1635: The Dreeson Incident

Assiti Shards #9

by Eric Flint, Virginia DeMarce

The Thirty Years War continues to ravage 17th century Europe, but a new force is gathering power and influence: the Confederated Principalities of Europe, an alliance between Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, and the West Virginians from the 20th century led by Mike Stearns who were hurled centuries into the past by a mysterious cosmic accident.

While the old entrenched rulers and manipulators continue to plot against this new upstart nation, everyday life goes on in Grantville, the town lost in time, with librarians, firefighters, and garbage collectors trying to make do under unusual circumstances. And what better place for an undercover spy from France than working with the garbage collectors, examining 20th century machines that others throw out and copying the technology (though he wishes one device—the paper shredder—had been left behind in the future).

There are more sinister agents at work, however. One of them, Ducos, almost succeeded in assassinating the Pope, but his plan was ruined by quick action by a few Americans. Now, the would-be assassin not only has a score to settle, but has also decided on two excellent targets: Grantville’s leader Mike Stearns and his wife Rebecca. . . .

Genres: Alternate History, Science Fiction, Fiction, Time Travel, Fantasy, Historical, Historical Fiction

590 pages, Hardcover

First published December 2, 2008

About the author

Eric Flint was a New York Times bestselling American author, editor, and e-publisher. The majority of his main works were alternate history science fiction, but he also wrote humorous fantasy adventures.

Reviews

[Winston Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really dislike Virginia DeMarce as an author. I'm pretty sure that I could properly label the writer of each chapter in this book by how painful I found it to read. The fact that the story spends more time describing the different familial arrangements for Thanksgiving dinner then it does the reaction of the community to the actual “Dreeson Incident” or CoC campaign that is supposed to be the climax of the novel is incredibly frustrating. I'm skipping “The Tangled Web” in the hopes that I don't have to read anymore long boring descriptions of either West Virginian or Germanic extended family trees.

Also, this is a minor thing, but exactly what part of the story is the cover supposed to depict?

[Jeremy Preacher · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like the Ring of Fire, but good God, this was tedious. The writing isn't totally clunky or anything, and there are some decent bits - anything relating to the actual plot was just fine. But a very large chunk of the book is devoted to the kind of infinitely boring family dynamics that are only of any interest to people who have to deal with those families at Thanksgiving. Seriously, if I wanted to read about small-town Appalachian dynastic politics I would be reading a totally different genre.

[Leelan · Rating 1 out of 5]

So VERY disappointing. This is way below par for this author. I can only guess that he handed his coauthor the outline and said "Have at it!"
Of the umpteen books in this series (fourteen, just walked over to the shelf and counted) this is easily the worst of the lot. If you like this series I recommend that you skip this book. Find someone to give you the gist of the story just for continuity but don't waste your time reading this one. Just hope Eric recovers in time for the next book.

[Aaron Anderson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ok, I can't take anymore. I give up on this series. This book has been so utterly boring and incomprehensible. So many characters doing nothing interesting. I managed to finish 25 percent before giving up.

[Debrac2014 · Rating 3 out of 5]

This story was on a par with the Ram Rebellion, tho had it's moments! I never thought I'd see Nasi riding off into the sunset on a motorcycle!

[Joe Santoro · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really loved the 1st couple books of the series (1632 and 1633) but since it's become a franchise with different writers, things have gone down hill a bit. It's simply too ambitious as far as big ideas and plot goes, and still tries to have good characters and character moments. While it succeeds to an extent, it suffers some from the 'closed room' problem... Grantville seems to have an infinite amount of people and resources that keep popping up when they weren't mentioned before. I suspect that gets worse, since there are several '1636' novels now.

That, and the fact that it's just a little bit boring... 600 ish pages for basically 1 event is a bit much. Then there's the beating over ones head with what the author thinks are 'West Virginia morals'.. it's a bit tedious overall.

