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A review by carolynf
1632 by Eric Flint
5.0
I avoided this book for too long due to its ridiculous premise - a whole town (and natural resources underneath) is plucked up from West Virginia in the year 2000 and dropped into the German province of Thuringia in 1632. Why this happened doesn't matter - the story isn't about that. It is about this town of 3K or so inhabitants, mostly United Mine Workers and their families, forming a new United States of America in the middle of the 30 Years War. They have to figure out protection, resources, trade, and most of all, a new Constitution. The tone of this novel is perfectly balanced, moving easily from suspenseful battles to political wrangling to jokes about the quality of American beer. One of the most interesting aspects of the book for me was the women's lib angle. There is a lot of debate about equal rights and the concept of sexual consent and how much of these ideas can even be communicated to people who live in rigidly hierarchical society.
The one criticism I have is that the characters don't have a whole lot of moral ambiguity. Both the Americans and the Europeans are overwhelmingly portrayed as good guys, even when they disagree about the best way to go about doing things. The only bad guys in the story are REALLY bad - mustache-twirling mercenary leaders who exploit others for sex, money, power, and plain bloodlust. These guys are few and far between. Most of the mercenaries are shown as simple folk who have been forced to serve and are just as happy to go back to blacksmithing or farming or whatever once their leader/captor has been killed off. But that aspect is not brought up in the scenes where Americans are using 20th century weaponry and tactics to slaughter the mercenaries in numbers that terrify their European allies.
This is a very fun read, a little heavy on the melodrama but with lots of interesting survivalist stuff thrown in. I'm curious whether the later books in the series show these characters becoming more complicated.
The one criticism I have is that the characters don't have a whole lot of moral ambiguity. Both the Americans and the Europeans are overwhelmingly portrayed as good guys, even when they disagree about the best way to go about doing things. The only bad guys in the story are REALLY bad - mustache-twirling mercenary leaders who exploit others for sex, money, power, and plain bloodlust. These guys are few and far between. Most of the mercenaries are shown as simple folk who have been forced to serve and are just as happy to go back to blacksmithing or farming or whatever once their leader/captor has been killed off. But that aspect is not brought up in the scenes where Americans are using 20th century weaponry and tactics to slaughter the mercenaries in numbers that terrify their European allies.
This is a very fun read, a little heavy on the melodrama but with lots of interesting survivalist stuff thrown in. I'm curious whether the later books in the series show these characters becoming more complicated.