1636: The Saxon Uprising

The Saxon Uprising turns the Ring of Fire series inward, as Grantville's influence on seventeenth-century Europe sparks a revolutionary movement that threatens to consume the United States of Europe. When the firebrand Gretchen is arrested in Saxony and faces execution, street uprisings spread, and the brutal General Baner moves to suppress them by any means necessary. Mike Stearns, now a general rather than a prime minister, is sent to restore order, and finds in the mission an opportunity his former adversaries never intended to give him.

George Guidall has long made the Ring of Fire series his own, and the political complexity of this installment suits his measured, authoritative delivery. He handles the novel's ideological debates with the same care as its military action, making the longer discussions of political theory feel like genuine drama rather than digression.