Michael F. Flynn (1947–2023)

This book is best described as science fiction meets historical fiction and I absolutely loved it!

The book is set in two time periods, modern day and the late 1340's Germany. In the current day, Tom is a mathematical historian and has discovered an anomaly regarding settlement patterns in a particular area of Germany. According to his work, a town called Eifelheim was abandoned in the 14th Century and never re-settled which is extremely uncharacteristic. In fact, centuries later, the roads show more turned back on themselves and went out of their way to avoid the area.

Meanwhile, we are inserted into the daily lives of the inhabitants of Oberhochwald (as it was known back then) through the eyes of Pastor Dietrich. We learn quickly that this is the lead up to the abandonment of the town. Without ruining the story, there is a discovery of 'beings' living in the forest and the ever encroaching threat of the black plague.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book from so many angles. I enjoyed unravelling the mystery with Tom and his partner Sharon, and following along as the drama unfolded at Oberhochwald.

I enjoyed pondering the different responses by the towns people to the events occurring and how different the behaviours, beliefs and values were in that time period in Europe. It was also fascinating comparing the technology of the beings to those of the time period, and also to what we know today.

The book had a satisfactory and solid conclusion, and I was still thinking about it days after finishing it, which is the mark of any great novel.

Highly recommended! 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

This a fast-paced, engaging suspense novel about dueling secret societies each attempting to shape the course of society using applied mathematics. As it turns out, all the secret societies contending in the book have developed a field of study they call "cliology" (a true *science* of history that applies historical / actuarial records to ascertain sociological / political / economic trends that enable predictions about future events). Definitely an interesting premise, and one that's been show more used previously in science fiction (the most famous example of which would probably be Asimov's "Foundation" series). The book is extremely entertaining and a very easy read. I would it describe it mainly as an adventure / suspense novel spiced up with a few fantastic elements (cliology and its associated "secret history;" normal people turned into assassins with post-hypnotic triggers; arguably, working Babbage machines in the mid-1800s).

The characters are engaging, but I'd have liked to have seen them fleshed out a little more thoroughly. They aren't ciphers by any means, but I almost feel like prior to the start of the novel, they were all loners with few personal interests. That's a lazy way to create characters, though it's a common failing in SF. I wish that a little more detail had been included on cliology in the text. As it stands, cliology (by design, I suppose) remains largely mysterious. I was also expecting that Babbage machines and "steampunk" elements would play a larger role in the book; some readers may be disappointed to learn that they do not. Babbage machines are mainly just window dressing in the first third of the book. Also, though it's mainly set in the near future / modern day, some of the technology is starting to look a bit dated, an artifact of the book having been first published in 1990.

The setting and characters are crying out for a sequel, as there's a great deal left to explore and the book's finale was very open-ended with no real closure or resolution to the impending conflict. That said, I was satisfied with how things were left at the close of the book, but I would like to see more in a sequel (a prequel about the early days of the Babbage Society would be welcome as well). Flynn has a tendency to write stand-alone novels, which I respect in a field overflowing with trilogies and series.

This wasthe first Michael Flynn book that I've read, but it certainly hasn't been my last. He's an excellent writer with a real gift for plot, pacing, and natural-sounding dialogue.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I own a copy of the first edition of the book, which does not contain the final appendix on cliology is present in the current edition. I enjoyed the book so much, and, as a historian, I do intend to purchase the second edition at some point so I can read that appendix!)

Review copyright 2008 J. Andrew Byers show less

What do you think of an author who

- writes "the cries of joy he wrang from God's presence,"
- misspells "delirium" as "delerium" (where was spellchecker? where was the editor?),
- misuses "nexus" (which means a system of connections or connected things, as in a network or series of links) as if it meant "crux of the matter,"
- misspells one of his own fictitious place names (which is also the title of the book),
- drops suddenly and without warning from a third-person omniscient narrative into a show more first-person POV ("Tom once told me") and then drops back out of it again, with no explanation,
- switches POV from one character to another in the middle of a paragraph, without cuing the switch, so that suddenly the character is seeing himself in the third person,
- invents coy little linguistic devices such as referring to a height in "shoes" instead of in feet,
- partway in, starts delivering characters' speeches in quasi-German syntax, as if they were all speaking English with a German accent, instead of giving us a normal-sounding English equivalent of their German utterances--but not even from the beginning; only starting well along in the story,
- includes some German text that's wrong (Dorp instead of Dorf for "village"),
- has a medieval character recognize a computer as a machine, invent language to describe it that just happens to match 20th-21st-century technological language, and also allude to a "screen" with no prior explanation,
and
- delivers quantities of labored, pretentious-sounding sentences using a vocabulary that seems to be just a little bit beyond him, as if he had been picking words out of a thesaurus for their impressive sound without quite having a full command of their meaning, connotations, and usage?

Right. That's why I'm abandoning Eifelheim on page 92.

(not rated) show less