Drawing Together the Threads of a Vast Tapestry
1636: The Ottoman Onslaught by Eric Flint
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This novel brings together the threads of several novels, particularly 1635: The Eastern Front, 1636: The Saxon Uprising, and 1636: The Viennese Waltz. We're seeing the consequences of the events in the first two as events in Poland and Silesia unfold, while down in Vienna the alliances in the latter book bear fruit as the Ottoman forces move in several decades earlier, thanks to uptime knowledge, both technological and historical.
It's interesting to discover that Gustavus Adolphus isn't quite as bad off as he'd seemed at the end of The Saxon Uprising, nor has he given up as much of his power as it had seemed. Although he's still having occasional seizures from his head injury, he's still very much in command -- albeit from HQ rather than at the front of the fighting as he had previously been. And he does keep his uptime doctor close at hand, in case he should have another medical crisis.
His decision to insist that Gretchen Richter must join a Protestant church has interesting repercussions. Gretchen was raised Catholic, but had become irreligious (apparently somewhere between an outright atheist and an agnostic in the Huxleyan tradition) and very much keeping her own counsel. So she wants nothing to do with the Lutheran church or any of the downtime or uptime Calvinist churches -- but the uptime American Episcopal Church is just enough like Catholicism in its liturgy to tweak the right emotional strings, but sufficiently far away from downtime Anglicanism to avoid certain other problems.
Which makes for an interesting situation as she moves into Silesia in the effort to dislodge the vile Holk and his goons. Holk was once the commander of a mercenary company, but has descended to being more of a bandit chieftan who's settled into a castle. One that has attracted the attention of the USE Air Force, in a scene that initially led me to think that the crew of the airplane was going to buy the farm, whether as the price of success, or as failure, I couldn't tell -- than then we discover that the "golden BB" is the one that takes out the bad guy.
OTOH, things aren't so good in Vienna, as the Emperor and the government flee to Linz (a city that has certain associations in the present, but is just a sufficiently defensible place to downtimers). Two of the Emperor's siblings stay behind, hiding in the secret cellars under the Hofburg along with two other women, one an uptimer and the other a downtime woman who had befriended her. An oversight leads to a daring -- and rather disgusting -- trip into the streets of the occupied city to retrieve a vital piece of equipment.
It's interesting how we simultaneously see the continued growth and change of the major characters we've been acquainted with since the original book, and various bit POV characters who we may only see once or twice, but in those moments make some choice or take some action that shifts the arc of history, even just a little bit. No one, no matter how small, is utterly insignificant, and anyone can have a moment of agency that transforms a situation.
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