Substantive: Eifeilheim

Eifelheim, to me, was this fascinating glimpse at an alien encounter that was, from our perspective, entirely alien. While every other book this semester has been an alien encounter where we see the humans on one side and the aliens on the other, the humans in this book were almost as alien to us. The vision of the world that medieval Europeans had is totally different from what we perceive in the 21st century, and the fact that everything the aliens said was essentially translated through that perspective was so compelling. The unfortunate part about it, though, was that while we could see the pitfalls of their conversation, it didn't seem like they could.

I'm not totally sure why neither the Krenken nor the humans could identify that there was a disconnect between what each comprehended. Medieval Europe was not exactly the height of technological civilization; the Krenken must have understood that when they talked about heaven it was metaphysics. Some of them converted so at least they somewhat understood the concept of religion. Or maybe not. I'm still not sure if it's that cut and dried, because the Krenken lived in this master-slave dynamic of hierarchy that means that maybe what they understood about Christianity was subordination. Perhaps they assumed that the humans were kept technologically stunted by virtue of keeping their Lord's superiority.

There's no real happy ending to this book, but given that it's set in the future and writing about the past, that's hardly surprising. Everyone Tom and Sharon are learning about are by definition dead by the time they start researching them; it's a natural casualty of history. The kind of downer portion of it is the fact that Krenken who choose to stay also die, and the ones who leave are left to an uncertain fate. Yet this wasn't a total failure in communication, these aliens coexist peacefully with the people of Oberhochwald and some of them, as I mentioned before, even convert to Christianity. They are not trying to control humans, humans are not trying to control them, they're not trying to kill each other. Compared to some of the other encounters we've seen, this one is pretty successful.