Eifelheim

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 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, show more 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 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 show more 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 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 show more 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

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 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 show more 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

Eifelheim is a crash course on life in the Holy Roman Empire in the Late Middle Ages and on remaining compassionate and unprejudiced in the face of hopelessness. It achieves this by brilliantly weaving together: insectoid aliens, a Catholic pastor, some quite convincing pseudo-physics, and the bubonic plague. If that intro doesn’t sound like the recipe for your new favorite novel then we’re two very different people.

(spoilers)

You may have heard elsewhere something like “those aliens aren’t really alien, they’re just funny looking humans” used to denigrate a science fiction novel for its unoriginality. With Eifelheim the similarity between the proto-German villagers and the interloping aliens called the Krenken is exactly the show more point.

To the reader the lifestyle of the krenkl is probably more familiar than that of the villagers of Oberhochwald in the middle of the 14th century. Flynn overcomes this barrier and ensures that we see things from the human perspective with our protagonist Pastor Dietrich, who from the highest education attainable in that era possesses a sharp and critical mind that relies on logic and observation to draw conclusions rather than dogmatism. In this way we experience the events of Eifelheim from the perspective of a modern man, an unlikely but not entirely inconceivable character to be found in Western Europe on the eve of the Renaissance.

With Dietrich’s eyes we see the nitty quotidian details of village life under the manorial system. Work, marriage, feasts, the law, traveling merchants, death, and an endless stream of Catholic holy days. We see the storming of a fortress and the inside of a battlefield surgeon’s tent. Journeys to the marketplace in the nearest city and the martial rules of the road on the way there and back. None of it is particularly grand or historically noteworthy, intentionally so. But each day we spend in the Breisgau adds detail to the picture of life in that place at that time that very well may faithfully depict how things really were. The amount of research that went into the setting is astonishing and, even ignoring all else, for that reason alone I found Eifelheim to be an immensely rewarding read.

So, over to our Krenken and their shipwrecked vessel hosting a few score tourists, scientists, and crew. Since we see them from the perspective of medieval villagers their antics are presented as incomprehensibly alien but when you look at what’s said and not how it’s said it’s clear that that couldn’t be further from reality. Some stop to take pictures of the church while others pick plants to test in the lab and yet more pull apart the ship’s innards and attempt to repair the fried circuitry. They wear varied clothes, react to events differently, and speak diverse set of languages that are inconsistently translated into German. They have no clear leader or universally respected order within their ranks and present anything but a unified front. They are generally nonthreatening save for a cultural predisposition towards corporal punishment that they willingly curb at the request of the humans.

And yet, most hochwalders still see them as a band of irredeemable demons sent to punish the village for what sins, exactly, nobody can truly say. Most hochwalders — but not our Dietrich. He serves as the bridge between villager and krenk in much the same way as how he connects us, the 21st century readers, to the villagers.

With neighborly hospitality and a willingness to communicate he averts what could have been a slaughter by the superior Krenken weaponry and works to build a mutually enriching relationship, not for any personal gain but because helping those in need is just what you do. By communicating they learn ways in which members of each species might offer their unique strengths to aid each other in their quest towards salvation. Prejudiced villagers slowly come around to their mantis-like guests as they witness their strife and sacrifice while spiritually impoverished Krenken learn the meaning of hope, faith, and mercy by the example of Dietrich and others. It’s a real kum-ba-ya situation, until all of the Krenken starve to death and the village is annihilated by the plague, that is.

As the novel progresses and the relationship with the aliens deepens, the distinction between krenk and human diminishes until finally it disappears completely. In the last days of the village of Oberhochwald and the Krenken adventure on Earth those that remain are brother and sister, both condemned to death by forces entirely outside of their control and accepting of their fate with the sense of grace and duty reserved for the enlightened.

Parallel to the medieval storyline is a modern-day account of the relationship between two professors, one theoretical physicist and one quantitative historian attempting to learn the truth behind Oberhochwald’s disappearance. This serves as a lighter and more familiar break for the reader while underlining how tolerance and open-hearted curiosity can uncover the hidden connections between concepts and strengthen those between people, throwing the themes of the other storyline into relief.

Straddling the line between historic fiction, science fiction, and so-good-it-needs-no-modifier fiction, Eifelheim is nothing other than a masterpiece. I have the same knot in my chest that I had after finishing Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. show less

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 show more 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. show less

The plot of Eifelheim relies on two huge coincidences. First of all we have Sharon, a theoretical physicist with a special interest in an obscure branch of mathematics which may one day, she believes, make travelling between universes possible; sharing an apartment with Tom, a theoretical historian, who is the first to notice a hole in the map, a medieval village—Eifelheim—which should still be there today but isn’t. And, second, we have an alien ship crashlanding on Earth at precisely the time and place—Europe in the 1340s—that the Black Death was wiping out as much as half the population.
    Eifelheim’s medieval name was Oberhochwald, one of many small villages deep in the forests around the town of Freiburg in southern show more Germany. Through the eyes of its priest, Father Dietrich, we get a pretty detailed picture of what daily life back then was like: its cottages and huts surrounded by the classic strip-cultivated land; its mill and forge, castle and church. Dietrich himself is intelligent and open-minded, well-versed in fourteenth-century philosophy and science; although a believer and clearly devout, his role as pastor in a Black Forest backwater also gives him the solitude and time to contemplate, not only his God, but Nature and universe too.
    I guess this latter is a third coincidence, now that I come to think of it, because it is into the very parish of this rational and imaginative man that something otherworldly intrudes early one August morning. In the pre-dawn gloom Dietrich notices a strange glow on a nearby hilltop; he feels…odd, then notices the hairs on his bare arms standing on end and sparks snapping and arcing from a pair of copper candlesticks. To most of the locals these would be supernatural phenomena, but to the modern eye (and Fr. Dietrich’s too) they’re clearly electrostatic effects. Later, a “building” is discovered deep in the woods, and later still there are glimpses of what to many of the villagers are “demons”. To our modern eyes again, accustomed to science-fiction novels and films, this is a wrecked ship and its alien crew; and as word spreads, while some fear these “demons”, others go to aid and feed the injured.
    This is more historical fiction than science fiction really, and for me the story itself got bogged down at times in some of the details of medieval politics for example. On the other hand, its depiction of daily life is fascinating—like an alien planet in itself in some ways. One detail I particularly liked was how alien (i.e. modern) technology might have looked to the medieval mind. Less imaginative, though, are the actual aliens, who could have flown here directly off the pages of C S Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet (the seroni, or what Ransom calls “sorns”) and, again for me, the most unforgettable thing in the entire book was something all too Earthbound: its ghastly descriptions of people suffering and dying from the baffling horror of the Black Death. Beside that (and I think perhaps this was the point) a shipful of strangers from another world paled to insignificance. show less