Preface
This is the seventh anthology of stories from the electronic magazine The Grantville Gazette that Baen Books has published. The first four were direct, one-to-one reissues of the first four volumes of the magazine. Thereafter, given the pace at which stories were being published in the magazine, we shifted to a “best of” format. Grantville Gazette V contained stories selected from issues 5–10 and Grantville Gazette VI contained stories selected from issues 11–19. This volume contains stories selected from issues 20–30.
If you’re spotting a pattern here—the spread of issues selected from keeps getting bigger, from six to nine to eleven—you’re right. The pace of the magazine has kept outrunning the anthologies. As of the publication date of the book in your hand, the electronic magazine just came out with its 59th issue.
This is the sort of problem created by success, which is a much nicer problem to be faced with than those produced by failure. But it’s still a problem. We’ll probably have to keep expanding the spread of issues we choose from in succeeding collections of stories from the Gazette. In the meantime, though, we have taken some steps to alleviate the backlog in other areas.
Last year, we launched a new publishing house, Ring of Fire Press. The “we” referred to consists of the many people who have participated in creating the 1632 series, either as authors or editors or technical advisers or—usually—a combination of all three. This series long ago became a collective enterprise in which I function as much as the literary analog to the conductor of an orchestra as I do as an author.
Ring of Fire Press works closely with Baen Books. Our arrangement is that Baen gets first choice of whatever they might want to publish for the first time—that would be all novels and many anthologies—or reissue from the electronic magazine. (That would be all the Grantville Gazette anthologies.) What’s left is then selected from by Ring of Fire Press for publication as an e-book with, for those who prefer a paper edition, a print-on-demand option as well.
This material consists of two items. First, serialized stories that are simply too long to be included in an anthology published by Baen Books. Most of them are reissues of stories that were first published in the magazine, but some of them have been significantly rewritten. We are also now moving toward publishing some original stories as well. The material we publish includes collections of fact articles. Initially, with the first four Grantville Gazette anthologies published by Baen, we included fact articles along with fiction. But once we moved to a “best of” format beginning with Grantville Gazette V, space considerations required us to limit the collection to fiction only.
As of the publication of this volume, these are the titles available from Ring of Fire Press:
Kim Mackey, Essen Steel
Herbert Sakalaucks, The Danish Scheme (which includes a short story by Eric Flint, “Brave New World”)
Douglas W. Jones, Joseph Hanauer
Kevin H. and Karen C. Evans, No Ship for Tranquebar
Wood Hughes, Turn Your Radio On
Various authors, Medicine and Disease after the Ring of Fire
You can buy the titles from Baen Books’ Webscriptions in any format you choose, including Kindle and EPUB (which is the format used by Nook, Apple and Kobo). They are also available from Amazon or Barnes & Noble online. My preference, for whatever it’s worth, is for people to buy through Baen Webscriptions. Leaving aside my longstanding, friendly and mutually beneficial relationship with Baen Books, its Webscriptions service charges us a considerably smaller distributor’s fee than anyone else does.
And . . . I think that’s it. I believe in keeping prefaces short anyway.
I hope you enjoy these stories.
—Eric Flint, October, 2014