Thanks for your thoughts Mr. Stirling...I recall you had some history with Jim Baen and his company's workings?
ANyway, I do appreciate Baen Books preview material for their products, and I have actually prepurchased both collections of the Grantville Gazette, but the later issues are declining in quality, though some stories are still quite good. (Mr. Huff's stuff is quite good.) Still there seems to be an overwhelming need to pair off couples. It's like there's a formula: take an uptimer, uptimer uses uptime knowledge & American entrepreneurial spirit to impress person of opposite sex (because 163x is schwulenfrei), then they pair up.
I am also starting to think some of the authors are eager to show off their knowledge of obscure canon or county law in 1630's Germany to the detriment of an interesting story. Who here remembers the infamous novel 1945 by Forstchen & (Newt) Gingrich? There was a line in there where a German described how they would employ the Me262, Ar234 and Do335 aircraft in different roles for Operation Sealion, and you know it was just put in there as technowankery to reward the technically knowledgable reader. Alas, the entire book was like that, lacking any other merits, and I'm hoping these 163x spinoffs avoid the same phenomenon. Similar in effect to the Dilbert cartoon where Dogbert mocks Dilbert by drawing Boron, the Most Boring Man in the Universe, who singlehandedly slays the marketing department through boredom by explaining asynchronous communication protocols....