Guest of Honor: Eric Flint

Unfortunately, Eric Flint will not be able to travel to Balticon due to health constraints. He will be addressing the Convention remotely for his Guest of Honor speech and the traditional Snerking the Plots 1632 Panel.

Eric Flint’s writing career began with the novel Mother of Demons, published in 1997. With David Drake, he has collaborated on the six novels in the Belisarius series (An Oblique Approach, In the Heart of Darkness, Destiny’s Shield, Fortune’s Stroke, The Tide of Victory and The Dance of Time), as well as a novel entitled The Tyrant. His alternate history novel 1632 was published in 2000, followed by many sequels, several of which made the New York Times extended bestselling list. In addition to the fifteen novels he has written in the 1632 series, he has edited twelve anthologies of short fiction set in that universe. He also publishes the Grantville Gazette, a bi-monthly electronic magazine devoted to the series which has now produced over sixty issues.

Flint has co-authored SF adventure novels with the South African writer Dave Freer: Rats, Bats & Vats, The Rats, the Bats, and the Ugly, and Pyramid Scheme. His comic fantasy novels The Philosophical Strangler and Forward the Mage came out in May of 2001 and March of 2002. He is also working on a major fantasy series with Mercedes Lackey and Dave Freer, the first four volumes of which are The Shadow of the Lion, This Rough Magic, Much Fall of Blood and Burdens of the Dead.

Flint is also working on several other ongoing projects:

  • With David Weber on a series of novels set in Weber’s Honor Harrington universe. The first three of these, Crown of Slaves, Torch of Freedom and Cauldron of Ghosts, have already appeared.
  • A new alternate history series taking place in Jacksonian America, the first two volumes of which have already appeared: 1812: The Rivers of War and 1824: The Arkansas War.
  • Further volumes in the Joe’s World series, which began with The Philosophical Strangler and Forward the Mage.
  • Hard SF adventure novels with Ryk Spoor, set in the universe they created in the Bemmie trilogy (Boundary, Threshold and Portal), which include Castaway Planet and Castaway Odyssey.
  • Two SF adventure volumes with K.D. Wentworth, The Course of Empire and The Crucible of Empire. He has now finished the third volume in the series, The Span of Empire, with David Carrico. The novel will be published this September.

 

In addition to his own writing, Flint is the editor of several series reissuing the works of past SF authors. These include James H. Schmitz, Keith Laumer, Christopher Anvil, Murray Leinster, Randall Garrett, Tom Godwin and Howard L. Myers. He was also the editor of the online science fiction and fantasy magazine, Jim Baen’s Universe.

Flint graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1968, and later received a masters degree in history from the same university. Despite his academic credentials, Flint spent the next quarter of a century as an activist in the American trade union movement, working as a longshoreman, truck driver, auto worker, steel worker, oil worker, meatpacker, glassblower and machinist. He has lived at various times in California, Michigan, West Virginia, Alabama, Ohio, and Illinois. He now lives in northwest Indiana with his wife Lucille.