Michael F. FlynnRezensionen
Autor von Gefallene Engel
Rezensionen
Set in the distant future, in the same universe as the Firestar series, written in a old style; the story covers the chase for an artifact of great power that that is even yet more than it appears.
The story starts of quite slowly, but builds up a solid head of steam going right into the next installment of the series.
Bonus points for concept in the structure of the civilizations and cultures in the Spiral arm and how they are tied by travel.
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 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.
In the end it was too disjointed, and too unresolved for me to enjoy.
You know, upon reflection, I disliked Gone Girl for the same reasons I disliked this book. Entirely too much navel gazing and too little story.
Eifelheim’s medieval name was Oberhochwald, one of many small villages deep in the forests around the town of Freiburg in southern 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.
In this book her plans are close to completion. She has a working platforms for space manufacturing .She has a crew going to a possible planet killer sized asteroid. Despite a seeming good situation the consequences of Marissa van Huyten's past decisions are coming to haunt her. On her space platforms the growing international crisis on Earth is causing poor morale among her workers.On top of all that the asteroid mission has found evidence of alien's having visited it before humans. All this sets the reader up for an exciting sequel for this book
I love this novel. There, I’ve said it. Having been tempted by its “Spoiler Alert” title, when I first read it about 15 years ago, I remember being impressed by the way that Flynn cleverly strips away the artifice, and still manages to create almost unbearable suspense. He tells you exactly what’s going to happen. Much of the time, he tells you exactly what’s going on in the minds of each character, and exactly how they are fatally misreading what going on in the minds of any other given character. He creates a premise that requires massive infodumps – technical, historical, personal – to work. And IMHO, not only does it work, but it’s a delight. And not only is it a delight, it has fascinating depths and insights – insights into human nature, insights into how endeavours (personal, professional, perhaps even societal) work, or more crucially, don’t work. Insights into how one person can make a crazy, complicated system (again personal, professional, perhaps even societal) work, and how taking him/her away can result in the whole dam’ pack of card collapsing.
Why do I love this book? Wellll ….
1) It’s about so much more than (wait for it) the wreck of the MSS River of Stars, the formerly fabulous luxury liner that used to ferry the great and the good back and forth between the planets, asteroids and artificial habitats of the inner Solar System. This novel is about every toxic workplan, and failed venture; how it got that way, and what might have been done to make it different. As Flynn tells it, this is something of a ghost story, and the catastrophe of the title results on one crucial absence (which commences on page 4 of my edition) and gradually, slowly, inexorably develops as a disparate bunch of misfits follow their own agendas, misunderstand their colleagues motivations, and just don’t listen. If that doesn’t sound familiar, you have never had to work with other people. If you are recently emerged from a bad working situation, you might have to read River as you’re hiding behind the sofa, peeping through the fingers held to your horrified eyes. This will be hard, but worth it.
2) I love Flynn’s style. Yes, sometimes (often ... always …) he gets a bit carried away with himself. In the immortal words of Prime Minister Benjamin Disreali, he can be “inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.” So what? When the verbosity is this exuberant, when the asides are this snarky – what’s not to love? And Flynn is comfortable with poking fun at himself ...
English, ‘Kiru decided, had too many words, and its speakers felt obliged to play with the extra ones.
3) The worldbuilding is fabulous. Flynn constructs a history. There is technology, there are societies, each with every different, and very plausible, norms and outlooks. There is biology, and prejudice. There are recipes, and sea chanties. There are great names, names that are so almost not weird, but still very SF … I want my next grandchild to be named The Lotus Jewel, but I don’t think my daughter and her partner will buy it …
I also love the way that Flynn plays with the tropes of other genres – this is, as I suggest above, a ghost story. It’s also SF’s answer to Patrick O’Brien and Horatio Hornblower. It could also be used as a textbook in a (very forward looking and imaginative) MBA as a guide to how not to organize a major project. It’s a future history, but it’s also an alternative history, with its clever nods and winks to Titanic, the near cousin to MSS River of Stars, both in its glorious launch and great prospects and its Olympian, stuff-myths-are-made-of downfall. But River of Stars is what Titanic would have been had it survived that maiden voyage, and completed hundreds of Atlantic crossings, until the paint start to chip, the fabulous fittings were damaged, or sold off, and (like Titanic’s sister ship, Olympic), she became a hospital ship and was torpedoed ignominiously in a forgotten episode of WWI.
Flynn’s lowering sense of a catastrophe about to happen even echoes Thomas Hardy’s wonderful poem on Titanic, “The Convergence of the Twain” …
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
I love this novel.
There are, perhaps, two “elephants in the room” of my 5-star rating that I feel I have to address. I can love this novel, and give it a 5-star review, and still admit that it’s not perfect. (In my rating system, a novel doesn’t have to be perfect to get 5-stars: it just has to be better than it needed to be, and memorable in a way that I know I will never forget … )
First, are there times when reasonable people can agree that Flynn may have gotten carried away, and The Wreck of The River of Stars could have benefited from a tuck and a trim? Well … no. One of the things I enjoyed is the way that the inevitable seems to happen in real time – day by day at first, and then, as the catastrophe reaches its climax, minute by minute. I loved the detail. I loved the backstories, I loved the technology (and I am not a natural techie …).
The other aspect of the novel, which I had forgotten, but now makes me uncomfortable, is the story arc of the character of Miko, the apprentice engineer. She’s a teenage girl who has escaped a traumatic, abusive childhood, and emerged from that experience with a burning, obsessive desire to lose her virginity to an unprepossessing middle age man. Eye roll ... Flynn would probably object to that description, but hey, I call ’em as I see ‘em. Her relationships with the three men on the River of Stars who are in positions of authority over her, who know her tragic backstory, and who ought to know better run the gamut from plausible (if still very wrong), to exploitative, to downright creepy wish-fulfilment . This is a great shame in a novel that, otherwise, depicts a future that is realistically diverse, and still sensitive to the pressure of that diversity.
