"Eric Flint - Grantville Gazette - Vol 2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Flint Eric)

- Chapter 1

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 - Chapter 1




Editor's Preface
By Eric Flint

As you can perhaps deduce from the simple existence of a second issue of the Grantville Gazette, the
first issueтАФwhich we did as an experiment, to see if there would be enough interest in such an online
magazineтАФproved to be successful.
Quite successful, in fact, better than I'd hoped. As of today, we've sold about 1750 copies. With that
sales base, the magazine can be financially self-sustaining, which was the prerequisite for being able to
continue with it. I still can't afford to pay professional rates for the stories and articlesтАФwhich the
Science Fiction Writers' Association has now pegged at five cents a wordтАФbut I can cover all the other
costs, including paying professional rates to a copy editor as well as the percentage received by
Webscriptions and Baen Books. And I'm hopingтАФI think not unreasonablyтАФthat over time the
magazine's sales and subscription base will become large enough that I can start paying professional
rates for the stories and articles instead of the current semi-pro rates. In order to do that, I estimate we'd
need a stable sales/sub base of around 2500 readers.
So... onward.
***
Now that I know the Gazette will be an ongoing publication, I've got more leeway in terms of the kind
of stories I can include in the magazine. A number of the fiction pieces being written in the 1632 setting
are either long or are intended as parts of ongoing stories. There are two examples in this issue: Danita
Ewing's "An Invisible War" and Enrico Toro's "Euterpe, episode 1." In terms of its length, "An Invisible
War" is technically a short novel. So, it'll be serialized over the next two issues of the magazine. Part I
appears in this issue; the concluding part will appear in the next.
Enrico Toro's story is somewhat different. Neither he nor I know what the final length of this story will
be. It's written in the form of episodes, each told in epistolary form by the narrator. I wanted to include
it, because (along with Gorg Huff's story, "God's Gifts") Toro's piece approaches the 1632 framework
entirely from the angle of how seventeenth-century people react to the events produced by the Ring of
Fire.
Most of the stories that have thus far appeared in either the Gazette or the anthology Ring of Fire have
approached the situation either entirely or primarily from the standpoint of up-timers. What I especially
liked about the stories by Toro and Huff is that up-timers are never the viewpoint characters. In the case
of "Euterpe," Toro is using an actual historical figure and trying to imagine how a young musician of the
time would react to the sudden influx of music written over the next several centuries. In the case of
Huff's story, the character is a fictional Lutheran pastor trying to grapple with the theological
implications of the Ring of Fire.
Given that there are a few thousand up-timers in the 1632 settingтАФand tens of millions of down-