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Flint, Eric

Entry updated 28 October 2024. Tagged: Author.

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(1947-2022) US author with a master's degree in history from UCLA, who spent many years before beginning his writing career as a longshoreman and then machinist, as well as serving as a labour organizer and member of the US Socialist Workers Party. His first work of genre interest was "Entropy, and the Strangler" (in L Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume IX, anth 1993, ed Dave Wolverton), though he began publishing regularly only several years later, with Mother of Demons (1997), in which a matriarchal world is unnervingly invested by patriarchal humans. This first novel began a long association with Baen Books, which published most of Flint's subsequent work, and for which he edited the Baen Free Library online and two Online Magazines: the Grantville Gazette from November 2003, eventually published in physical anthology form by Baen, beginning with Grantville Gazette I (anth 2004) edited by Flint; and Jim Baen's Universe from June 2006.

Most of Flint's work was collaborative, though his first series – the Belisarius sequence of Alternate History tales with David A Drake beginning with Belisarius (1998) and ending with The Dance of Time (2006) – is primarily his work, though plotted by Drake in response to an editorial request from Jim Baen for a Belisarius series. Echoing a somewhat similar use of Belisarius (circa 505-565) in Lest Darkness Fall (December 1939 Unknown; exp 1941; rev 1949) by L Sprague de Camp, the series focuses on the historical Byzantine general who is here given anachronistic knowledge in order that he might combat attempts to alter history in a Changewar dominated by an inimical AI from a wrong future. His second series of interest – the 1632 sequence, which in 2006 became retroactively the main existing sub-set of the Assiti Shards Series, with other sub-sets awaiting publication – is partly solo, partly collaborative. In the first instalment, 1632 (2000), a small American town called Grantville is transported via Timeslip to the Germany of 1631, and over the next year its modern-day inhabitants transform their new world in order to fight off the depredations of the Thirty Years' War. Further volumes include 1633 (2002) with David Weber, Ring of Fire (anth 2004), 1634: The Galileo Affair (2004) with Andrew Dennis and its immediate sequel, 1634: The Cannon Law (2006) with Andrew Dennis, the title novel of 1634: The Ram Rebellion (anth 2006) with Virginia DeMarce, 1634: The Baltic War (2007) with David Weber and 1634: The Bavarian Crisis (2007) with Virginia DeMarce, with various continuations scheduled under the Assiti Shards umbrella. Much of the contents of various iterations of the Grantville Gazette relate to this sequence as a Shared-World enterprise, whose overall tenor has been criticized for ethnocentricity; it takes an optimistic bent on the nature of progress.

Other series include the Rats, Bats and Vats sequence beginning with Rats, Bats and Vats (2000) with Dave Freer; the Joe's World series beginning with The Philosophical Strangler (2001); the Heirs of Alexandria books, beginning with The Shadow of the Lion (2002) with Mercedes Lackey, and connected to his collaborator's Merovingian Nights Shared World; plus contributions to other shared enterprises. The Wizard of Karres (2004) with Dave Freer and Mercedes Lackey is a Sequel by Other Hands to James M Schmitz's The Witches of Karres (December 1949 Astounding; exp 1966).

Of Flint's singletons, only the first (see above) and 1824: The Arkansas War (2006) are solo. He also edited collections of the work of Christopher Anvil, Randall Garrett, Tom Godwin, Keith Laumer, Murray Leinster, Howard L Myers and James M Schmitz, sometimes with collaborators. Flint was one of the few twenty-first-century sf authors of any influence whose voice could be described as uplifting as regards the human enterprise; it was a welcome (though at times slightly strained) tone. [JC]

Eric Flint

born California: 6 February 1947

died East Chicago, Indiana: 17 July 2022

works

series

Belisarius

Rats, Bats and Vats

Assiti Shards: 1632

See also under works as editor: Assiti Shards: 1632: Ring of Fire.

Assiti Shards

Pyramid

Joe's World

Heirs of Alexandria

Honor Harrington: Wages of Sin

The Jao Empire

Witches of Karres

Trail of Glory

Boundary

individual titles

collections

  • Worlds (New York: Baen Books, 2009) [coll: hb/Tom Kidd]
  • Worlds II (New York: Baen Books, 2018) [coll: pb/Adam Burn]

works as editor

series

Assiti Shards: 1632: Ring of Fire

  • Ring of Fire (New York: Baen Books, 2004) [anth: Assiti Shards: 1632: Ring of Fire: hb/Dru Blair]
  • Ring of Fire II (New York: Baen Books, 2008) [anth: Assiti Shards: 1632: Ring of Fire: hb/Tom Kidd]
  • Ring of Fire III (New York: Baen Books, 2011) [anth: Assiti Shards: 1632: Ring of Fire: hb/Tom Kidd]
  • Ring of Fire IV (New York: Baen Books, 2016) [anth: Assiti Shards: 1632: Ring of Fire: hb/Tom Kidd]
  • 1637: The Coast of Chaos (New York: Baen Books, 2021) with Paula Goodlett and Gorg Huff [anth: hb/Tom Kidd]

Assiti Shards: 1632: Grantville Gazette

Published in Grantville Gazette, the Online Magazine, from number VI on.

Jim Baen's Universe

individual titles

links

previous versions of this entry



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