Still, highly recommended.
(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 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.
The basic idea is similar to the starting point of Asimov's Foundation series: that a secret society has discovered how to compute what will happen in history. Except that it's not set in the far future, it's set in the recent past. The sort of thing that could be going on now.
What's particularly fascinating about it for me was:
(a) It's more realistic than Asimov's Foundation--there are better limits on what could and could not be done. Better explanation of why nobody but this secret society does it.
(b) The dynamics of the secret society are much more realistic. These are realistic people, with realistic disagreements. Some of the people are moral, some less so. (This is partly where conflict arises.)
(c) There are things in here that somebody like Asimov really *should* have thought of when he imagined a society that has figured out the math of history and how to predict it. I came away amazed: Flynn was exactly right, that is what *would* happen, but I (and apparently Asimov) never thought of it. Unfortunately I can't discuss these details without ruining the surprise, which would frankly damage the story.
The characters are so-so. Not bad. It's told from the viewpoint of someone who is discovering all this from the outside, and she's a fairly interesting character. Flynn does a really good job of letting the discovery unfold for you. The rest of the characters are ok. The fascinating part, for me, was the exploration of the idea: what she discovers.
If you've read this review so far, you probably want a more detailed comparison with the Foundation series. The Foundation series was interesting because it explored ideas of how history *ought* to work which are counterintuitive (e.g., the great general in the last days of the empire will never be allowed to succeed in an invasion, because of the dynamics of the empire; basically, why Belisarius was never allowed to succeed). This book has none of that. Rather than being about the dynamics of history, it's about the dynamics of the secret society that understands and predicts history. In the Foundation series (at least in the first part), you find that the characters for the most part did nothing at all; what happened was just inevitable, and what the characters did was futile from the start. (It was a minor triumph of Asimov to turn crushing, blind historical inevitability into an interesting story.) In this story, the characters are doing something: mostly, working against each other, exploring how they should use their knowledge.
Later on, Asimov's Foundation wandered off into other territory: first breaking his thesis that history could be predicted (the Mule), then into mind magic, ESP, etc. (the Second Foundation). (I don't know why, but almost all the hard science fiction guys eventually would up with mind magic.) This story has none of that.
This series was pretty good, but looooooooong. So many characters. Most of the many subplots are kind of interesting. It definitely held my attention through four long novels. But I was definitely done when he finally wound up the last novel.
The most interesting story to me, and the one that threads it all together, is the story of the tycoon whose obsession is to protect the earth from asteroid impacts. But this story is intermixed (in a very satisfying way, actually) with the same tycoon's attempts to fix education (so that we *can* go to the asteroids) and keep control of her company (again, so that we *can* go to the asteroids). And of course it's all mixed up with her relationships (which was, frankly, less satisfying but actually not bad). It tells the story over several decades (I think; I can't quite remember, but it was certainly many years).
Most of the rest of the subplots are in some way about the teenagers whom she saves from a derelict school system and gives new hope and life. This was long and complicated, but it was still satisfying to see them rescued from a life with no future, and accomplish something worthwhile as adults, in so many different ways. I wish I knew of some school system in the real world that had such a phenomenally high success rate at converting otherwise wasted humans into world-class scientists, engineers, and poets, because it would be totally worth supporting. But the story is told in such a way that you don't feel the improbability of such a high success rate; you just feel her passion to make it happen, and cheer it on.
I picked up this story because there are not that many science fiction works about the near-term exploration of the solar system (compared to, say, going to other star systems at speeds faster than light).
Theses stories were started over twenty-five years ago, but they didn't feel dated to me. They accurately portray what we see increasingly today: corporate space programs rather than exclusively government sponsorship.
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garyrholt | 6 weitere Rezensionen | Nov 5, 2020 |
garyrholt | 6 weitere Rezensionen | Nov 5, 2020 | One of the things that I thought was intriguing about it was the historical setting, just when science is about to take off in the universities; the leading character is a disciple of Jean Buridan, who was a key early Christian scientific thinker, now largely forgotten except by historians of science. Other thinkers such as Ockham make brief appearances. You can see the beginnings of scientific thinking, and how it was all mixed in with Christian theology.
A lot of authors I have read, even good ones, do not really seem to understand how medieval Christians; they typically impose modern grids on medieval persons, and it makes the people of the time look like idiots. This is a terrible way to do history; you shouldn't assume that the people are idiots, you should assume that if what they did doesn't make sense, you just don't understand their premises. You should assume if their system makes no sense to you, you just don't understand it; it must have some logic to it that made people of the time adhere to it, even if people today don't. This author has definitely researched his stuff and knows what he is talking about, and gives a surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of how one of the best men of his time, with his obvious conceptual limitations, could deal with such a shock.
Interestingly enough, he also portrays the aliens in ways that we can understand--they are grappling with the same issues as humans, really, despite their radically different origins.
This book is by no means action-packed; the whole mood is contemplative, another thing that (to me at least) makes it feel less anachronistic. (This fits quite well with the protagonist being a priest.) Once again, it feels like Flynn really understood what these people would have been like, without imposing what we might expect today.
Although it's not action-packed, important things still happen; but you aren't left breathless. I found myself intrigued, not by what would happen next, but by how the characters would process what had just happened. How do these characters understand the moral issues that the situation raises? How do they understand the different alien society, as much as they are able? How do the aliens understand them? What would it mean to be a good alien in a world that's not your own?
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[Audiobook note: The reader, Anthony Heald, does an amazing job. I love his rhythms and inflections.]