And it's the one I've read (in part, I stopped at some point after 8-10 books, may or not return to it eventually).

The setting was created by Flint, originally for a stand alone novel (and it remains perfectly possible to stop there, if someone wants a taste of the series without reading all of it). It transposes a fictional small town in West Virginia in the middle of the 30 y. War Germany, and in a way it's about how this bunch of people with limited resources and education (they're for the most part miners and such - the most educated people are a catholic priest, a medical doctor from NYC who was visiting, a rich entrepreneur with a military background and a local high school history teacher) face the challenge of rebuilding something like America in those conditions, which in turn is an excuse to look at American values and realizations - what to keep, what should be abandonned. Flint returned to the setting later on, continuing the story. Eventually he turned it into a shared universe and the whole thing branched out a great deal.

Later books deal with the survival of the political entity created in the first one, though sometimes only as a background (without getting into too much spoilerish details, the "branches" of the series - those I've read from as I suspect there's more now - deal with the fact the high school was full of textbooks, which got read or stolen by various players. One branch is more "religious" (the themes and background, the stories remain mostly entertaining/avendtures, without becoming heavy-going) as it deals with how the Catholic Church in the 30Y war era deals with the full knowledge of its "future" history (from the failure of eradicating the "reform" to dropping latin for masses) as compiled by the local catholic priest for the Pope - will it accept it and try to accelerate the changes, or not (the story thus centers on the embassy sent by the "Americans" to Venice) Another branch deals with Richelieu and how he acts after reading the history of France up to now (it's basically newborn America without the Atlantic between it and the absolutist monarchs), and yet another branch is set in Eastern Europe - in and around Prague, with the Jews playing a big role. The series is quite entertaining and often funny, if a bit lightweight (it could have been more than that in the hands of a major intellectual, but Flint remains primarly an entertainer with an historian background, he does not go as deeply into issues as some might wish him to). Outside from dubious depiction of some historical figures (his Mazarin and Richelieu seem lifted more from Alexandre Dumas than history books), it's relatively good, historically. Once the series becomes a shared universe, it gets more uneven. It's written by a mix of solid established writers mostly from Baen's stable, and amateurs with various backgrounds as Flint also uses the project to "groom" new (not necessarily young - one is a grandma) writers, mostly who are historians or history buffs. The series also has several collections of short stories by various writers beside the novels. Those too are uneven. I've stopped not because it wasn't fun, but because trying to follow all the "branches" (which is kind of necessary to keep up with how the global situation progress) became very time consumming for something that is very much "entertaiment".



I totally agree with that.