Customer Reviews

1635: The Dreeson Incident (Ring of Fire)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(40)

 

 

This book is just bad, bad, bad.

I'm a series fan so am familiar with the stylistic differences that come with the various contributing authors. For example, some of the fan-written "Grantville Gazette" entries are stronger than others but overall Flint's enthusiastic generosity with co-authors gives the series a heady vitality. Unfortunately, Virginia DeMarce consistently disappoints. She's a good researcher but a terrible writer.

I approached this new title with some caution, simply because DeMarce's previous two attempts were so bad. Unfortunately, she did it again, "it" meaning strewing names, names and more names across lots of pages and calling it a novel. There is NO character development. Zilch. Nada. Zip. Phone books have more depth of interest. A few of the names crop up more often than others but they aren't fleshed out. Worse, the reader is given absolutely no reason to give a whoop what these names--uh, 'characters'--do, much less what happens to them. Contrary to a previous reviewer's suggestion, I DO enjoy complexity in books. There is nothing complex about this mess. It's just a carelessly written hodgepodge. Or perhaps it's just cluelessly written. It's a big ol' glob of turgid text with no discernible purpose but it probably took a while to write--which is even sadder, when I think about it.

Worst of all, particularly for this series, this wretched book fails for context. I figured out where the book falls chronologically but it simply doesn't move the action forward. The torturous soap opera details of one boring family doesn't develop what happens when the modern world is forcibly injected into the past. I'm particularly peeved because this book is such a *waste*. It's a stagnant, disappointing waste of potential.

Save your money. This book is definitely not worth purchasing, particularly at hardcover prices. Mr. Flint and Ms. DeMarce? You used up your last free pass with this mess. When in a hole, *stop digging* already.

I found the book tedious and it had a scatterbrained plot. The book was almost completely filled with difficult to follow interpersonal feminine relationships which I may presume are similar to those in romance novels. Very hard science fiction and the continuity with the rest of the series was lacking. In this book, within three years,the refinery was supplying all up-time fuels as needed; there were no limits on cartridge ammunition, railroads and radios were complete, and I infer that automotive engine production was in full swing. Blast furnace and primary processing technology would take several years without an industrial base to produce the steel used in this novel alone. In the mid-1800s, with all the available industrial base, it still took 10 to 12 years to get a working bessemer/martin furnace. They had third generation aircraft (does anybody know how difficult it would be to manufacture a just J3 or J5 cub under the novel circumstances)? The novel was too fractured and fragmented with wanting continuity. Eric Flint let us down on this one. This was far below his usual standards. I hope I did this right for I have never criticized a literary work before. This one was so bad I got mad. It was real torture to finish it.

I am a big fan of the Ring of Fire series and had eagerly awaited the latest installment from Flint and DeMarce. In fairness, it is not terrible. But, large portions of the book were less interesting to read than a family tree, which much of the book resembled throughout. It is fair to say that I was disappointed that this book fell so far below the level of the previous entries in the series, expecially the initial book and the Galileo Affair. There was simply too much effort and time expended trying to parse out who was related to whom, and how. That's not a recipe for great reading, no matter what your topic.

If `The Dreeson Incident' had been the first of the 1632 saga I had read I would have avoided all the others. Now we know what happens to the new writer's paradigm of cooperative writing: the scum rises to the top. This is far from being the worst book I've read in years, but the disappointment is considerable because of comparison with the others in the series.

The strong points of the series are, in no particular order, the details of the problems of maintaining as much as possible of a high technology science based civilisation with the infrastructure replaced by that of seventeenth century Europe, the political consequences of contemporary democratic ideals colliding with the ancien regime, the history of the period and the alternative history possibilities, the military issues.

What Eric Flint and Virginia DeMarce offer us here contains almost none of these elements. I suspect DeMarce of having written some of the Harlequin romances in an earlier life, and if so, she is reverting to type. Instead of larger themes, we have instead endless agonising details of the domestic lives of twenty of the most boring people who got left in Grantville. Their marriages, divorces, separations, love-lives, are penned in meticulous and incredibly boring detail. They range from early teens contemplating kissing and even, whoops, sex, to ancient dowagers airing their inane bigotries. About eighty percent of the book is focussed on these grandmotherly obsessions. Immediately after a major successful assasination of a noted Grantville character, the old biddies are ignoring the corpses while they do sums to work out when someone had to have been conceived.

Neither does Eric Flint come out of it too well. The only military sociolgical study is a description, mercifully brief, about a pogrom carried out by the CoC against rabid antisemites. I can't say that I'm much in favour of pogroms. If we have to have them then killing palaeoNazis is about as good a choice as I can imagine, but I can't avoid the suspicion that that's because Nazis are the current choice of baddie. The main difference between Flint and the Nazis is who is to be the designated bad guy, the methods are pretty much the same. I daresay the Nazis thought of themselves as the good guys too, Eric. We disagree with them, and wiping them out was pretty much forced on us, so we did it, and the world is a better place, no question. But a pre-emptive murder of people we don't agree with doesn't set a tone I care for.

