Eric Flint’s 1632 & Beyond #19, September/October 2026
“A Duty to Home” by Síân Reid
“No One Stands Alone” by Brad Banner and Bobbie Banner
“Natanel and Sarah’s Story” by Natalie Silk
“It Was Just A Joke” by Tim Sayeau
“Out Of The Frying Pan, Into The Friar” by Todd S. Jones
Reviewed by Henry Gasko
[Editor’s note: The following is offered by Tangent reviewer Mike Bickerdike as a guide for those not familiar with this magazine’s concept. Eric Flint’s 1632 & Beyond is a magazine comprising stories set in the late Eric Flint’s “Ring of Fire” or 1632 alternate-history universe. For those unfamiliar with the books, the essential concept is that the town of Grantville in West Virginia became transported (by cosmic accident) from our present day to northern Germany in 1632 during the 30 Years War. The book series extends to dozens of novels. The short stories in this magazine are set within that framework.]
This is my first experience of the extremely popular 1632 / “Ring of Fire” shared world created by Eric Flint at the turn of the century. As such, I’ll have some general observations to make about the concept at the end of these reviews. But first, the stories.
In “A Duty to Home” by Síân Reid, a message arrives for Elena, one of the locals working in Grantville (the town that was transported into the past): her step-mother has a serious illness and is coming for treatment. Note the passive voice here: the message is passed between three senior staff in the town while they decide who should tell the girl the bad news before they finally give her the message.
As with most of these stories, there is a certain amount of prior knowledge required to make full sense of the action. Here, Elena has been working in Grantville drafting plans that are apparently important but are never actually described. And even though this is only six years after Grantville has “landed” in medieval Germany, the cultures seem to be completely integrated and there has already been regularly scheduled airship travel established around the continent for at least a couple of years.
Elena’s step-mother does arrive and the doctors confirm that she has leukemia (again, the reader just has to accept that a small West Virginia town has the laboratory facilities to make such a diagnosis). The remainder of the story concerns a long discussion about whether Elena should return to her home village to take care of her step-mother or stay to do her important but unspecified work, and how this can be arranged. The ending is obvious from early in the story but it is a long round-about journey as Elena and her step-mother say their lengthy good-byes.
“No One Stands Alone” by Brad Banner and Bobbie Banner, is a different type of story. That was a gentle, almost soporific family tale. In this story, the entire focus is on a brutal sex offender who has been praying on members of his brother’s family. The descriptions are graphic, both of the offence and the treatment handed out to the man when he is finally captured. The story itself reads like something straight out of Deliverance and its clichéd (and highly inaccurate) vision of “hillbilly families” in West Virginia. That is fine as far as it goes, but unlike the previous story, this story has nothing to say about the dislocation of Grantville into the past. All the characters are from the town itself and the story could easily have been told in any other mainstream magazine with only minimal changes.
“Natanel and Sarah’s Story” by Natalie Silk suffers from the same problem, only in reverse. The story concerns a poor Jewish family who fall on hard times and decide to leave their current town to journey in search of a better life. The epilogue tells the reader that this is part of a larger sequence of stories that will eventually lead this family to a new life in Grantville. But the family are not even aware of this strange town that has dropped from the sky into their world, which means that in this story at least there is no connection to the premise of the magazine.
“It Was Just A Joke” by Tim Sayeau is the shortest and slightest story here, although it definitely does depend on the clash of the two cultures. It is also the only story that discusses the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants. In case you are wondering, Grantville landed in a Lutheran area just before the Battle of Lutzen where the protestant King Gustavus of Sweden was killed, changing the tide of the war. This story is set in the fictional time of 1636, after the good people of Grantville used their modern weapons to save King Gustavus and swing the war firmly in favor of the Protestants.
All that is background that the reader needs to know to make sense of this tale of a school-boy telling naughty jokes about Martin Luther and getting into a lot of trouble with the local children. That leads to parental homilies about the necessity for religious freedom in a democracy, something which is in the American constitution of course despite often failing in practice during American history (and if you don’t believe that, check out the Missouri Extermination Order). So a story that does take at least a surface-level look at what was clearly the most serious issue of the time. And it does conclude with quite a funny punch line.
The final story is “Out Of The Frying Pan, Into The Friar” by Todd S. Jones, and it is perhaps the most perplexing of all in several ways. First of course is the title, which might lead you to suspect another humorous story. But this is anything but light-hearted.
The story is set only a few months after the arrival of the town in the past and despite what the original novel had to say about how quickly the town realized their predicament and adapted, not everyone has done so. In particular, the story is about Marlene Bates, a woman straight out of central casting: a tough-talking west Texas gal of questionable morals but with a heart of gold and a .45 derringer in her bra.
We learn that before the story begins, Marlene had argued with her boyfriend, wandered around drunkenly in her spandex tights smoking one of her few remaining cigarettes and was soon kidnapped by a group of mercenaries. Fortunately for Marlene, she is being held captive alongside of Thomas, a Jesuit priest from England at a time when Catholics were hunted in both England and this part of Germany. Thomas speaks English (needless to say Marlene hasn’t picked up any medieval German yet) and also happens to be a real-life Jean-Claude Van Damme with his fists, and together they manage to kill or chase off the mercenaries who were holding them.
But it appears that the author may have enjoyed writing this scene a bit too much: the pair take the time to bury the bodies and that delays them just long enough for the escaped mercenaries to return with reinforcements, and the two unlikely partners have to do it all over again before they can ride off to the safety of Grantville.
That is the last story in this issue. As for a general impression of my first visit to this world, as a non-American the overall gung-ho positivity of these stories takes some getting used to. Of course Eric Flint created this world in the golden age of pre-9/11 America, when the Iron Curtain had recently fallen, Russia was led by a drunk named Yeltsin, and China was mostly a source of cheap plastic toys. The future looked utopian for the free world, and political scientist Francis Fukuyama was so optimistic that he famously declared it “the end of history,” a period when liberal democracies, epitomized by America, would prevail as “the final form of human government.”
In Flint’s vision, this small West Virginia town looks more like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting from the early 1900’s than a realistically dying coal mining town of the early 2000’s. In less than a decade they are able to re-shape the kingdoms of medieval Europe, who have been engaged in a minor squabble called the Thirty Years War, into the United States of Europe, a democracy complete with equal voting rights for all men AND women, as well as electricity, flush toilets and air travel. If only this town had been plonked down in Iraq a few years later, perhaps that attempt to bring American democracy to a backward people might have worked out somewhat better than it actually did. But that is another story.
While the premise of the 1632 world might be hard to accept, there are certainly more outlandish worlds than this in science fiction (Riverworld, Solaris) and the concept itself is not the problem here. There are many stories that could be written about the effect of the incomprehensible dislocation of an entire town to an almost alien time. But everyone in these stories, both those who are sent into the past and the people they encounter there, seem to accept this with hardly a second thought.
The other possible path for this kind of high-concept story is to examine it from a philosophical point of view, such as The Library of Babel and more recently The City & the City. The problem is that for these authors at least, there is no attempt to deal with the interesting questions that are posed by the clash of world-views: the medieval feudal system dominated by superstition and religion contrasted with the modern democracy dominated by science and engineering. Perhaps it is asking too much of a handful of short stories, and I understand that some of the later novels in the series do question this simple demarcation, but these stories at least take the too-easy default position that the modern American view of the world is always the right one.