I'm at the point in this series where I think I just want the cliff notes... though perhaps if I find the net one for $1 (as I did this one) I'd pick it up.

[Dan · Rating 2 out of 5]

2018 re-read: About 2/3rds of this is drudgery comprised of who won't attend Easter diner with who, how obnoxious old crones hate each other, their family, and the world, mixed inwith familial strife and chapter after chapter of familial minutiae. The last 15% or so makes it worth skimming ove the exceptionally boring sections. Barely

[Bob · Rating 1 out of 5]

Poor, Very Poor compared to the other books in the 1632 series. Could it be Virginia DeMarce's influence?

[Ron · Rating 1 out of 5]

dreadful

[Anton Hammarstedt · Rating 2 out of 5]

(This review concerns 1635: The Dreeson Incident, by Eric Flint and Virginia DeMarce, in case Goodreads does this stupid thing where it collapses multiple entries into some type of anthology edition)

General impressions
NB: This book is part of a series. I may or may not have focused my efforts in reviewing the last part of the series.
Rating (Intuitive*): 2
Rating (Weighted**): 2.39
RMSE***(Intuitive,Weighted): 0.379
Mean error***(Intuitive,Weighted): -0.187
Format: Ebook
Language: English

Setting and premise
Aesthetic: 5/5 [w:2.5]
Verisimillitude: 4/5 [w:2.5]
Originality: 3/5 [w:1]

Plot
Design: 1/5 [w:2]
Verimillitude: 2/5 [w:2.5]
Originality: 3/5 [w:0.5]

What I really like about the 1632 series is how autistically detailed it is. There's quite a number of articles floating around about why they use a certain type of antibiotics, or why the Grantville/USE industrial base manufacture a certain type of firearms, etc, that really show that they've thought about these things. The same goes, in general, for characters and plots: Everything tends to build on things that have happened previously. However, a thing I've noticed in The Dreeson Incident and a few volumes immediately preceeding it (The Galileo Affair comes to mind) is that the antagonists' plots seem foiled by chance more than by the protagonists' competence, which is a huge minus. This goes for, mostly, for the volumes dealing with plots, schemes and spycraft and less for the volumes dealing with battles. The Hugenots or whoever cook up some ingenious plot to accomplish some goal and instead of the authors using the very competent spymaster of Fransisco Nasi or any one of the other intelligence assets that USE has built up over the first ten volumes (the CoC, for example), the plan just fizzles due to not even lack of planning, but by some random chance event.

Characters
Design: 1/5 [w:1]
Verimillitude: 3/5 [w:2.5]
Development: 2/5 [w:2]
Sympatheticness: 2/5 [w:2]

I gave this a 1 in character design because my god does this series need to either trim down the amount of characters, start each book with a dramatis personnae summary, or split off into multiple indipendent series that all follow 10 or so characters. Granted, I've been on a break from this series for a couple of years but I have absolutely no idea about who more than half of these characters are, and I couldn't care less about their days-of-our-lives bridezillas marriage dramas.

Presentation LINE Prose: 3/5 [w:1.5]

Additional modifiers
Page turner factor: 2/5 [w:3.5]
Mind blown factor: 1/5 [w:2.5]
Mood: 2/5 [w:3]
Length****: 1/5 [w:0.5]

This could (and probably should) well have been paired down to 30% of the final page count.

Recommended related reading*****:Destiny's Crucible (series) by Olan Thorensen

*The rating I felt this deserved before thinking about it too much.
**Weights displayed next to each applicable scoring criterion. (Weights version 3.1)
***Root mean squared error and mean error calculated for all reviews using this format for books read from 2020-07-12 up until this book (20 reviews).
****Length is only scored 1, 2 or 3 in the case where the book was too long or too short given its scope and contents.
*****With a bias in favour of stuff I've read more recently, so stuff might be missing.

[Kanea · Rating 3 out of 5]

So I took a break from this series, and was excited to jump back in to one of my favorite alternative time travel histories but it fell a little flat. First the book is good. Let's be clear. It's well written, language is easy to understand. The problem is simple: if you aren't reading this series religiously then thank God for the cast of characters sheet in the back because oh boy! Si many characters! Was it easy to be confused? Yes. Eventually, I was able to get a grip on whose who but here's the rub- between the family talk, teen romance, political talk anything close to the intriguing aspect of a set of spies plotting in grantville got dragged out to a mercilessly slow degree. I did like the book, I can't dismiss it, but ....i think in terms of bringing someone back into the fold? This one had the opposite affect. There are some very charming, excellent moments but that's the problem. Besides those moments the story is a hit or miss. I will continue the series but my advice: don't take a break too long between books in the series otherwise the story doesn't strike the same way.

[Marsha Valance · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ever since the alien Assiti displaced the 20th century West Virginia town of Grantville in time and space, the community has worked to craft a 17th-century United States of Europe, introducing modified 20th-century technology as well as ideas of democracy and egalitarianism to a world hardly able to accept them, except for the forward-looking King of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, who now heads the United States of Europe. As the Thirty Years' War continues to take its toll on Europe, a Huguenot assassin, thwarted from his attempt to kill the pope by a handful of Americans, turns his sights on Mark and Rebecca Stearns, the leaders of the West Virginians. Instead, his minions kill Henry Dreeson, the popular mayor of Grantville (and grandfather-in-law of Gretchen Richter. head of the revolutionary Committees of Correspondence) and Buster Beasley, an ex-biker whose resourceful daughter vows revenge.

[Mark A · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is like two books. First half is a genealogy - Joe is Mary's second cousin who married Jim's daughter who is etc. Not necessarily relations, but relationships. Very little happens, just enough to introduce the characters. The author either has a perfect memory or a big wall chart showing all the connections. They did include one in the front of the book, but it is very annoying to constantly flip back and forth.
Second half is lots better. A few key characters (few enough I could remember who's who). The characters actually do something.

Guessing, I'd say Virginia Demarce wrote most of the first half, because all the other books she has co-authored (that I've read) where just like this. And I'd say Eric Flint wrote the second half, because none of the books he has authored or co-authored with anyone other than Virginia read like this.

[Luci · Rating 3 out of 5]

Surprisingly I really liked this DeMarse novel better than I have liked any of her other novels in this series. It was more coherent and the writing was just better. Some may complain about the proliferation of characters and their interconnected families but I think that that made the story make more sense. Grantville is a small town and it would be untrue if families hadn't been tangled. I also liked the direction this novel took. It showed how prejudice and hate can affect many and that the people who got thrown back in time might not be "making the best of it." This novel was a pleasant surprise from this author because it seems as though she is really frowning as a writer.

[Shawnee Hayward · Rating 3 out of 5]

Been reading the 1632 series for a while now and am quite enjoying it. It's got a strong variety of characters, great overarching themes, well-written action, and sometimes longwinded explanations because it's scifi, alt history, and time travel in wrapped in one. Some books in the series, like any series, are stronger than others. This was a weaker one for me, but still good.

What I liked: the history, the 17th century period setting, the characters and their growth.

What I was not so fond of: it was a bit of tangled web of a story between the many alternating lines of family-drama in a small, rural town. Some might like that - it was a little hard for me to follow.

On to the next!

[Roman Jones · Rating 2 out of 5]

The writing is good, but the novel felt very scattershot and unfocused overall. Too many subplots and excess characters to the point you get narrative whiplash. The book is like a bowl of soup with various, distinct ingredients and flavors which don’t all come together as a cohesive whole.

This could have been broken up into a couple novellas or Ring of Fire Press short books and it would have better served the multiple smaller plots. There are a few major events that happen here which reverberate into later installments of the series, so it’s not really skippable, but I can only recommend for diehard 1632 fans.

