Since I'm going to be voting for the Hugos this year, I feel obliged to actually read as many of the nominated books as possible, and Michael Flynn's Eifelheim was readily available, so I picked up a copy and read it a little while back.
The novel mixes two plot threads, one in a near-future setting, the other in medieval Germany in 1348, just before the Black Death. The modern thread concerns a couple of academics, a physicist studying new theories of time and space, and a historian looking into the mysterious abandonment of a place called "Eifelheim" in Germany. The medieval thread tells the story of what really happened in the place that is now called Eifelheim, which was originally a village called Oberhochwald.
In October of 1348, a mysterious light flashes through the sky over Oberhochwald, acoompanied by a loud bang. Shortly afterward, the village priest goes into the woods to investigate, and stumbles across mysterious beings in a strange "house" in a field of newly flattened trees. It seems that an alien spaceship has crashed, and a number of aliens are stranded with no obvious way to repair their ship. They have to make some sort of accompadation with Pastor Dietrich and the rest of the village, if they hope to survive and reach their homes again.
I was initially unenthusiastic about this because I had the mistaken impression that it was an Eric Flint sort of thing. It's very much not that, much to my relief. The other major knock on the book, in reviews that I've seen, is of the form "Michael Flynn suffered for his research, and now you will too..." There's a little truth to that, but I didn't find it oppressive, save for a couple of small areas to be mentioned below.
On the whole, this is a very good historical SF sort of book. The aliens are interestingly alien, the medieval setting is meticulously researched, and while there's a certain ominous inevitability to the unfolding of events in Oberhochwald, the basic structure of the plot is interesting throughout. The near-future interludes aren't quite as well done, but there's an interesting mystery element to the hunt for evidence of what happened. Taken as a whole, it's a well-done book.
Looked at more closely, though, it has some serious flaws...
To begin with, there are far too many scenes of people explaining things to one another. I'll tolerate a certain amount of infodumping, particularly in a first contact story, but it gets to be a bit much after a while.
A bigger problem is something all too typical of secret history/ alternate history books: in his interaction with the alien Krenk, Dietrich stumbles over a llarge number of essentially modern concepts that are presented in a sort of quasi-medieval form. Flynn can do this because Oberhochwald is a backwater, and ends up abandoned by the modern era, so nothing discovered there can really affect the course of history, but he gets a little carried away. Dietrich ends up getting explanations of a lot of physics and technology, and always puts them into terms that are almost but not quite the modern words for the same devices-- the bit of the communication device that you speak into, he dubs a "mikrofoneh," for example, combining a couple of Greek words, and in the background you can hear Michael Flynn hugging himself for being so darn cute.
(He does, at least, avoid the pitfall of having famous people make cameo appearances, which drives me up the wall in a lot of alternate history books. The only famous personage to pass through is William of Ockham, and he barely counts.)
The biggest stumbling block, at least for me, though, comes in the modern interludes that deal with the new theories of physics. These are explained in just enough detail to sound utterly daft, while remaining vague enough for just about anything to be possible. There's a bunch of technobabble about a changing speed of light, and quantized redshifts, and other things that I can't precisely recall because reading them made me want to take a power drill to my temple like the guy in Pi. These sections are highly not recommended, though they were originally published in Analog, and I can see how their readership would eat this stuff up.
In the end, I think it's good, but not great. It's very much in a classic sort of SF mode, and I suspect that played a role in getting it nominated, but the overly talky, too-clever-by-half nature of a lot of the interactions put me off a bit. If you stripped out the physics stuff entirely, and made some dramatic cuts in the "aliens explain science to a medieval scholar" bits, this could be a fantastic story-- the alien storyline is actually fairly moving, and the modern-day historical inquiries are pretty cool. As it is, though, it's not that great a book-- I'll vote it above "No Award," but it'll be near the bottom of my ballot.
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Regarding your view of historical celebrity appearances in fiction, what did you think to the way it was handled in Stephenson's Baroque Cycle? Another interesting case would be Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell...
Stephenson gets away with some things that other writers wouldn't be able to, just because he writes with such panache. Likewise Strange and Norrell and, for that matter, Naomi Novik's Temeraire books-- they don't reward deep thought, in that it doesn't make a bit of sense that Napoleon Bonaparte would be the same person in either of those universes that he is in ours, but the authors get away with it because the rest of the story is fun.
In the specific case of Stephenson, it also helps that the famour people are the whole point of the book. They're not making cameo appearances, they're central characters. That works better than books where the main character is supposed to be an ordinary person, but famous people just happen to keep dropping by just along enough for the reader to say "Look, Mark Twain!"
I know just what you are talking about. At the beginning of Quicksilver there is a little cameo by young Ben Franklin, and I kind of groaned. Then Blackbeard. Arg. And then we meet young Daniel Waterhouse and he's a buddy of Newton. And I almost stopped reading as I thought the whole book would be invented characters running around in a secret history woven around all these famous characters and events. And then that totally didn't happen and it was good.
I've never formulated the rule before, but it would go something like this. Famous historical figure (FHF) as protagonist is fine. FHF referenced in the background doing exactly what history reports they did, while other characters are creating a secret history is also fine. FHF appears in a world with a totally different history/setting (re: Temeraire) is fine. FHF, identity open or obscured, makes a single cameo appearance for humor value is fine IF FUNNY. Pretty much nothing else works.
Heh, that pretty much sums up how I found it too - was wondering if perhaps that had annoyed you in the Baroque cycle, seeing as I thoroughly enjoyed it! I guess it's one of those literary conceits that's highly dangerous in the wrong hands...
I also found when reading both the BC and JS&MN that the authors were somehow not taking the whole historical thing too seriously - like you say, just making it fun. This, I think, made it work a lot better than an ever-so-earnest approach.
Glad I saw this. I like scifi but rarely like fantasy, I usually make it a point to read any hugo scifi nominees but assumed this was a fantasy book. "Elf-something" was how I saw it.
I'm a bit puzzled about the references to variable speed of light, quantized redshifts, etc., because I don't remember any of that from the original story in Analog. What I do remember is the issue of history becoming a quantitative science, clearly a topic that interests Flynn. Of course, it's been years and years since I read the original story, so it's possible the goofy physics was there from the start; but perhaps it was a later addition or fleshing-out?
From my point of view, the famous characters in the Baroque Cycle were unexceptional[*], precisely because it's historical fiction (among other things). A great deal of historical fiction is about historical "celebrities," or features them as part of the scenery. It's only when you have genuinely alternate history with famous people showing up anyway (e.g., in ironic alternate cameos) that things can get silly. What was awkward about the Baroque Cycle were the infodumps, except that Stephenson is such a fun writer that he makes them entertaining anyway (large sections of Cryptonomicon were like that).
[*] Well, I've only finished the first book, so possibly I'll find them annoying later, but so far they're not.