The Grantville Gazettes - Importance of The Gazettes

Importance of The Gazettes

The impact of individual stories submitted for inclusion into the Grantville Gazettes will likely never be truly known, because even the bad or 'unaccepted' ones have shaped ideas, the action, commentary, and thought on the web-forums 1632 Tech and 1632 Comments. Even those that fail to meet the final test of espousing 'canon' developments in the neohistory have influenced later written works, including those by Flint, who is the final determiner as the sole person involved in each work in the milieu of what is acceptable canon, and who has acknowledged a debt to all such submissions and discussions. Considered one way, each story written has the ability of setting a new Point of divergence, affecting various storylines. Several fan-written stories have suggested major plotlines, even before the concept of the Grantville Gazettes eMagazine experiment was approved by Jim Baen. Those stories were published alongside established writers in the Ring of Fire, and according to Flint, affected other main plotlines like 1634: The Ram Rebellion.

Other Gazette stories have filled in important gaps in terms of economics, sociology, and technology: "The Sewing Circle" deals with four precocious teen friends and their stubborn insistence on making adult contributions. When they succeed, they establish a model for uptimers starting downtime businesses, setting an example that ripples through Grantville. In the sequel, "Other People's Money", they shake up the European stock markets, and not inconsequentially, interest the downtime populace in learning more about investing and uptime financial knowledge. Sociologically, their success doomed tailoring guilds, and spawned down-timer publication of popular fiction, inculcating up-timer sociology et cetera via modern novels, especially perhaps, Romance novels. Apparently even downtimers like their soaps! "A Lineman for the Country" along with a couple of other short stories created the forthcoming important Eastern European thread, and so on.

Flint has stated that he intends that short stories featuring major characters, or establishing points that will be important in future novels will be collected into the Ring of Fire anthologies, and that The Grantville Gazettes anthologies will feature the stories of characters that don't establish new background for the novels. However, many of the characters or events become more important in retrospect than either the author or editor expected, so this rule is fairly weak, as shown in the Other People's Money example.

On another level entirely, the gazette stories are just stories. Since they tend to focus on the ground-level interactions of their protagonists, and those characters tend to repeat, not only in subsequent stories by the same author, but in stories by others, Flint has characterized them in part as soap-operas in the preface to Grantville Gazette IV.