Grantville, Tuesday, June 1635 It had been a hard day at the salt mines. Sebastian Jones trudged the last few feet up the garden path to the front door. He was just about to insert his key when the door was swung open. "Did you have a good day at school?" his mother asked. He [...]

Patience growing short in the afternoon heat, Dara's favorite leopard yowled and spat at her handler, ready to hunt.Dara grinned, ready as well, welcoming the prospect of release from the tension being around Aurangzeb always provoked in him. Now, if only they could begin. The small army of beaters had started the day before, working [...]

Grantville, May 1636Daniel Block stretched his aching back, then tilted his canvas to capture more of the fading light of the evening. The reddish hue changed the colors on his palette, giving Fraulein Barnes's pale arms and shoulders an orange tint that he found most intriguing. Painting outdoors had much to offer, though he worried [...]

Bamberg, April 1636 "You look like a bloated corpse," Logan Sebastian muttered at the bag of hot air floating before her, "but an honest corpse." Logan stood on the closely-cropped grass of the Bamberg airfield, shouldering an overstuffed backpack with a lacrosse stick slung to it, a carefully-rolled poster clutched in one hand, and her [...]

June 30, 1631 Johan was hung over again and that was good. For Johan, going into battle with a hangover was almost as good as going into battle a little drunk. It distracted him from what he had to do. He shifted his pike just a little. He was in the second rank of pikes [...]

Chapter 9: Too HotJena Lokschuppen, Jena, Saxe-Weimar CountyMay 1633Nikki Bourne didn't exactly know why she was here.One year ago she had started a chicken farm in Grantville—something she thought she was good at—but then the Croat Raid came, and the Croats had torched the farm and killed all her chickens and her future.Then she had [...]

MagdeburgOctober 1635Giacomo Carissimi closed the front door behind himself, and began to take his coat off."Is that you, Jude?"The sound of his wife's voice calling out her nickname for him still stirred a warmth in him. Elizabeth Jordan had not been married to him long. Her deceased husband Fred had died in March of this [...]

Introduction What will music be like after the Ring of Fire? That was the question I set myself some months back when Paula Goodlett asked me for a panel topic for the 1632 mini-con at WorldCon in Chicago in 2012. The previous couple of years I had done a presentation on how down-time musicians might [...]

In part 1, I provided an overview of how warships were armed in the seventeenth century and later in the old time line, and considered the choices between muzzle and breechloading, and smoothbore and rifling. I also explained how cannon were manufactured. Here, I look at how the guns were mounted, laid, sighted, and fired, [...]

I write mysteries under the name Kris Nelscott. I'mcurrently working on the next. These mysteries are set in an alien world, withunfamiliar technology, and inexplicable cultural attitudes. You're thinking, She does that in her Retrieval Artistsf/mystery series. Why the pen name? What's so different about these books?What's different is this: The Kris Nelscott novels,about black [...]

With growing horror, Basil watched the tanks roll up to the former UN buffer zone separating the two parts of Nicosia. Enemy troops approached from the Turkish north. Greek ordnance advanced through the southern part of town, which belonged to the Republic of Cyprus. Basil's ears rang with the sound of the commands sergeants on [...]