The Saxon Uprising(167)

What can I say? It’s a messy world—as is the real one. Still and all, I think the reading order recommended above is certainly as good as any and probably the best.

We come now to Virginia DeMarce’s 1635: The Tangled Web. This collection of inter-related stories runs parallel to many of the episodes in 1635: The Dreeson Incident and lays some of the basis for the stories which will be appearing in the next anthology, 1635: The Wars on the Rhine. This volume is also where the character of Tata who figures in Eastern Front and Saxon Uprising is first introduced in the series.

You can then go back to the “main line” of the series and read 1635: The Eastern Front and the volume you hold in your hand, 1636: The Saxon Uprising. (Yes, I realize how silly it is to tell someone to read a novel who presumably just got finished doing so. But you never know. There are people in the world—I’m one of them, as it happens—who read afterwords before they read the book they’re in.)

That leaves the various issues of the Gazette, which are really hard to fit into any precise sequence. The truth is, you can read them pretty much any time you choose.

It would be well-nigh impossible for me to provide any usable framework for the thirty-four electronic issues of the magazine, so I will restrict myself simply to the five volumes of the Gazette which have appeared in paper editions. With the caveat that there is plenty of latitude, I’d suggest reading them as follows:

Read Gazette I after you’ve read 1632 and alongside Ring of Fire. Read Gazettes II and III alongside 1633 and 1634: The Baltic War, whenever you’re in the mood for short fiction. Do the same for Gazette IV, alongside the next three books in the sequence, 1634: The Ram Rebellion, 1634: The Galileo Affair and 1634: The Bavarian Crisis. Then read Gazette V after you’ve read Ring of Fire II, since my story in Gazette V is something of a direct sequel to my story in the Ring of Fire volume. You can read Gazette V alongside 1635: The Cannon Law and 1635: The Dreeson Incident whenever you’re in the mood for short fiction.

And…that’s it, as of now. There are a lot more volumes coming. The next volume of the 1632 series which will be appearing in print is Ring of Fire III, in July of this year. My story in that volume is directly connected to this novel and will lay some of the basis for the sequel to this novel. The discerning (that’s a polite way of saying fussbudget) reader will have noticed and perhaps been disturbed by the fact that the Bavarian invasion of the Overpfalz vanished from this novel almost as soon as it was reported in Chapter 21.

That’s because if I’d included that episode in this book it would have loaded it down with a large and unwieldy—and unresolved—sub-plot. So, instead, I will tell that story in Ring of Fire III.

I’m not sure yet the order in which I will write the next two novels in the series. The direct sequel to this book will pick up from the end of my story in Ring of Fire III and cover Mike Stearns’ handling of the assignment which Gustav Adolf gave him in the last chapter of this novel—crush Maximilian of Bavaria. New developments involving mumble mumble will also require Mike to mumble mumble in the course of which he winds up mumble mumbling. The working title of that novel is 1636: Tum te Tum te Tum.

Or I might decide instead to finish a novel I began a while ago and set aside when I realized I was getting ahead of myself. The title of that novel is 1636: The Anaconda Project. That book will serve as a sequel to my short novel “The Wallenstein Gambit,” which was published in the first of the Ring of Fire anthologies, and will tell the story of how Wallenstein—working mostly through Morris Roth—begins the expansion of his new kingdom to the east, by encroaching on the Ruthenian territory under Polish-Lithuanian rule. It will also serve as a companion volume to this novel, by recounting some of the developments in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth which were left offstage here. The attentive reader of this volume will recall that it was mentioned that the hussar Lukasz Opalinski’s older brother Krzysztof and the notorious up-time radical Red Sybolt were off somewhere in Ruthenia stirring up trouble for the Polish powers-that-be. That tale will be told in 1636: The Anaconda Project.

(If you’re wondering about the distinction, “attentive” readers are the readers who pay attention to the things an author wants them to notice. “Discerning” readers are the damn nuisances who insist on fussing over loose ends that the author thought he’d swept far enough under the rug to be out of sight.)

A number of other novels are in the works that deal with other story lines in the series. I will mention in particular: