First Read (May 2011): "1632" by Eric Flint is a book motivated by an interesting idea and executed inconsistently. Taking a classic alternate history trope the first book of the "Ring of Fire" project (see below) sets up an ambitious premise with characters that can't help but charm the reader and keep them engaged through even the roughest patches.

The premise is simple as it is intriguing: the entire town of Grantville, West Virginia find themselves transported from 2001 America to 1632 Central Germany at the height of the Thirty Years' War. Far from being melancholy or extremely silly as the genre tends to go between, "1632" is more of a "positive" alternate history which casts the entire town as a "collective protagonist" whose presence in the timeline will have negative but also real, positive effects. I do not wish to give too much away about the plot or characters but I will say that while the characters are for the most part one-dimensional, I couldn't help but feeling for them and caring about their fates.

Far from focusing solely on larger historical events, what makes the novel tick is that it is willing to engage with the every day characters and the real, practical considerations that would need to be taken by a 20th century town in the 17th century. How would they practically survive? What would the relationship be with the native Germans that surround them? What effect would they have on the world, both in terms of technology and ideas? Behind all of these questions is the feeling that the American characters from West Virginia would attempt to make the best of the situation and integrate themselves into the world they had come to inhabit.

The "Ring of Fire" project is the result of this event. The author decided that it would be fun to create a large, multilevel world where different authors could explore the premise of "1632" on a mass-scale. The project shows how complex history can be and how one change can have wide-reaching effects. In addition to twelve different novels co-written or authored by others there are anthologies of short stories and a monthly web magazine called "The Grantville Gazette" which expand the premise of the story further.

I would give the book a four out of five for premise and ideas but a two out of five for writing. Please don't get me wrong - I enjoyed the book immensely but found the writing to be noticeably distracting and awkward. Still, it is a book I would recommend for beach reading or something fun and mindless - an enjoyable alternate history for a rainy day.

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Second Read (September 2021): I decided to give this series another go and I can look at this first book with an understanding of what comes next in this sprawling series. As written above, I found the series' premise very intriguing and the ideas, ethics, and philosophy are interesting. But out of the seven or so books I've read in this series (I recently finished "1634: The Ram Rebellion"), "1632" is the weakest volume. Perhaps because it was written not as a series but as a single, one-off volume while the later versions are conceived with a broader canvas in mind. The characters are a bit one-dimensional and don't get a chance to grow. It rests a bit too much on the violence (a notion which does get challenged in later books). But I can assure you that this changes as the series goes on. So, if you find this book not as good as you wish, I urge you to give the later volumes a try, especially the short story collections, which I think really show the possibilities of this series.