1632

Sometimes, a writer will come up with a watertight plot. Sometimes... not so much.

Robert Ludlum wrote a foreword for The Road To Gandolfo where he said that he really hadn't intended for his novel (about a former US soldier kidnapping the pope and replacing him with a failed opera singer) to turn into a comedy. It was just that the more he worked at it, the more a voice at the back of his head kept screaming with laughter: "You can NOT be serious!" And so eventually, he couldn't make the plot work, and gave up and just let it be a self-parody.

Eric Flint doesn't do that, though it must have been tempting. He has a plot that hinges on something that makes no rational sense in the world he wants to set it, about a West Virginia coal-mining town from the year 2000 getting sent back to the 30 Years' War, and so he opens with an introduction that essentially says: "Aliens did it. I'm not going to mention them again. They have nothing to do with the plot at all. But just so you know - the reason a chunk of West Virginia is now in 17th century Germany? Aliens. Now, let's not worry about the hows and just get on with the story."

It really takes the pressure off, gives the readers a chance to decide for themselves how seriously they want to take the story while he gets to play it more or less straight. That's good. Because if I were to try to take this story completely seriously, I'd probably hate it. That's the problem with a writer like Dan Brown, for instance; he lays claim to credibility that he simply cannot live up to, while Flint starts it all off with a knowing wink.

Anyway, I'm sure you can guess what happens when a bunch of hard-workin' straight-shootin' no-bullshittin' mountain folk end up in the middle of a huge war over religion and politics; they cock their 21st century shotguns, load up the pickup, blast Reba McEntire and decide to start the American revolution a few hundred years earlier. And to do this, of course, they join up with the good protestant king Gustav Adolf of Sweden and start kicking papist ass. It's to Flint's credit, though, that for all its flirts with jingoism, machismo and blond-heroes-vs-swarthy-heathens, 1632 never becomes the flag-waving God&Guns fantasy it might have. Flint's WVians aren't necessarily PC liberals, but the novel constantly checks itself, asking what can be done, what should be done, arguing tolerance, adaptation and co-operation over domination and isolation. That's good too. And it's interesting to see the choices they have to make to try and survive and help out when there's just a handful of them caught up in one of the most devastating wars of all history; as one Vietnam war veteran puts it, all he knows how to do is call in air support, and they're not getting any of that. They have to build from scratch, and they can't do it alone.

What's not so good is... well, as entertaining as it often is, and it is a lot of fun watching him play out his over-the-top plot as if it made perfect sense, nobody could really call Flint a good writer. His prose is functional meat-n-potatoes stuff at best, unbearably flowery at worst, and his characters are for the most part painfully one-dimensional; the time travel trip that means they'll never get back home doesn't really impact the characters much, the good guys are completely good with no flaws or doubts whatsoever, the bad guys are bad baddy bad bad, and the poor people caught in between are just misled and have no problem at all adapting to the new way of things. Flint has certainly done his homework - perhaps a little too much so - on early-modern warfare and technology, but perhaps not so much on the other differences that have played out over the last 400 years.

But nevermind; aliens did it. 1632 is an entertaining romp, one with perhaps more thought put into it than it needed to be just an entertaining romp, and while some of it falls flat on its face (and please, Flint, get someone who speaks German to write the German dialogue for you) I can't help but admire the sheer ballsiness of it.