Reading is my second favorite indoor sport. It’s (late) summertime, and the book I want to talk about posits a world in which ordinary Americans confront extraordinary circumstances — and as is apt to happen, do so with mixed results. It’s called 1632, and the author is Eric Flint.
Some might call it science fiction; others might call it fantasy. I call it a rippin’ good story — and without being pedantic, it reinforces “the American way” as it was before 2000. The book isn’t new — it was written in 1998-99.
The hero of this story is Mike Stearns — a thirty-something single man from West Virginia, insofar as there is one “hero”, I suppose. If I were casting this as a movie, Mike Stearns is the role I’d want a blockbuster-star for — Brendan Fraser, maybe.
(By the way, go see Brendan Fraser’s new movie, “Journey to the Center of the Earth.” See the 3-D version. It’s a pretty good retelling, in a semi-modern way, of the Jules Verne book. There’s a cute blonde from Iceland, a kid who swaps a PSP for an old wooden yo-yo and a brass-cased compass, and Brendan Fraser’s character: younger brother of the kid’s dad, a professor in a science department where he’s the only person not actively aching to get rid of the last vestiges of the tectonics researcher who disappeared in 1997. That researcher was Fraser’s character’s older brother, who also happens to be the kid’s dad — and might have been a friend of the blonde’s now-deceased father.
The rest of the story — which involves everything from a hair-raising underground roller-coaster ride aboard an abandoned mine train to improvising a lifeboat with a jawbone to riding magnetic rocks, upside down, across an underground chasm — you’ll have to see to believe. It’s imaginative. It’s fun.
If I have a quibble with it, it’s that if the heat really is rising as fast as the plot pretends, none of the protagonists are nearly as debilitated by the temperatures they’re enduring while doing spectacular feats; but it is, after all, a movie.)
Back to the book. The sci-fi part is over pretty fast in the first chapter — most of the town’s attending Mike Stearns’ sister’s wedding when there’s a flash of light and a thunderclap, the power goes out, and the universe … branches.
On the new branch, a small town — 3000 people or so — from West Virginia coal-mining country is, in the blink of an eye, moved to Thuringia, in the middle of a war. At first, people in town wonder if they’re the last survivors of a nuclear blast. It takes a week or so to figure out what did happen, but by then what’s happening in the town’s brand-new 1630-something here-and-now eclipses the “what happened” element.
In the face of seventeenth-century mercenaries, twentieth-century coal miners find themselves determined to recreate the America they’ve been torn out of in the place where they’ve landed. The America the protagonists resolve to recreate is a different America from the one we live in today, though.
It’s an America where unions are strong, honest work is honored, personal integrity actually matters, and the people leading the charges aren’t lawyers or politicians or oil barons — they’re coal miners, farmers, and a small-town police chief; they’re high-school kids on dirt bikes and camp followers rescued from the aftermath of battles.
And then there’s the king of Sweden, of whom the Americans make a fast friend. Gustav II Adolf, by the way, really lived and ruled and fought; in history as we know it, he was killed in a battle that, in this book, turns out differently.
A couple of things come to the fore pretty fast: we, as in modern Americans, are way dependent on our technology; and without the infrastructure to sustain and the supplies to replenish our stocks of, for example, medications and industrial chemicals, our way of life will have to change.
Eric Flint posits some very high-return ways to make those changes. I read it with a sense of nostalgia for the innocence of the protagonists — they never had to live in W’s America. So they still see us as the good guys, and they’re still trying to operate under the Constitution.
The difference that makes is huge.
Eight short years have changed the face of our politics and changed the shape of our national heart; and by far the majority of those changes haven’t been for the better.
Even if it’s only in fiction, now, it’s important not to let the idea of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people die.
This book does that, in an engaging way. You can while away an afternoon in an alternate history that isn’t apocalyptic, and watch a handful of people determined to do the right thing … not get squashed by their own government.
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— and some really impressive birds, too
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