By Eric Flint. If you like science fiction and the Thirty Years War this book might be up your street. It's about a modern American town of apparent hillbilles thrown back in time to Thuringia in 1632. The book is available online - this is the prologue - it seems to be a really popular concept being a best-seller and creating many spin-offs.Wiki on the novel with links to ebooks and a fansite
The Ultimate Y2K Glitch....
1632 In the year 1632 in northern Germany a reasonable person might conclude that things couldn't get much worse. There was no food. Disease was rampant. For over a decade religious war had ravaged the land and the people. Catholic and Protestant armies marched and countermarched across the northern plains, laying waste the cities and slaughtering everywhere. In many rural areas population plummeted toward zero. Only the aristocrats remained relatively unscathed; for the peasants, death was a mercy.
2000 Things are going OK in Grantville, West Virginia. The mines are working, the buck are plentiful (it's deer season) and everybody attending the wedding of Mike Stearn's sister (including the entire membership of the local chapter of the United Mine Workers of America, which Mike leads) is having a good time.
THEN, EVERYTHING CHANGED....
When the dust settles, Mike leads a small group of armed miners to find out what's going on. Out past the edge of town Grantville's asphalt road is cut, as with a sword. On the other side, a scene out of Hell; a man nailed to a farmhouse door, his wife and daughter Iying screaming in muck at the center of a ring of attentive men in steel vests. Faced with this, Mike and his friends don't have to ask who to shoot.
At that moment Freedom and Justice, American style, are introduced to the middle of The Thirty Years War.
5 comments:
This whole series is rather interesting. Fantastical, of course, and the writing is quite uneven and sometimes tedious (particularly in the short story collections) . . . but overall they are fun if you don't take them too seriously.
-- Jeff
I'll have to give it a try as it sounds like something in a similar vein to H. Beam Piper's Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen.
It's completely fantastical--a then-contemporary 1961 Pennsylvania State Trooper is caught in a time-dimensional shift and ends up in his same section of Pennsylvania, but it's a different time line where 'Aryans' crossed the land bridge into N.A. and not Asians.
They're up to pike & shot era technology but a priestly class holds the supposedly magical formula for creating gunpowder that they run as a closely-guarded monopoly. There he aligns with a king (and his pretty but active heiress) who is surrounded by enemies.
There are also dimensional-time travellers from the most-advanced time line taking an interest in him out of humanity (they're the reason he was knocked out of his time line), and as an anthropological experiment.
I've only read the first, some years ago. Huge fun, but pure 'airport fiction' category. Would, however, make a marvellous B grade movie that would be heaps of fun to be the historical advisor for!
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