"Eric Flint - Grantville Gazette - Vol 5" - читать интересную книгу автора (Flint Eric)

Stars of the Story. In the 1632 anthologies, you get basically more of the same, simply with a
narrower and tighter focus and (often but not always) featuring a worthy character actor who gets
his or her day to strut on the stage.
What do you get in the Gazette? All the shenanigans of everybody else, that's what. The damn
spear-carriers, run amok. Slice of life story piled onto family sagas—functional and dysfunctional
alike—and all of it ladled over with a heavy scoop of personal melodrama.
I mean, honestly.
Who cares—just to name one example—if Karen Bergstralh's woebegone blacksmith gets
around the oppression of the guild-masters and starts setting up his own successful business?
Who cares—to name another example—if the pimply-faced American teenager in Jay
Robinson's "Breaking News" wins the heart of the (hopefully not acne-ridden) teenage daughter
of a downtime artist who is only remember by art connoisseurs?
(The mother, not the daughter—nobody except scholars remembers the daughter, for Pete's
sake, until Jay dragged her out of historical obscurity.)
Shall I go on? Who cares if Velma Hardesty's daughters escape from the Horrible Mother's
clutches, in Goodlett and Huff's "Susan Story"? Just to make it worse, from what I can tell about
a dozen other writers seem to have become infatuated with Wicked Velma, and it looks like we'll
be getting a small cottage industry cropping up of "Velma Gets Her Just Desserts" stories.
Sigh. Not one of these stories deals with Ye Big Picture. Not one of them fails to wallow in
the petty details of Joe or Dieter or Helen or Ursula's angst-ridden existence.
Pure, unalloyed, soap opera, what it is.
Fortunately, before I start tearing my hair out over the Lit'rary Disgrace involved, my
commercial instincts rally to the rescue. Because, while it is indeed true that soap opera gets no
respect from the Illuminati, it's...
Well.
Wildly popular.
So, I brace myself. No, more. I find a peculiar sort of glee in contemplating the fact that a
universe I originally created in order to explore some of the alternate possibilities for The Big
Issues—democracy, religious tolerance, that stuff—has expanded to include a veritable spaghetti
bowl of personal stories that have absolutely no function or purpose than to examine the
multitude of ways in which the unwashed masses get about their lives under the changing
circumstances.
It's a fitting full circle, I think. Let us not forget that, in the end, democracy is just a form of
government—and the only purpose of government (legitimate one, anyway) is to enable the
unwashed masses to get about their lives with a minimum of grief and anxiety. That way they can
invent, discover, explore and wallow in their own hassles, instead of being saddled with
somebody else's.
So, again, we venture into the 1632 soap opera. Hankies can be found on the coffee table, I
believe. Yes, I know the guys won't need them. Shirt-sleeves will always do, in a pinch.


Eric Flint
August, 2005
 STORIES

Breaking News

By Jay Robison

Rome, Italy, August, 1632