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A review by branch_c
Eifelheim by Michael Flynn
5.0
This is an absolutely fascinating book with a great concept and excellent execution. I enjoyed the 1348 sections more than the modern day ones, which is fine, since the historical story makes up the majority of the book, and the short modern day parts are well placed and serve their purpose admirably. It's also a very erudite book, with many archaic terms to look up, not to mention phrases in German and other languages, but amazingly, this works, and these touches add to the realism rather than making it dry or academic.
We learn about the aliens in a somewhat clouded way, which, on consideration, seems appropriate, since we are seeing them from the perspective of the 14th century villagers, who literally have no idea what they are - for all they know, they could be demons - or maybe just very different strangers from outside their insular existence. The protagonist is the village pastor, Dietrich, so we get most of the story from his viewpoint, one in which Christianity is matter-of-factly true. Dietrich is also well-educated in "natural philosophy" though, and he produces and accepts ideas about physics and biology that seem decidedly before their time.
The only aspect slightly lacking for me was the aliens' perspective - everything we learn about their biology and technology has to be described in terms that Dietrich can understand. And I can believe that some of the aliens might still be sympathetic to religious concepts, but it seemed a bit of a stretch that they would take at face value Dietrich's statements about the coming of Jesus - to the point that they thought that this "lord from the sky" might be a being of energy who could rescue them. Even with translation difficulties, surely they would have recognized this as theology and not science - so I was skeptical that their alien religious tendencies would extend to some of them actually accepting Christianity as true! Anyway, it would have been interesting to see one of them as a viewpoint character - but this was a tradeoff and in the end I think Flynn made a fine choice in telling the story as he did.
There's a plague episode toward the end, which brings to mind Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, and yes, it's as graphic and depressing as you'd expect it to be, but this clearly was intended to add to the power of the story, and it does so fairly well.
Definitely recommended, and I'll be interested to check out other books by Flynn.
We learn about the aliens in a somewhat clouded way, which, on consideration, seems appropriate, since we are seeing them from the perspective of the 14th century villagers, who literally have no idea what they are - for all they know, they could be demons - or maybe just very different strangers from outside their insular existence. The protagonist is the village pastor, Dietrich, so we get most of the story from his viewpoint, one in which Christianity is matter-of-factly true. Dietrich is also well-educated in "natural philosophy" though, and he produces and accepts ideas about physics and biology that seem decidedly before their time.
The only aspect slightly lacking for me was the aliens' perspective - everything we learn about their biology and technology has to be described in terms that Dietrich can understand. And I can believe that some of the aliens might still be sympathetic to religious concepts, but it seemed a bit of a stretch that they would take at face value Dietrich's statements about the coming of Jesus - to the point that they thought that this "lord from the sky" might be a being of energy who could rescue them. Even with translation difficulties, surely they would have recognized this as theology and not science - so I was skeptical that their alien religious tendencies would extend to some of them actually accepting Christianity as true! Anyway, it would have been interesting to see one of them as a viewpoint character - but this was a tradeoff and in the end I think Flynn made a fine choice in telling the story as he did.
There's a plague episode toward the end, which brings to mind Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, and yes, it's as graphic and depressing as you'd expect it to be, but this clearly was intended to add to the power of the story, and it does so fairly well.
Definitely recommended, and I'll be interested to check out other books by Flynn.