The characters were pretty flat. Sure, I liked Rebecca, but overall, they did not develop much over the course of the story. That says a lot when a book is over five hundred pages. Hopefully, throughout the course of the series, they do grow. The female characters were all ‘girl bosses’; they could shoot guns and make a room of men cry. I would just like to see more diversity than that. As for the men, I began to forget who was who by the end. This book had poor characterization.
The atmosphere left me gaping with questions. Why did this time slip happen? Were other places experiencing the same thing? Could the people of Grantsville go to the rest of America? We saw what the rulers of Europe thought, but what was the president thinking about one of his town’s vanishing and going back to the past? I am picky when a science fiction book takes place in our own world. I need logic. This book could have been so much bigger, and I would have enjoyed it more if it had been.
The writing was very accessible. Thankfully, it was easy and fast to get through, which is something rare for the genre of science fiction.
A lot of my complaints from the other points come into play with the plot as well. Eric Flint must have had a lot of faith in Americans. I truly do not believe if this story happened in the real world, as it does, it would play out this way. Then again, this book was published nearly twenty-five years ago, and America has changed a lot in that time. What I mean is, I do not believe all the citizens of the town would come together, and no one would really question a time slip. I also do not believe the characters from the European past would adjust so well to our modern world. The atmosphere did leave a lot of holes for me as I still do not have a complete understanding of what was going on. This is a unique premise of a plot, but it was not executed properly by Flint.
The characters were pretty flat, and this book had poor characterization. The atmosphere left me gaping with questions. This book could have been so much bigger, and I would have enjoyed it more if it had been. The writing was very accessible, thankfully, making it easy and fast to get through, which is something rare for the genre of science fiction. A lot of my complaints from the other points come into play with the plot as well. This is a unique premise of a plot, but it was not executed properly by Flint. I would not recommend this book to others.
by beaniebaby729
3 Comments
Oh man I got this book for free and I still want a refund! I hated it.
“This book could have been so much bigger.”
It’s a shared universe and it’s huge. Possibly some issues you had with the first book were an artifact of Flint writing the first book of what was intended as a shared universe…so he intentionally left holes, which could be filled in later, by him or others…
I don’t understand some of your questions.
The “rest of America” is irrelevant to the story. What happens, and other, similar incidents are part of the larger “Ring of Fire” or “1632”-verse. There might be some material about the “real world” the Ring of Fire left behind, but it’s not a main focus of the series.
There’s a subsidiary (no intersection beyond it being part of the same broad series of events) series about a cruise liner that ends up in Classical Mediterranean. (Alexander Inheritance?) Another about a prison in Southern Illinois that ends up in…dinosaur time…and there are Conquistadors. (Time Spike)
Broadly, I think there’s an explanation for all of these incidents…Aliens? I don’t recall, never really seemed important. There are time slips, it’s an excuse to tell stories about time slips.
The book explains that the Assiti aliens were doing some random time-space shenanigans. There is a spinoff about a cruise ship that was sent into a different timeline from Grantville, in the Helenic Age. They’ll never get back home to the 21st century.
And yeah, an historian of the Thirty Years War I know thinks it’s absolute garbage.