[Kay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another full-length storyline in the Ring of Fire universe which benefits from prior knowledge of several of the main characters. Any of the volumes co-authored by Virginia DeMarce are character-heavy stories and the cast list at the end is invaluable to keep everyone straight in my mind.

None of this means I don't like the story. This one had only a couple of chuckles, with many more tender moments and even a few shocking ones. I needed my handkerchief in a couple of spots because I cry easily at good dramatic plotlines.

[john Rickman · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have seldom come across a book I disliked more. Even though I just finished it I would be hard pressed to tell you what it was about since it was a jungle of plots, sub-plots and dead ends, almost none of which advanced the "story" or even had much relation to it (whatever it was).

The "cast of characters” ran on for pages and the vast majority of them were totally superfluous and highly worthy of being forgotten. The author would have been well advised to jettison more that half of them and two thirds of the so called “plot threads.” Better yet the co-author, Virginia DeMarce, should have been thrown overboard since every book in the series that she had a hand in suffers from the same over complex and boring mass of characters and sub-plots.

If you like the Ring of Fire series then my advice is to skip this book entirely since it is so boring and does nothing to advance the story.

[Aamundson · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are so many people in this book. I honestly had a hard time remembering who was who in a lot of locations.
It would have been hard to make it through the first half of the book if I hadn't been listening to it in the background on audio. Fortunately about halfway through the plot starts to kick in and the book becomes a lot more engaging if you just skim through the some of the drier details.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is sort of like an easter basket with a few chocolate eggs and a lot of that fake grass. There are good bits in it and the good bits are good but you’re digging through a fair bit of boring filler to get to it. This is probably Virginia Demarce’s fault. Heres the thing, her Grantville Gazette short stories are good but when you give her more space to make a bigger story the fills that additional space with genealogy rants and fluff.

[Thorn · Rating 2 out of 5]

The political plot was OK, but there were way too many personal digressions as to who had premarital sex twenty-five years ago and too many characters with similar names to keep track of. It took me to the end of the book to figure out that there was a Missy AND a Minnie. This should have been a novella.

[Danny · Rating 1 out of 5]

I think I understand even less of how on earth this got a 3.5 star rating overall than I understand how this got published in this state. Rambling, switching viewpoints every other paragraph and not s lot of story, especially given the size of it. Not nearly up to par with all I've read before in this series.

[Keith · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book actually turned me off the series for a long time.

The book is patchy in quality. It is long winded and boring in many sections, but riveting in others.

Most if the characters are interesting, but many scenes are drawn out and boring. It goes beyond excessive exposition into just unnecessary wordy and uninteresting dialog.

[Christopher Riley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stick with it. The first 300 or so pages can be teeth-grindingly detailed. You'll need the family trees from the front of the book, and you'll need them often. There were many times I nearly gave up.

Then, finally, the story gets moving as it hits March 1635, and it all comes together. The last 275 pages are as action-packed and interesting as the first 300 are very much not. Stick with it.

[John Barclay · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun,but not as good as some, romp through the shards. A little too much of the uptimers antics. Still, some interesting thoughts about prejudice and normality as well as a comment on abuse and morality. I really like this series.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Family Ties and Lessons In Investigative Research. We learn more about the families of Granville and how a few of them are tied together. Ron Stone gets Engaged and a couple of 16 year old girls take down a number of paid trouble makers.

[Howard Brazee · Rating 2 out of 5]

A novel in the series where Grantville, WV got sent into German land in 1632.

This one has lots of background characterization with hints of plot for most of the novel. I recommend reading earlier books in the series before picking this one up.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the book, the family interactions between members of the extended families were hilarious and fun to read

I have really being enjoying this series as well

[Richard Harries · Rating 1 out of 5]

Verbose

Self indulgent, no plot. A myriad of irrelevant characters. Do not waste your money. Read a synopsis to get the important facts before reading The Eastern War.

[Jeff]

A bit meandering, but good story kept me coming back to this one.