Eifelheim (2006)

If my dashed-off remarks often feel inadequate in the face of a cinematic achievement (as a student filmmaker-turned-media-worker I KNOW how long it takes to make even the shortest 30-second commercial), they can only be hopelessly more so with a novel, which always astonishes me that it comes from the mind of one person or a few people.

This was nominated for a Hugo Award and so it was available for free as a PDF from somewhere, and it's the first novel I've read in almost two years. It's about aliens crash-landing into the titular small German village during an outbreak of the Black Death. This is juxtaposed with a modern story about a couple, a theoretical physicist and a historical statistician, attempting to understand what happened way back when at that village, now completely deserted. The evocation of Germany in the Middle Ages, from the rhythms of its internal speech to its unequivocal belief in a geocentric universe, is transporting. And the varying reactions of the villagers and their church to the aliens, who some believe need God's salvation and others curse as demons and harbingers of doom, bear a striking resemblance to the diametrically opposed viewpoints people take on unexplainable problems today.

Here's Wikipedia's entry on the Black Death. Sounds ridiculously awful. But I wonder how bad a disease would need to be now to correct human overpopulation, given that we've gotten so good at figuring them out and containing them. Round the time of that Hot Zone book I was all freaked out about this junk. Now it's kind of just like, meh.

Sci-fi's definitely my bag. Time to find another free PDF.