13) Eifelheim, by Michael Flynn

Flynn's The Wreck of the River of Stars was one of the best sf books I read last year, and I had high expectations of this Hugo nominee: a story of aliens landing in 14th century Germany, and the contemporary historian (and his physicist girlfriend) who works out what happened way back then. Flynn puts a lot of effort into creating a believable 14th-century world, with a relatively harmonious relationship between religion and science depicted; some of the best passages are where the central character (the village priest) and the aliens try to make sense of each others' world-views in terms of their own. He has tried hard also (not always successfully) to catch the linguistic flavour of the period. I didn't enjoy Eifelheim quite as much as River of Stars, though; I felt that Flynn's occasional expositions of his characters' motivations didn't work so well here, and I found the shift from omniscient narrator to tight first-person at the end a bit jarring.

Dear author,

I am enjoying your book, with its medieval German setting. But please note that "Lover-God!" is not a good translation of "Lieber Gott!"

Yours helpfully,

nhw
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In 2006 I read over 200 books - lost count but I think the final tally was 207 - up considerably from last year's 137. This was partly because I read quite a lot of shorter books, but also I think I did more travelling where it was easy to keep reading. In addition, I had a few attempts at sertting up small reading programmes for myself, such as the Unread Books Project and pursuing a couple of obscure authors, which actually gives you an incentive to read them fairly quickly so that you can get on with the next sf paperback.

Comics

I read six graphic novels in 2006 (down from eight in 2005).

Non-fiction

I read 70 non-fiction books, about 34% of my total reading; an increase on both counts from 40 and 29% last year. ( Read more... )

Fiction

I read 131 fiction books this year, up considerably in number (but not in proportion) from 89 last year. ( Read more... )

SF

I read 101 books in the sf field this year, counting seven non-fiction books on sf topics, which is up from last year's 79 (but down in percentage terms, from almost two-thirds to less than half). ( Read more... )

Books of the Year

Non-fiction

In no particular order: Robert Cooper's The Breaking of Nations is a brilliant examination of what international politics is about by a senior practitioner; Lost Lives is harrowing but essential reading for anyone interested in Ireland's recent past; and Indefensible unexpectedly develops from being a day in the life of a defence lawyer to an exploration of the possibility of redemption. Honourable mentions to Fanny Kemble's first person account of slavery in the Old South, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, and Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton.

Fiction

Although I read many classics of non-genre fiction this year, the two I enjoyed most were an unpretentious children's book, The Warden's Niece by Gillian Avery, a charming children's novel set in nineteenth-century Oxford; and Ismail Kadarë's The File on H, a very thought-provoking exploration of Albania and its relations with the outside world.

SF

Only one of my top four sf books was published for the first time in 2006, and that was a compilation of the author's previous work: Impossible Stories, which pulls together Zoran Živković's visions (many previously published in Interzone) and makes a satisfying if somewhat mysterious read. I thought that Terry Pratchett hit all the right notes with Thud!, an allegory on sectarianism and bigotry - not in themselves new themes for Pratchett, but done somehow more sure-footedly here. Similarly, of the past Nebula winners, I particularly liked Elizabeth Anne Scarborough's account of the Vietnam War through a mildly fantastic lens, The Healer's War. And I can't understand why I had not previously heard much about The Wreck of The River of Stars by Michael F. Flynn, a superb hard sf story about the crew of a doomed spaceship, with characters and scenes that lingered in my mind for months after I had closed the cover.

4) The Wreck of The River of Stars, by Michael Flynn

Years and years ago I remember reading a fantastic book about a cargo ship sinking in the North Sea. There were only about half a dozen characters who all abandoned ship in the space of forty minutes; the author sketched them each memorably and effectively and it took about a hundred pages. (Has anyone else read that book? Can you remember what it was called, and who it was by?)

Michael Flynn has done much the same here, though with a dozen or so characters and a timescale of a couple of weeks rather than a few minutes. Not all the characters survive - indeed, the captain dies on the fourth page, with over 500 pages left to go - but all are depicted with great depth and compassion. Flynn picks up beautifully on those little misunderstandings where what appears to be a clear statement of fact, or even a sympathetic remark, to the speaker is picked up as an intentional slight or insult by the addressee, or by other listeners.

Each crew member has a formally assigned role, but each comes from a different part of Flynn's vividly imagined solar system, bringing their own personal ghosts to the ship, working with, arguing with, and occasionally having sex with each other in a series of tightly controlled shifts of narrative perspective. In what is essentially a rather grim stopry, there are occasional shafts of humour as well: at one difficult moment, the ship's cook decides to eschew the usual synthetic food, "thinking that a feast upon real mutton would relax the crew and ease the pressure - a sort of pascal lamb" - I had to read that a couple of times before I got the joke.

At first I was so interested in the people that the setting of the spaceship in trouble felt like a mere backdrop for the character interactions. But then the ship itself emerged as an interesting player in its own right: both technically, in terms of the challenge faced by the crew in reviving its solar sails to add crucial extra momentum after its ion thrusters are disabled in an accident, and in character terms, as its AI system starts to behave more and more as a character in itself. None of the lazy spaceship = Napoleonic warship stuff that so annoyed me with Honor Harrington: the engineering issues here do involve a certain amount of handwaving (what, I wonder, is "hobartium" when it's at home) but it all hangs together as an independent construction.

Anyway, very good stuff, and I'm surprised I hadn't heard much about this book before. Looking at Flynn's bibliography I see he wrote the very silly Fallen Angels with Niven and Pournelle, but also "The Clapping Hands of God", my favourite of last year's Hugo nominees in the novelette category (it came second, beaten by "The Faery Handbag"). I'll look out for his other stuff now.