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1634: The Galileo Affair
(2004)(The third book in the Ring of Fire series)
A novel by Andrew Dennis and Eric Flint
From Publishers Weekly
After the emotionally draining tragedy that concluded Flint and David Weber's 1633 (2002), Flint (The Philosophical Strangler) and newcomer Dennis provide a more lighthearted interlude in Renaissance Italy. Grantsville, a West Virginia mining community that a black hole transported back to the Thirty Years War, now forms the kernel of a fledgling democratic Germany. An embassy to Venice is led by Grantsville's only Roman Catholic priest, whose revelations about Vatican II meet a surprisingly unhostile reception. When the pope appoints this priest advocate for Galileo at his trial for supporting the Copernican theory, teenagers from uptime, combined with local Italian sympathizers, are convinced by Cardinal Richelieu's agents to stage a rescue mission whose assured failure will discredit the Americans' efforts. In many ways this reads like a Tom Clancy techno-thriller set in the age of the Medicis with the Three Stooges thrown in for seasoning. In the tradition of Italy's commedia dell'arte, the rollicking plot serves to bring two lovers together despite formidable obstacles. It's refreshing to read an alternate history where the problems of two people do amount to a hill of beans, which isn't surprising, since all the installments in this popular series to date have focused as much on ordinary people as on kings and generals. The closing chase sequence is literally a riot.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Flint and a new collaborator take his successful alternate-history saga to Italy and, once again, shift focus to a new set of protagonists. Tom Stone travels to Venice to found a modern pharmaceutical industry, with some modern notions of financing introduced by his wife and Sharon Nichols. The latter, the most subtly drawn character, finds in Venice a vision of the future different from the one she conjured after her lover Hans Richter's death. Stone's boys ride and otherwise travel to the rescue of a Galileo much less endangered--and much less agreeable--than they have been led to believe, nearly causing a diplomatic disaster while behaving rather like the Keystone Kops. Meanwhile, Father Mazzare has to deal with the church hierarchy in a way that justifies his faith and brings on stage some of the complexities of seventeenth-century theology. If readers may be the better for having the shared-world anthology Ring of Fire (2004) at hand, they won't be the worse, nor less delighted, for plunging into this volume without it. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Genre: Science Fiction
After the emotionally draining tragedy that concluded Flint and David Weber's 1633 (2002), Flint (The Philosophical Strangler) and newcomer Dennis provide a more lighthearted interlude in Renaissance Italy. Grantsville, a West Virginia mining community that a black hole transported back to the Thirty Years War, now forms the kernel of a fledgling democratic Germany. An embassy to Venice is led by Grantsville's only Roman Catholic priest, whose revelations about Vatican II meet a surprisingly unhostile reception. When the pope appoints this priest advocate for Galileo at his trial for supporting the Copernican theory, teenagers from uptime, combined with local Italian sympathizers, are convinced by Cardinal Richelieu's agents to stage a rescue mission whose assured failure will discredit the Americans' efforts. In many ways this reads like a Tom Clancy techno-thriller set in the age of the Medicis with the Three Stooges thrown in for seasoning. In the tradition of Italy's commedia dell'arte, the rollicking plot serves to bring two lovers together despite formidable obstacles. It's refreshing to read an alternate history where the problems of two people do amount to a hill of beans, which isn't surprising, since all the installments in this popular series to date have focused as much on ordinary people as on kings and generals. The closing chase sequence is literally a riot.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Flint and a new collaborator take his successful alternate-history saga to Italy and, once again, shift focus to a new set of protagonists. Tom Stone travels to Venice to found a modern pharmaceutical industry, with some modern notions of financing introduced by his wife and Sharon Nichols. The latter, the most subtly drawn character, finds in Venice a vision of the future different from the one she conjured after her lover Hans Richter's death. Stone's boys ride and otherwise travel to the rescue of a Galileo much less endangered--and much less agreeable--than they have been led to believe, nearly causing a diplomatic disaster while behaving rather like the Keystone Kops. Meanwhile, Father Mazzare has to deal with the church hierarchy in a way that justifies his faith and brings on stage some of the complexities of seventeenth-century theology. If readers may be the better for having the shared-world anthology Ring of Fire (2004) at hand, they won't be the worse, nor less delighted, for plunging into this volume without it. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Genre: Science Fiction
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