Best Book of the Blog? Eifelheim!

Guess what?! I finished another book! It only took three weeks. That's not bad, right? Well, it's okay then. Anyway, this time I picked Eifelheim by Michael Flynn from the good ole giant bookshelf of unread books.

The first thing that I realized when I started reading this book was that it sure was a lot like the last book I read, Coalescent. Both books jump back in forth between two different characters, one in the past and another in modern times. However, the similarities were really only skin deep.

Eifelheim starts with a mystery. Tom, a modern historian with a great name, is researching the disappearance of a small German village in the Middle Ages. Turns out that the land was never resettled after the Black Plague, when all other abandoned towns were resettled shortly after the plague ended. So, what happened?

We then jump back to the time in question, 1348, and follow the character of Dietrich, a worldly and knowledgeable priest who leads the small town of Oberhochwald. This is where the book really starts to get good. Shortly after we first meet Dietrich, there is a loud boom and a shock of electricity. The next day he wanders into the forest and guess what? Aliens!

That's right, the main focus of this book is about aliens crash landing in medieval Germany! This, of course, has far-reaching results. The first thing the villagers assume is that these are demons. The priest, being worldly and knowledgeable, soon realizes that these are not demons, but men who did not descend from Adam. He has a difficult time convincing the villagers of this fact, but the Krenken (as he names them) eventually form an uneasy alliance the villagers and are partially accepted.

What really blew me away about this book (besides aliens in medieval Germany) was the level of intelligence it must have taken to write it. It's one thing to think about how cool it would be to see knights with swords fighting aliens with ray guns (this doesn't actually happen, sorry), but it's an entirely other thing to see it play out in a realistic way.

These medieval people have no concept, as we do now, of aliens, space, electricity, or any of the other science fiction tropes and cliches that we take for granted now. The way Flynn is able to show the interactions between the priest and the aliens is fantastic. They each do their best to explain their beliefs about their physical and spiritual worlds to each other, with many misunderstandings. These conversations are fascinating, even if at times difficult to understand, and were great fun to read.

Michael Flynn was able to weave in an amazing amount physics, history, theology, philosophy, and historical science and understanding. I wish I knew more than I do going into this book so I would be able to understand a little more of these sections. This is one of the best books I have read in a couple years and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to experience some really special science fiction.