Grantville Gazette III (Ring of Fire)
The third volume of short fiction and nonfiction from the e-zine Eric Flint spun off from his alternate-history hit1632(2000) boasts the same combination of charm and intelligence as its predecessors and again has continuing character Anne Jefferson on the cover in less than she really enjoys wearing. Meanwhile, at the end, the nonfiction contributors launch a series of articles on seventeenth-century firearms, a topic almost as confused and shifting as seventeenth-century religion. Between cover and guns come stories of refugee experience, of a pastor setting up 12 American men to marry Germans and convert to Lutheranism, of the culture shock when a delegation of Benedictines encounters the1632town of Grantville, and of the influence of the Ring of Fire on the already lively enough religious controversy at Cambridge. And an essay considers the likely effects of mechanization on Germany's tangled land tenure system. Flint's1632universe seems to be inspiring a whole new crop of gifted alternate historians.Roland GreenCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved