Grantville Gazette I

The Grantville Gazette (Grantville Gazette I or more recently yet, Grantville Gazette, Volume 1) is the first of a series of professionally selected and edited paid fan fiction anthologies set within the 1632 series inspired by Eric Flint's novel 1632. The electronically published the Grantville Gazettes, which are reaching long novel length with regularity, now make up the majority of the series in terms of words in print. Flint as series owner and editor accounts all as canonical. The Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) recognizes published stories within the Gazettes as qualified credentials for membership—which membership requires a writer to have three published works as prerequisites.

The first novel, 1632 and resultant 1632 series share a common theme, which is to ask the "What if?" questions common to and characteristic of the science fiction genre: "What if a mysterious cosmic event occurred which juxtaposed the location of a whole populated region of West Virginia with a matching portion of early modern Germany?" Flint added the additional query to his premise: "What if the two places also switched their respective places in time so that the region from our here-now traveled back in space-time to the land and peoples of 369 years ago?" The series lands a fictional town of about 3,000 people (Grantville, West Virginia) in Germany amidst the chaos and disorders of the Thirty Years War.

The story deals with the decision to smuggle information about antibiotics to hostile forces besieging Amsterdam, where Rebecca Stearns is trapped. It features Anne Jefferson, introduced in S. L. Viehl's Ring of Fire short story "A Matter of Consultation". As well as presenting the moral and ethical issues implicit in aiding the enemy, the story focuses heavily on artist and diplomat Peter Paul Rubens, whose portrait of Jefferson forms the book's cover art. The events of this story are referenced in 1634: The Baltic War and other works in the series.