Michael Flynn (1) (1947–)

It's really hard to write a tragedy that works. Getting one that's sad, that has impact, that has good foreshadowing and the classic tragic flaw, that draws you in without getting too maudlin about it all, that's a difficult task. So I found it quite enjoyable to find Flynn's book really carried off the whole package. It's more than I usually expect from my science fiction, but maybe I should expect more, if things like this are out there.

Flynn's tale is of a ship that sailed the solar winds show more majestically and with pride and panache... but the time for sailing that way, for not using engines, is long past. Now the ship has been retrofitted, but instead of being a grand liner, it's now just a cargo ship, and the crew is much reduced from its heyday. Even just summarizing the setup gives you a sense that the story's tone and style is all elegiac, with some tongue-in-cheek humor and puns thrown in to leaven the mood a little.

Of course, when the engines encounter a problem, and the old sailors see a chance to revisit their old glory, the situation slowly falls apart. And it is slow, and all of the dozen characters or so have their flaw: one is too officious, one too secretive, one too insensitive, etc. The book spins out and lets you see how each one in turn allowed for matters to get worse, until the ship was doomed.

I felt for the characters, who I thought were well-written, honest and interesting, and the sci-fi parts of it were pretty well worked out, too. This was the most satisfying read for the genre I've had in a while, and I would certainly recommend it to others, even non-sci-fi fans. The story's that strong, as long as you're willing to accept the sci-fi elements. show less

An alien craft crashes on 14th century Earth, just outside an isolated village in Germany; the village priest, Father Dietrich, a man of reason and science, discovers the aliens and forms a connection to them, eventually introducing them into his village.

Flynn depicts daily life in the Middle Ages in great detail, such that the village and its inhabitants became very real to me. Besides imbuing the story with historical interest, he also brings in quantum physics to explain interstellar show more flight, and even plays the two disciplines off one another in a parallel story that takes place in the present (or near future). A physicist and her historian boyfriend discover the secret history of the village Eifelheim, where the spaceship crashed, and thus unlock the potential for humans to move into space.

But most of the novel takes place in the past. Flynn depicts his medieval villagers and their alien visitors almost lovingly, as real beings with real flaws who nonetheless are doing the best they can. But both the people and the aliens are victims of the larger forces of the universe. The aliens are stranded in a time when the technology to repair their ship simply doesn’t exist, and they cannot get adequate nutrition from Earth food. Then the Plague comes to the village.

This brings up religious and philosophical questions, which Father Dietrich asks: Are the aliens also children of God who can be saved? What is the meaning, if any, of their coming to that particular time and place on Earth? The answers are left up to the reader. In the end, the village itself is lost, its secret buried for 700 years, waiting for someone to happen upon it.

I enjoyed reading this book and felt I learned a lot from it about both quantum physics and religion. Some of the physics went over my head, though. show less

This novel will become one of the very few I keep to savor again, along with titles such as "The Eqyptologist" by Arthur Phillips and "The Sparrow" by Mary Doria Russell. The multiple layers of history, science, linguistics, philosophy and plot would all benefit from a second reading.

As the plague approaches through the Black Forest of Germany in 1348/49, a group of wayfarers appears in a lightning storm near a tiny village deep in the woods. The travelers, who resemble more than anything show more giant grasshoppers, awaken diverse reactions among the villagers. Some decide demons have descended on them, others that these are people from an unexplored part of the world. The more thoughtful among the inhabitants, including the priest, a visiting monk, and the lord of the manor and his sergeant, take a more nuanced approach, giving the newcomers a chance to act and explain themselves before drawing conclusions. The visitors are, of course, interstellar travelers, but they have crashed into a world which thinks the stars circle the earth nearby and which has no sense of modern physics, cosmology, or time theory.

And here lies the depth of the book, because the villagers have their own cosmology to describe the world they perceive, and several members of each group attempt to understand the other, the villagers to understand what’s happening and the visitors to find a way to go home. The visitors have technology which allows them to learn the local language, but only to a point. Abstractions prove the foundering point, as with the priest’s assertion that the Lord rises to heaven (the skies) at Easter, which leads some travelers to be baptized so they can get home by going with Him. William of Ockham visits at one point, on his way to make peace with the Pope (historically, he disappeared on the way), and the priest has a past which brings up various historical events of the time.

