Not quite as good as earlier 163x books

books:


	• 1634: The Baltic War (Ring of Fire) David Weber, Eric Flint Baen, 2007 - 752 pages average customer review:based on 33 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Good details-- terrible characters.

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!

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Interesting Times in Denmark

1634: The Baltic War (2007) is the seventh SF novel in the Assiti Shards series, following 1635: The Cannon Law. Obviously, this novel actually precedes the previous volume by internal chronology.

The League of Ostend has King and Emperor Gustav Adolf surrounded in the fortified town of Luebeck. However, League attacks have been repelled several times by artillery, scuba divers and warplanes. The United States of Europe is not likely to lose Luebeck any time soon.

Also, USE forces are gathering to relieve Luebeck. Ironclads are being constructed in the Magdeburg naval shipyards. The USE Army in being equipped with new types of weapons. By next spring, the League forces around Luebeck will be under heavy attack from sea and land.

In this novel, Thorsten Engler is night foreman at the coal gas plant in Magdeburg. He was hired as a repairman and his training had focused on those duties. After the previous foreman died from influenza, Engler had been promoted to the position, but has not yet received additional training.

Unfortunately, few people know much about the overall operation of the plant. Engler notices that the gas lights outside the plant are going out. He immediately starts looking for reasons for the loss of gas pressure, beginning with the coal loading operation. There he finds that a grate had been removed from the coal chute and the opening covered with wood.

Engler also noticed that the main pipe was red hot at the top, but not at the bottom. He visualizes what he knows of the operation and deduces that the coal dust had been converted to coal tar, which has plugged the pipe. He immediately sends someone to the fire station.

Mike Stearns hears the fire wagon arrive at the scene and soon becomes involved in limiting the damage. The firemen try cooling the exhaust chimney, but the structure erodes and collapses from the effects of the water on the very hot bricks. This releases hydrogen gas, which mixes with the outside air and causes an explosion. Burning coal and hot metal are thrown everywhere, starting additional fires.

As an uptimer -- and former coal miner -- Mike is more aware of the possibilities than the narrowly trained downtimers. He is particularly concerned about the light benzoils -- effectively gasoline -- and has the collapsing storage tank dumped into the river.

The fires are eventually put out, but the coal gas plant is now in ruins. High level management fires Engler, since he is the only non-union employee involved. Now Engler has to find another job.

Manual labor jobs are readily available in Magdeburg, but Engler has become used to using his mind to solve problems. He doesn't want to have to accept some repetitive -- and boring -- job. Then Gunther Achterhof -- headman of the Magdeburg Committee of Correspondence -- suggests that he join the army. Frank Jackson shows up later and convinces Engler that he will not be bored as an army sergeant.

Gunther also talks Engler into approaching the social workers in the Department of Social Services. Despite Gunther's recommendation, Engler is reluctant to face the American social workers. He has heard many stories about American women and he hesitates for some time before entering the office.

The receptionist is amused by his hesitation, but Engler is filled with lust at the first sight of her. He somehow manages to inform Caroline Platzer of the nightmares and images that he has been having since the disaster. His manner also arouses Caroline's interest and she decides not to become his counselor in case their relationship should develop further. She does invite him to visit her at the Settlement House.

In this story, Tom Simpson learns of the industrial accident, but is alarmed at the burning river. He soon decides that the burning material is only a thin layer on the river and should soon burn out, but he hurries to the shipyard to inspect his ironclads. Fortunately, the fire doesn't present a danger to his ships.

Later, Jesse Wood attends a conference with Mike, Simpson, Jackson and Torstensson. The meeting concerns various military affairs, including the possibility of Jesse flying Mike to Luebeck. After they discuss certain necessities, Jesse agrees to take Mike there the next morning.

Mike goes to Luebeck primarily to get Gustav's permission to arrange a ceasefire with the Cardinal-Infante. Don Fernando is considering the establishment of a separate Habsburg dynasty in the Netherlands. Such a move would create major problems for his older brother, King Philip IV of Spain, and would weaken the League of Ostend.

This story eventually leads to major problems for King Christian IV of Denmark. His son Prince Ulrik is working behind his back to avoid these problems, but Christian is an energetic and meddlesome King. Unfortunately, he also tends to create multiple projects rather than concentrating on one or two at a time.

Eddie Cantrell is one of the problems facing Christian. King's daughter Anne Catherine has a crush on Eddie and he is seriously lusting for her. He wants to marry her, but she is a little too young for him. Anne Catherine and Danish customs don't agree with Eddie.

In England, Darryl McCarthy is having similar problems with Victoria Short. At least she is old enough to marry. Darryl is seriously in love with her, but she is always under observation by her family. She is the brother of Andrew Short, a Yeoman Warder of the Tower of London. Moreover, her uncle, Stephen Hamilton, is a man that nobody wants to antagonize.

This is another good war novel in an excellent series. Of course, it only covers a limited time frame, but it holds the readers interest throughout the story. Enjoy!

Highly recommended for Flint & Weber fans and for anyone else who enjoys tales of military and naval action, political intrigue, and a bit of romance.

-Arthur W. Jordin

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Not quite as good as earlier 163x books

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.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

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 Navy¿s ironclad ships¿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.

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