Since I’m going to be voting for the Hugos this year, I feel obliged to actually read as many of the nominated books as possible, and Michael Flynn’s Eifelheim was readily available, so I picked up a copy and read it a little while back.
The novel mixes two plot threads, one in a near-future setting, the other in medieval Germany in 1348, just before the Black Death. The modern thread concerns a couple of academics, a physicist studying new theories of time and space, and a historian looking into the mysterious abandonment of a place called “Eifelheim” in Germany. The medieval thread tells the story of what really happened in the place that is now called Eifelheim, which was originally a village called Oberhochwald.
In October of 1348, a mysterious light flashes through the sky over Oberhochwald, acoompanied by a loud bang. Shortly afterward, the village priest goes into the woods to investigate, and stumbles across mysterious beings in a strange “house” in a field of newly flattened trees. It seems that an alien spaceship has crashed, and a number of aliens are stranded with no obvious way to repair their ship. They have to make some sort of accompadation with Pastor Dietrich and the rest of the village, if they hope to survive and reach their homes again.
I was initially unenthusiastic about this because I had the mistaken impression that it was an Eric Flint sort of thing. It’s very much not that, much to my relief. The other major knock on the book, in reviews that I’ve seen, is of the form “Michael Flynn suffered for his research, and now you will too…” There’s a little truth to that, but I didn’t find it oppressive, save for a couple of small areas to be mentioned below.
On the whole, this is a very good historical SF sort of book. The aliens are interestingly alien, the medieval setting is meticulously researched, and while there’s a certain ominous inevitability to the unfolding of events in Oberhochwald, the basic structure of the plot is interesting throughout. The near-future interludes aren’t quite as well done, but there’s an interesting mystery element to the hunt for evidence of what happened. Taken as a whole, it’s a well-done book.
Looked at more closely, though, it has some serious flaws…
To begin with, there are far too many scenes of people explaining things to one another. I’ll tolerate a certain amount of infodumping, particularly in a first contact story, but it gets to be a bit much after a while.
A bigger problem is something all too typical of secret history/ alternate history books: in his interaction with the alien Krenk, Dietrich stumbles over a llarge number of essentially modern concepts that are presented in a sort of quasi-medieval form. Flynn can do this because Oberhochwald is a backwater, and ends up abandoned by the modern era, so nothing discovered there can really affect the course of history, but he gets a little carried away. Dietrich ends up getting explanations of a lot of physics and technology, and always puts them into terms that are almost but not quite the modern words for the same devices– the bit of the communication device that you speak into, he dubs a “mikrofoneh,” for example, combining a couple of Greek words, and in the background you can hear Michael Flynn hugging himself for being so darn cute.
(He does, at least, avoid the pitfall of having famous people make cameo appearances, which drives me up the wall in a lot of alternate history books. The only famous personage to pass through is William of Ockham, and he barely counts.)
The biggest stumbling block, at least for me, though, comes in the modern interludes that deal with the new theories of physics. These are explained in just enough detail to sound utterly daft, while remaining vague enough for just about anything to be possible. There’s a bunch of technobabble about a changing speed of light, and quantized redshifts, and other things that I can’t precisely recall because reading them made me want to take a power drill to my temple like the guy in Pi. These sections are highly not recommended, though they were originally published in Analog, and I can see how their readership would eat this stuff up.
In the end, I think it’s good, but not great. It’s very much in a classic sort of SF mode, and I suspect that played a role in getting it nominated, but the overly talky, too-clever-by-half nature of a lot of the interactions put me off a bit. If you stripped out the physics stuff entirely, and made some dramatic cuts in the “aliens explain science to a medieval scholar” bits, this could be a fantastic story– the alien storyline is actually fairly moving, and the modern-day historical inquiries are pretty cool. As it is, though, it’s not that great a book– I’ll vote it above “No Award,” but it’ll be near the bottom of my ballot.