Eric Flint

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Eric Flint (February 6, 1947 – July 17, 2022) was a noted science fiction author who tended towards the harder end of the Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness, often in collaboration with other authors such as David Weber.

Notable aspects of his writing style included a number of trademark affections and concepts, including:

  • Unusual tonal tags, structured in a general manner like the following: he said "something something something." Emotional tone: "Something."
  • A tendency to have fun with characters' emotional and physical relationships that's somewhat unusual for most science fiction authors.
  • At least one romance per book. Some of his co-writers has mentioned Flint Shipping the characters the co-writer developed. He has even unabashedly shipped Historical Domain Characters that he thinks should have gotten together.
  • A notable bantering style of dialogue between most of the major cast.
  • A distinct tendency towards being able to make workable, interesting and entertaining Author Avatars and God Mode Sues (examples: see Flavius Belisarius, Michael Stearns and Victor Cachat).

If not the creator of the Assiti Shards time travel idea (also known as ISOT events, after the Island in The Sea of Time), then the writer of the best example. Assiti being an anagram of As It Is, and the idea is simple: a location is picked up whole and dropped in another time, with only the resources they would have on hand--As It Is--to survive.


Notable works include: