Contents
The book is hard to classify as it is an oddity, as acknowledged by series creator Eric Flint in the foreword; an anthology in fact, with several longer novelettes sandwiching seemingly unrelated short stories under a (hidden for a while) overarching story line that is capped off by a short novel that finally brings all the seemingly unrelated and disparate contents together in the latter part of the book.
Unlike most works in the 1632 series, much of this book is written from the standpoint of common people "in the street", including Germans trying to cope with Grantville, West Virginia, up-timers trying to cope with their new world around Grantville, and both trying to deal with the problems of two widely different cultures meeting in the new United States of Europe. These merging dynamics are the milieu shaping stories Flint felt necessary to include even though they are set in 1631—1632. Their impact extends throughout the book and into 1634, as well as across political boundaries and battle lines as the historical imperatives developed in this book extend into the direct sequel 1634: The Bavarian Crisis.
Read more about this topic: 1634: The Ram Rebellion
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Yet to speak of the whole world as metaphor
Is still to stick to the contents of the mind
And the desire to believe in a metaphor.
It is to stick to the nicer knowledge of
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“To be, contents his natural desire;
He asks no Angel’s wing, no Seraph’s fire;
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)