1824
The Arkansas War
By Eric Flint
(Del Rey, Mass Market Paperback, 9780345465702, 512pp.)
Publication Date: November 27, 2007
Other Editions of This Title: eBook, Hardcover (November 28, 2006)
Categories: Alternative History, Historical - General
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In the newest volume of this exhilarating series, Eric Flint continues to reshape American history, imagining how a continent and its people might have taken a different path to its future. With 1824: The Arkansas War, he spins an astounding and provocative saga of heroism, battlefield action, racial conflict, and rebellion as a nation recovering from war is plunged into a dangerous era of secession.
Buffered by Spanish possessions to the south and by free states and two rivers to the north, Arkansas has become a country of its own: a hybrid confederation of former slaves, Native American Cherokee and Creek clans, and white abolitionists–including one charismatic warrior who has gone from American hero to bête noire. Irish-born Patrick Driscol is building a fortune and a powerful army in the Arkansas Confederacy, inflaming pro-slavers in Washington and terrifying moderates as well. Caught in the middle is President James Monroe, the gentlemanly Virginian entering his final year in office with a demagogic House Speaker, Henry Clay, nipping at his heels and fanning the fires of war. But Driscol, whose black artillerymen smashed both the Louisiana militia in 1820 and the British in New Orleans, remains a magnet for revolution. And fault lines are erupting throughout the young republic–so that every state, every elected official, and every citizen will soon be forced to choose a side.
For a country whose lifeblood is infected with the slave trade, the war of 1824 will be a bloody crisis of conscience, politics, economics, and military maneuvering that will draw in players from as far away as England. For such men as Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Sam Houston, charismatic war hero Andrew Jackson, and the violent abolitionist John Brown, it is a time to change history itself.
Filled with fascinating insights into some of America’s most intriguing historical figures, 1824: The Arkansas War confirms Eric Flint as a true master of alternate history, a novelist who brings to bear exhaustive research, remarkable intuition, and a great storyteller’s natural gifts to chronicle the making of our nation as it might have been.
Eric Flint is the acclaimed author of the alternate history novels The Rivers of War, 1634: The Galileo Affair, and 1632, as well as Mother of Demons, which was selected by Science Fiction Chronicle as one of the best novels of the year. He has collaborated with David Drake on five novels in the acclaimed Belisarius series. He graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from UCLA with a degree in African history. A longtime labor union activist, he lives in northwest Indiana with his wife, Lucille.
Praise for Eric Flint’s 1812: The Rivers of War
“Flint’s witty, tightly written alternative history presents a subtly revised version of events in the final year of the War of 1812. . . . Fans will cheer even louder if this outstanding start turns out to be the first of a long saga.”
–Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Eric Flint drops his readers into another time and place, where cultures collide, the action is hot and heavy, and we get to experience the best of the human spirit.”
–David Weber, author of the Honor Harrington adventures
“[Flint is] a helluva storyteller. . . . He’s dished up an excellent historical novel here–entertaining, informative, fast-moving.”
–SF Site
“Eric Flint has a genius for taking his passion for history and turning it into powerful, action-packed stories that instantly grab the readers and plunge them into a time and place that might have been.”
–David Drake, author of The Far Side of the Stars and Redliners
“A rousing tale . . . thought-provoking and gloriously action-packed.”
–SFReviews.net
“A meticulously researched alternate history, a tantalizing glimpse of the free America we have lost, and a thrilling story of warfare in the Napoleonic era.”
–Gene Wolfe, author of The Book of the New Sun
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