and take England/Scotland out of the war, this would have made sense and been interesting. As it was, who cares. I found the romance between twenty-year-old Eddie Cantrell and 15-year-old Anne Catherine unromantic and again, thought Stearns's and (in this case) Admiral Simpson's willingness to risk an outbreak of war in newly passified Denmark to preserve Eddie from the consequences of his decisions to be unbelievable. The romance between uptime lady in waiting, Caroline Ann Platzer and downtime Sergeant Thorsten Engler seemed to exist only to allow Princess Kristina to insist that Engler be named 'Count of Narnia.' (I imagined Flint and Weber giggling about this--maybe my sense of humor is just different).

The brief scenes with painter Pieter Paul Rubens and the Cardinal-Infante Don Fernando have a lot of potential. Here is a character who's looking to the future, prepared to deal with reality with relatively open eyes, and who may become a worthy opponent to Gustavus Adolphus and Stearns in the future. I had hoped that Prince Ulrick of Denmark and his inventor-friend Baldur Norddahl could play similar roles--perhaps becoming national resistance heroes, demonstrating that the capitulation of a king doesn't necessarily result in the defeat of a nation. Unfortunately, this lesson doesn't seem about to be learned.

One of my problems with this series is that Stearns stands in an ideal position to eliminate the Atlantic slave trade before it really begins. In 1634, slavery was still relatively new, cotton was not king, and a determined effort could have wiped it out. Stearns intends to do this--perhaps that will be the basis of a subsequent novel. For now, it's the ugly secret that no one dare name.

This 163X Series started powerfully with 1632--a time travel with a difference. Stearns and his allies were intent on preserving the democratic ideals of America and making them work, while simultaneously ending a war that convulsed all of Europe for thirty years, depopulated and decentralized Germany (creating hard feelings the Prussians would later exploit in their creation of the German Empire), and impoverishing Spain. The current novel in the series, 1634: THE BALTIC WAR, shows occasional flashes of the excellence that kicked off the series. Overall, though, I found it a disappointment. Much of the action didn't seem aimed at goals that matter to the reader or to the overall development of a democratic society. Characters spent too much time patting each other on the back and discussing things rather than doing things and showing why they deserved those pats. And the romances never really grabbed me at all.

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.

The first two books I blazed through them in 2 days easy. But this book i'm halfway through and am forcing myself to continue. It is slow and in some places rather boring. It's almost as if a different author decided to write this with the instructions to focus on the mundane. There are whole chapters that should be flat out deleted.

Maybe if I were a history buff I would get more out of it. But the first two books I thought were incredible despite my knowledge of history.

Hate to say it, but they lost the magic recipe in this one and I seriously doubt if i'll even finish this book which is a shame because I absolutely loved the first two.

*****

OK just finished reading it. Suffice to say, it does really pick up after the 1st half. In fact, I would probably have cut out about 50% of the 1st half of the book, easily.

Because of the last part, i'll upgrade my rating from two stars to three stars.

But i'm not hopeful for the next book in the series. Well see how that goes.

I really, really enjoyed 1632 and 1633. I enjoyed the Grantville Gazettes. This installment wasn't my favorite. It took me a long time to get through the first 1/3 of the book. I typically read at a very fast pace, but this one just wasn't doing it for me. Then, last night, it all turned around. I was up until 2:30am to finish it off!

I think the change had to do with the later part of the story focusing more on the characters I grew to love in the first books and less on historical figures which, to be honest, I often can't keep straight in my mind.

I recommend that folks who love this series read this one. If the beginning isn't working for you, HANG IN THERE!