F
Fone_Bone_2001
Guest
Anyone else read or heard of this book? It’s called Eifelheim by Michael Flynn.
It’s science fiction with a Catholic flavor, and while normally I’d be skeptical of a formula like that, I’m actually really impressed in this case for two reasons:
(1) This Flynn author knows his stuff: he’s the gent behind the highly informed and intelligent blog series on Galileo and the Church called The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown.
(2) My brother’s reading Eifelheim now and has shared some parts of it with me. Flynn doesn’t hold your hand at all: the setting and characters are very genuinely Catholic and medieval, yet the series is chock full of some really complex and up-to-date physics and other science. It sounds utterly fascinating and incredibly well-done.
From what my brother has told me, it seems there’s two stories in one in the novel. In the present, some researchers are trying to figure out why a German town/village in the Late Middle Ages suddenly vanished from the face of the Earth.
Part of the story seems to take place in that village itself in the… 1300s? 1400s? I forget. The protagonist seems to be the village priest, and insectoid aliens have landed on Earth and been stranded there. They’ve been having what my brother says are incredibly technical and complex dialogues with the priest - hence the conflation of 21st-century science - as specific and up-to-date and nerdy as you could ask for! - and Catholic spirituality and theology.
Sounds fascinating.
It’s science fiction with a Catholic flavor, and while normally I’d be skeptical of a formula like that, I’m actually really impressed in this case for two reasons:
(1) This Flynn author knows his stuff: he’s the gent behind the highly informed and intelligent blog series on Galileo and the Church called The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown.
(2) My brother’s reading Eifelheim now and has shared some parts of it with me. Flynn doesn’t hold your hand at all: the setting and characters are very genuinely Catholic and medieval, yet the series is chock full of some really complex and up-to-date physics and other science. It sounds utterly fascinating and incredibly well-done.
From what my brother has told me, it seems there’s two stories in one in the novel. In the present, some researchers are trying to figure out why a German town/village in the Late Middle Ages suddenly vanished from the face of the Earth.
Part of the story seems to take place in that village itself in the… 1300s? 1400s? I forget. The protagonist seems to be the village priest, and insectoid aliens have landed on Earth and been stranded there. They’ve been having what my brother says are incredibly technical and complex dialogues with the priest - hence the conflation of 21st-century science - as specific and up-to-date and nerdy as you could ask for! - and Catholic spirituality and theology.
Sounds fascinating.
