A fun book to read

Posted by MikeRael101 9 years, 9 months ago to Books
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Hi folks:) I recently read "1632" by Eric Flint. While Flint seems sympathetic to all ideologies, religious or free-thinking, his book "1632" is, ethically, strongly on the side of rational self-interest. Unlike Rand, he focuses on the feelings of different characters which, for me, makes his book very special. The plot focuses on an American city in the 1900s transplanted to a different time and place, Germany in the 1600s. The inhabitants of the city are horrified by the violence of the 1600s and decide to bring the American Revolution into being 150 years earlier than the actual one. This book is a great way to learn some of the history of the 1600s as well.


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  • Posted by DaveM49 9 years, 9 months ago
    I'm not familiar with this one, but I have often thought that an interesting alternate history saga could be made from the idea that a group fled Europe and organized a colony in America, not to establish a theocracy, but to free themselves from the yoke of the church (many colonial settlers did come here individually for such reasons).

    Imagine a Jamestown populated not by Puritans but by professors, engineers, inventors (Da Vinci in America!). They might well arrive under the banner of the Freemasons, which has protected free thought and the rights of free men since the days when such ideas were virtually unheard of.

    What might happen in such a colony? I would expect it to be far more interesting that the stories of some of the actual colonies, which were noted for disease, starvation, and vanishing mysteriously, likely because of a combination of the two.
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  • Posted by $ johnrobert2 9 years, 9 months ago
    Lord, this book has been around for at least ten-twelve years and had several sequels and spinoffs. 1632 and 1633 are great reads and wonderful alternate history stories. I think David Weber collaborated on 1633 and on 1634:The Baltic War. He's the author of the long lived Honor Harrington series, with its attendant Honorverse iterations. Glad you found the book.
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  • Posted by CircuitGuy 9 years, 9 months ago
    This was all that stuff with the anabaptists. I never understood how the violence got so horrific over what to my modern understanding seem like minor differences in religious opinion.
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