…Well, that was fun. The 163x series, for those who are not aware, is Eric Flint’s massive shared alternate history about what happens when you take a town in West Virginia and plop it right down in the middle of the Thirty Years’ War Germany. Short version: it sets off a lot of pretty explosions, and some of the most spectacular ones are the ones that go off in people’s minds. I enjoy this series quite a lot.
But I wasn’t quite expecting to enjoy 1636: The Chronicles of Dr. Gribbleflotz quite this much, given the hero of the book. Phillip Theophrastus Gribbleflotz: alchemist, egoist, and a bit of an academic fraud, forgotten in our history – but somehow perfectly well-suited to do quite a bit of practical, and profitable, chemistry while still going on about pyramid power and auras and other elements of our glorious ‘up-time’ pseudo-science. The trick with a character like this is to make the character flaws forgivable when compared to the compensatory virtues, and authors Kerryn Offord and Rick Boatright managed to pull it off. I enjoyed this book; you probably have to read 1632 at least to get a feel for the setting – but I routinely read each book in this series as soon as it comes out in any form, so I wouldn’t call that a hardship.
I like DR Phil. I’m downloading this one now.