Eifelheim

[lightreads]

Eifelheim by Michael Flynn


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
In 1348 aliens are stranded in an isolated medieval village, while in modern times a physicist and a historian investigate the mystery of that disappeared village.

Hrm. Just . . . not quite. A book all about clashing paradigms – alien science with religious natural philosophy, narrative history with theoretical physics, the short modern mystery novella with the slow medieval tale of aliens and the Plague. And it just never came together in that elusive way we call 'gelling.' Lots of neat cosmological metaphors, some pretty writing, but ultimately just bits and pieces instead of a working whole.

Still, the historical research is pretty cool, and I was both discomforted and interested in the bedrock literalness of medieval religiosity – the aliens want to go home to the stars, so of course the answer is to save them. But in terms of a book, if it's scifi does the Middle Ages, I prefer Connie Willis's Doomsday Book.

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Comments

[readerjane]

Sorry it didn't work for you! I loved Eifelheim.

But yes, I'd have to say I loved Doomsday Book more. A bit easier to latch on to Kivrin than to Dietrich, I guess. And Kivrin's transition to fluency came much quicker than the Krenkens' did, so the characters started communicating earlier on in DB; it didn't have that slow start that a story burdened with a long language acquisition can have.

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

I dropped one of his hard SF titles onto my big TBR electronic stack. He writes really well, as a craft matter, so I'm curious if the distance I felt was a function of the particular book or not.