Interspersed through this story is that of a present-day couple working through separate scientific projects (one on variable light speed and the other on population anomalies) which are destined to collide head-on and bring the village’s story into a new perspective. There is a nice building of suspense and dread throughout the story, and generally the author leaves it to the reader to decipher German, Latin and scientific terms, making the read dense and enveloping. The only complaint I had was with the priest’s choice of pointedly modern terminology to describe some of the travelers’ technology (e.g., their fotografik devices which render pictures for them) – just a bit too jarring for the reader enmeshed in the medieval.

For all the alien travelers and modern interpretations by the scientists, this did not read like science fiction but as a story of cultures and languages colliding. Most of the tale takes place in the village and is told from the priest’s learned viewpoint. Very compelling, especially coming hard on the heals of reading "A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos". show less

A fine idea for a story that I deeply regret to say is less than the sum of its parts. The concept is that in the 14th century, during the Black Death, an alien spaceship crash-lands outside a German village and, in the months that follow, its occupants interact with the God-fearing people there. Eifelheim sees the majority of its pages devoted to this story of 'Then', with author Michael Flynn providing a dense and detail-rich account of this compelling First Contact, mostly from the show more point-of-view of Pastor Dietrich, the village priest. Interspersed between these chapters are those of 'Now', as a modern-day historian and scientist duo seek to penetrate the mystery of this village of 'Eifelheim', which German folk legend says was possessed by 'demons' and was never resettled.

This separation between 'Then' and 'Now' is useful in diagnosing why I found Eifelheim compelling but was also left frustrated and disappointed. The 'Now' chapters are in effect an Eifelheim novella that Flynn published twenty years earlier, in which the two modern-day scholars theorise on the cursed village and dig up its mysteries. Its ending is prime novella territory, affecting and profound as the culmination of the original short novella, but which somewhat under-serves a reader who has endured through the much larger novel.

In light of this, the 'Then' chapters are a sort of world-building expansion of that original novella. In some ways, this is excellent: Flynn has clearly done his research and his vivid depiction of 14th-century life and the social mores of medieval Christendom show that, to a modern reader, perhaps the extra-terrestrials are not the only 'aliens'. How the villagers think and react to the actual aliens, who they call the Krenkel, is quite realistic. I deeply enjoyed this portrayal of First Contact; how the medieval villagers try to understand or conceptualise the advanced alien technology, but also how the aliens try to understand the humans' Christian worldview and adapt to it. These chapters have a great wealth of cerebral reward and verisimilitude; you can readily believe that a First Contact would play out like this.

That said, verisimilitude and world-building ought to be a means to an end, not an end in itself. It should be there to serve a wider story and, to be frank, I spent a lot of Eifelheim's dense 500 pages waiting for something to just, well, happen. There are affecting moments – the aliens' awe at the harmony and counterpoint of the church music (pp217-20) was quite striking, as was their embrace of Christian notions of self-sacrifice – but it's easy to lose track; not only of characters (only Dietrich and Hans stood apart) but also motivations (when some of the aliens left but others stayed, I felt I didn't really know why).

While the 'Then' chapters were better-written, I found myself grateful whenever there was one of the brief 'Now' chapters, because at least there was bit of movement, a bit of dynamism there. Not enough, I grant: when towards the end, the scholars head to Eifelheim to literally attempt to dig up the mystery, I felt both anticipation but also disappointment. Because this was happening in the final few pages, whereas I had expected this – the mystery, the investigation, the discovery, and the fallout as mankind grapples with its proof of First Contact – to have been what Eifelheim was about in its entirety, not just in its final pages. This was the story I expected to read when I first heard of the concept of the book.

But even if my preconceptions were misguided, I would have been happy so long as something else had been put in their place. But there's a real dearth of plot: I expected some grand things to happen, some jeopardy, some mystery or betrayal, some larger purpose or exposure to the wider world outside the village. Not melodrama or soap-opera, and not even a clichéd government conspiracy or majestic inter-worlds cataclysm, but for something.

Instead, neither the 'Then' or 'Now' stories seem to have an end-goal, and the story peters out. It never really finds that extra gear to really grip the reader and elevate the story. And considering the fantastic concept and the success in making its world convincing, it's a real shame it doesn't find that gear. Eifelheim is a fulfilling cerebral exercise, to be sure, but one performed on a treadmill. The reader by the end finds they have been merely running in place. show less