Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Our Heroine Confesses to a Guilty Pleasure

Y'all, it's about as far from the Western Canon as one can conceivably get and not be People Magazine, but I am really psyched to get my copy of Tom Flynn's Eifelheim:

A present-day scientific odd couple who are longtime domestic partners, physicist Sharon Nagy and historian Tom Schwoerin look into the fate of the Black Forest village of the title, which apparently vanished in the plague year 1348, in Flynn's heartbreaking morality play of stranded aliens in medieval Germany. Most of the narrative focuses on the consequences of the discovery in the 14th century by Eifelheim's pastor, Father Dietrich, of a crashed space ship carrying the "Krenken," horrific grasshopperlike aliens.

So, we have a novel involving a historical mystery, the Middle Ages, interdimensional travel (not the same thing as time travel, y'all), a priest, and, oh yeah, some aliens. Clearly, this book is made of awesome, right? Now, I know some of you probably laughed out loud at the phrase "horrific grasshopper aliens" but I am telling you that if you are a horrific grasshopper alien snob (as many people are) you are going to miss out on some solid gold awesome story-telling.

However, if you are afraid your Nietzsche-reading hipster friends are going to mock you mercilessly should you get caught with sci-fi, don't worry, you can still sneak an Eifelheim fix here, our heroine won't tell.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sounds positively mind blowing! Since our heroine is new to blogging, I noticed you quoted a book review but with no link...can you include links to quoted stuff for your legions of fans who want to click through and read the whole thing? Thanks!

Our Heroine said...

Good point RMK. Our heroine aims to please, so the link has been added to the post. We could...er...read it together.

Our Heroine said...

that "er" was meant to connote a hopeful, "please, pretty please." As opposed to a snarky, "as if you read."

Our Heroine said...

that "er" was meant to connote a hopeful, "please, pretty please." As opposed to a snarky, "as if you read."

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I think you lost me on the grasshopper aliens.

Anonymous said...

ok. have i been gone for that long, or you have always loved alien sci-fi?

Really, ALIENS?

Our Heroine said...

bmt and lily: don't be a couple of haters. i don't love stories just because they involve aliens, but i won't let aliens get in the way of my enjoying a story involving other awesome things like, the Middle Ages, the plague, a learned priest, inter-dimensional travel, a morality play, etc.