These "shards", according to the fictional universe backstory, are waste byproduct of artworks created by the sophisticated and curious alien race known as the Assiti.
This timeline involves the displacement and exchange of the late 1990s mining town of Grantville, West Virginia with a piece of 1630s early modern southern Germany (in Thuringia).
A secondary thread covers 19th century Cherokees being forcible escorted by U.S. Army troops from their homes in Georgia to their exile in would later become Oklahoma along the Trail of Tears.
[7] It is not clear if Vance will be able to continue this series after the immediate closure of both The Grantville Gazette and the Ring of Fire Press that had occurred after Eric Flint's death in 2022.
From 2012 to 2017, author David W. Dove wrote three unrelated short stories in the Time Spike universe that were published in volumes 39,[8] 41,[9] and 74[10] of the Grantville Gazette.
[11] The cause of the displacement was described as "An Assiti Shard transposes a modern cruise liner into the Mediterranean just after the death of Alexander the Great.
"[12] The passengers and crew include a historian, a Norwegian cruise ship captain, a French first officer for navigation who was a competitive pistol marksman while previously serving in the French Navy, and an American congressman, who are thrown back in time during the period of the Diadochi, when one of world's largest empires was being split apart by civil war.
[16] The Sicilian Coil is the third novel set in the Queen of The Seas series that was released in September 2021 (ISBN 978-1-956015-13-3) by Ring of Fire Press.
After the sudden demise of Ring of Fire Press in August 2022, the authors regained the copyrights to their books and they made arrangements to have this title be privately re-released on Amazon in September 2022 (ISBN 979-8354924882).
The Carthaginian Crisis is the fourth novel set in the Queen of The Seas series that was released in June 2024 (ISBN 979-8328591003) and was published independently by the Huff and Goodlett via Amazon.
In the first issue (September 2023; ISBN 978-1962398008), Cooper wrote Into the Dark, a short story that could be the start of a possible serial concerning a Queen of the Seas's crew member who was recruited to lead a group of ship peoples to search remote tropical island caves for sources of bat guano that could be used in the manufacturer of gun powder.
The Crossing (ISBN 978-1-9821-9201-3) is a 2022 novel by Kevin Ikenberry set in the Assiti Shards milieu about a time displaced 2008 ROTC squad sent back to the 1776 Battle of Trenton.