Grantville Gazette 37

corrections promptly and without nagging. Arguing, blowing off comments, or just not getting the point are quick ways to get ignored.

virginiaeasleyd..

It's often been fun. Sometimes it's just plain drudgery.

dvdscar

This is an utterly unique forum, due partly to Baen's general support, but mostly to Eric's willingness to let people play in his sandbox with very few restrictions.

ivergmail

I also maintain story time frames, which tracks the temporal settings of the stories, to make it easier to spot potential conflicts.

rboatright

'How did you do it?' Lucky. In the right place at the right time.

jones

Feel free to comment on any part of your experience that I haven't covered. Thank you!

– - Research. It takes a lot of research to write historical fiction. When you've got a large community as we have in the 1632 universe, you can leverage that to get a lot of research done. Writing the Joseph Hanauer series forced me to dig up topo maps and geologic maps of the entire route from Frankfort to the Ring of Fire, just so I could make sure that, when he walked up a hill, there was really a hill in that place, and so the chalky soil could be chalky here, and the rocks sandstone there. Then, I had to research the coal mine, digging up photos of the actual mine, re-engineering it to fit where Eric Flint moved it, so that I could write properly about such simple things as the bus trip from Grantville to the mine on Joseph's first day of work. The research of others was immensely important in this, particularly Virginia DeMarce's population database and story timeframes database, and Jack Carroll and I collaborated on much of the work on gearing down the power plant as it plays strongly into his work on the growth of the post RoF electrical industry.

Karen

I've been at this since '1632' was first published. It has been interesting, sometimes amusing, often frustrating (why won't they do the simplest research!) and I've learned a great deal about many things.

We love stories so write us one! No excuses. We've heard 'I can't write, I can't write fiction, I'm too busy' from many of our now published authors. :-P]

Appendix B: 1632 Books in Print as of June 2011

1632, February 2000

1633, August 2002

1634: The Galileo Affair, April 2004

1634: The Ram Rebellion, May 2006

1634:The Baltic War, May 2007

1634: The Bavarian Crisis, October 2007

1635: The Cannon Law, October 2006

1635: The Dreeson Incident, December 2008

1635: The Eastern Front, October 2010

1636: The Saxon Uprising, April 2011

Ring of Fire, January 2004

Ring of Fire II, January 2008

Ring of Fire III, July 2011

Grantville Gazette I, November 2004

Grantville Gazette II, March 2006

Grantville Gazette III, January 2007

Grantville Gazette IV, June 2008

Grantville Gazette V, August 2009

[1] Though the event is referred to colloquially as the “Ring of Fire”, this is more of a poetic metaphor than a technical term. What the characters actually saw (based on later authorial discussions) was “a very brief, very bright flash of light emitted from a spherical surface 6.1 miles in diameter centered somewhat below ground level. The flash of light lasted much less than the blink of an eye, but was probably a quantum mechanical after-effect of a spatio-temporal transfer event that was orders of magnitude briefer than the visible flash. Milliseconds for the flash, possibly picoseconds for the transfer event.” (Jack Carroll)

[2] The book starts in the year 1631 but ends in 1632. The series which followed, also generally called “1632,” is named for the first book.

[3] The “Great Man” theory is a once-popular historical approach credited to Thomas Carlyle, who declared that all history was essentially the biographies of great men.

[4] Grantville, West Virginia, was the fictional town transported back in time at the beginning of the series.

[5]Canon: A body of works considered to be established or significant (Oxford English Dictionary). In fan-speak, established facts or an unalterable part of the storyline.

[6]Up-timer: one who comes from up-time, i.e. the future. Down-timer: one who comes from down-time, i.e. the present.

[7] I am grateful to Kerryn Offord for clarifying the ins and outs of the character claiming process.

[8] A period of sunspot inactivity in the late 17^th – early 18^th century, which would have adversely impacted the ionosphere, and hence short-wave radio transmissions

[9] Paraphrased: If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.

[10] “dreck” is a mild swearword in fan-speak, meaning something like “yuck.” It is also the German word for “manure.”

[11] Henry Jenkins, in Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers, defines the term collective intelligence as “knowledge available to all members of the community”, in contrast to shared knowledge, which is “information known by all members of the community”. He further defines the term by saying, “Collective intelligence expands a community’s productive capacity because it frees individual members from the limitations of their memory and enables the group to act upon a broader range of expertise.” (139)

Climate: The Little Ice Age After the Ring of Fire

Iver P. Cooper

In winter 1634, James Byron 'Jabe' McDougal 'recalled that 'the winter of 1631-32 had been quite a shock to himself and his fellow up-timers. Not only were they considerably farther north than they had been when Grantville was in West Virginia, but they were smack in the middle of what up-time historians had called the 'Little Ice Age,' which had begun some two centuries prior and would continue for another century, give or take. (Robinson, 'Mightier than the Sword,' Grantville Gazette 6).

****

So what was this Little Ice Age? The real Ice Ages were prolonged (as in millennia) periods of pronouncedly colder world or hemispheric temperatures in which the polar and continental ice sheets were of considerably greater extent than in historical times. There have been a dozen or so major glaciations over the last million years. A particularly big one occurred 650,000 years ago and lasted 50,000 years. However, the one that is usually considered the last Ice Age peaked about 20,000 years