Eric Flint

Eric Flint was an American alternate-history and science fiction writer best known for creating the 1632 series, which begins when a small West Virginia mining town is inexplicably transported into the middle of the Thirty Years' War in 1631 Germany. Rather than keeping that premise to himself, Flint opened it up, building a genuinely collaborative shared universe out of it -- co-writing entries with dozens of other authors, running the fan-fiction-turned-professional magazine Grantville Gazette, and treating the whole project as an ongoing experiment in what a modern small town's know-how, transplanted wholesale into the past, might actually change about history. Before turning to fiction full-time, Flint spent years as a labor union activist and machinist, and that background shows up throughout his work in a recurring interest in class, organizing, and ordinary people solving extraordinary problems collectively rather than through a single chosen hero.

In this catalogue, Flint is credited on five of the six novels in the Heirs of Alexandria series, an alternate-history fantasy co-created with Mercedes Lackey and Dave Freer -- he sat out only A Mankind Witch, a side volume Freer wrote alone. Readers who enjoy Flint's blend of hard-nosed practicality and genre adventure elsewhere in the series should find that same sensibility recognizable here. Flint died in 2022 at age 75.