Michael F. Flynn (1947–2023)

For this book, I'm breaking my self-imposed rule against giving a 5-star rating without a second read. It is a wonderful melange of medieval history, culture, philosophy, and theology; xenobiology and xenopsychology; and modern theoretical physics. I'm no expert in any of these fields, of course; but I have done some more-than-casual reading the history/philosophy/theology field. Flynn has really done his research. But Eifelheim is never dry or pedantic. The scholarship is intimately woven into the story. And the 14th-century Germans as well as the stranded aliens are rendered in a touching and relatable way, even though both their worldviews are strange to our 21st-century ways of thinking.
[Audiobook note: The reader, Anthony Heald, does an amazing job. I love his rhythms and inflections.]… (more)

I actually give this 3.5 stars. Say one thing about the author, and this dovetails with my take on his Firestar series: he tells a GREAT story...but boy can he take his time getting to it.

Set in the distant future, in the same universe as the Firestar series, written in a old style; the story covers the chase for an artifact of great power that that is even yet more than it appears.

The story starts of quite slowly, but builds up a solid head of steam going right into the next installment of the series.

Bonus points for concept in the structure of the civilizations and cultures in the Spiral arm and how they are tied by travel.… (more)

Eifelheim has a simple premise—aliens crash-land in medieval Germany and can't get home, plot ensues. Good, yes?

At its best, this novel invites comparisons with Connie Willis's Doomsday Book, with its unique blend of genres and vivid evocation of the past. The history is honestly more compelling than the aliens, and Oberhochwald, with its cyclical seasons and frontier-like atmosphere of isolation and self-sufficiency, is as memorable a character as Dietrich, a scientifically-minded priest whose attempts to include the stranded aliens in the life of the village result in an unusual first contact story.

Like Willis's novels, Eifelheim's careful attention to detail means it's a bit slow and at times ends up in the weeds (and by "weeds," I mean "Habsburgs"). Its linguistic playfulness is almost too much, except that I pretty much enjoy every time Flynn drops in a medieval precursor to modern slang or has Dietrich use his scholar's Latin and Greek to accidentally coin words like "microphone" and "circuit." On the whole, this is a novel that's almost too clever by half, except when it surprises you by breaking your heart.

My only complaint is with the frame story, which follows two academics in our near future who accidentally uncover Dietrich's story. These chapters were originally a separate novella, and they did pretty much nothing for me, particularly as the characters are unpleasant to no end. I can't decide what I'm grumpier about, a librarian who apparently has a crush on her arrogant, boundary-challenged patron (in reality, I assure you she'd be giving him rude nicknames and laughing about him in the break room), or that the self-same patron is a historian whose discipline involves doing fancy things with big data yet begins the novel totally ignorant of where his data comes from. Happily I think you could just skip all the "Now" chapters and still enjoy the book.… (more)