I can't think who might actually enjoy this book. Some militant grandmother who finds the details of the domestic concerns of mostly tedious fatheads completely fascinating. If there are any more books like this I'm giving up on what looked to be the most interesting series in decades.

Most of this book is a soap opera concerning a bunch of people who aren't particularly interesting. I had trouble telling Missy's grandmothers apart because they essentially interchangeable, both being unpleasant, pigheaded bullies who disliked Ron Stone. I had trouble telling Vera, Vela and Velma apart and, quite frankly, didn't care.

There were some hints of a plot involving actually interesting characters. Buster Beasley breaking up the attack on the Grantville Synagogue was interesting (Buster arriving on the scene is shown, quite inaccurately, on the book's cover). The Huguenot plot to kill Gustav Adolph, Sterns, Kristina, and Wilhelm Wettin, which got changed by the participants into assassinating Henry Dreeson, was interesting. Why the Landgrave and Landgravine of Hesse-Kessel left the Crown Loyalist victory party was interesting. How the COCs stomped out anti-semitism and witch-hunting throughout the USE was interesting. Why Debbie's parents objected to her marrying her second husband was boring.

There was too much soap operatic chit-chat about a small town and not enough of what's happening in Germany when Sterns loses the election to Wettin. I don't care about who was sleeping with whom in 1988, I want to know how is Richelieu dealing with a political crisis in 1635.

I honestly cannot give this novel a review, although the Amazon system requires that I give it at least one star. This is not a novel, and deserves no stars whatsoever, as it was simply a collection of words strung together by Virginia DeMarce, lacking in coherence, plot, characters (let alone character development) or anything that I could find to recommend it, except perhaps as a door-stop.

I can only hope that Eric Flint never-again allows V. DeMarce to touch another of his novels except as a researcher. The Ram Rebellion, I managed to grimly work my way through, wondering from the first to the last page, who all these uninteresting people were, what they were rebelling against, and finally, what impact this had on the overall flow of this alternative universe. This one, I purchased with great hopes of getting at least an exciting escape from Charles II and his crowd, as well as a description of getting Oliver Cromwell out to the Fens. Instead, I was presented with one of the most forgettable narratives I have ever read. For the first time in this series, I could not finish a book as it was so bad.

I am going to include this rating on Eric Flint's site at Baen Books--either Virginia has got to go, or Eric's readership will.

Bottom line:1635: The Dreeson Incident (The Ring of Fire) is absolutely horrible, should be completely re-written by Eric Flint and then re-released. Sorry to say this, particularly as this was one of the finest alternative universe concepts out there until V. De Marche began actively participating in its novels.

I am a fan of this series. The first book was great and most of the sequels have been good reads. This book is so tedious and boring that even the very few interesting portions can't save it. Yes, there is some flushing out of characters and some movement in the overall story line of the series but you will start skipping pages just to get there. Just skip this book, you will not miss it.

Tedious.

It almost isn't even fiction. It is something else. A long, involved game of logic and causal relationships, perhaps.

See the picture of the cover? With the motorcycle? That's the best thing about this book.

I, as many other reviewers here, am a fan of the series. Unfortunately, this book just did not end up being very well written.

The authors spend page after tedious page outlining family relationships, brothers to half-brothers, 2nd wives and their step-grandmothers, daughters who live with some other part of the family, and much more of the same with every other imaginable family relationship. One unpleasant gossippy older woman just sort of blended together into the next unpleasant airheaded cougar. And at no point during all this slogging through complicated family relationships is it ever explained why the reader is supposed to CARE about these names flashing by on the page.

I quite literally had trouble keeping track of any but a couple of characters, and those primarily because they had made their first appearances in other, better characterized books in the series.

If you're a fan of the series, you might do just as well to read a synopsis of the "main line" plot elements of this installment, and skip wading through the rest.

I love this series, and have read many of the books in it more than once. I admire Eric Flint's courage as an author in letting a number of other people play in his world. I like that there is no "Star Trek" effect, where the Big Stars have to do everything, no matter how unlikely it is that they would be involved. Having said all that, this book is dreadful.

This book reminds me of how my Grandmother, who I dearly loved, would tell a story. In the middle of telling how her brother Earl was trapped behind German lines for three days she would digress to discuss the sister of Earl's girlfriend's cousin, and how she had done something that Grandma couldn't remember, but didn't like. In the book there are pages, chapters even, in which people are brooding over wrongs done them decades before, or who did what to who, or people embracing pettiness in the name of being pious, and others letting them get way with it. And then they would recount the same events from another angle.

But even worse, because of the attention lavished on the small details, the big events of the book were given very short shrift. Without spoiling, there are fight scenes that are completely one dimensional, and in which the timelines don't make sense. These should be heroic, but come of boring. There is a move by the CoC that will change the political face of Europe, and it receives less coverage than a Thanksgiving dinner.

I will read more books in this series, but it won't take many more like this before I give it up.