Michael Flynn writes compelling science fiction with an emphasis not just on science but on the scientific method. His first novel, In the Country of the Blind, won both the Compton Crook Award and the Prometheus Award. His other well-received books include the Firestar series, Fallen Angels (with Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle) and The Wreck of the River of Stars.

With bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics, Flynn has been married to his wife Margie "35 years, plus or minus the standard deviation." When he is not writing, Flynn works as a quality control manager and statistician. He says, "If you can't have fun doing statistics, when can you?"

SCI FI Weekly telephoned Flynn for a chat to discuss his work and his most recent novel, Eifelheim, which asks, "What if aliens were stranded in medieval Germany?" Eifelheim has been nominated for a Hugo Award by the voting members of the 65th World Science Fiction Convention, which will be held in Yokohama, Japan, Aug. 30-Sept. 3, 2007.You have a background in mathematics. What inspired you to become a science fiction writer?

Flynn: My brother and I used to write science fiction stories in pencil in spiral notebooks for each other from as early as I can remember, illustrated with magic markers, the ones that gave off toxic fumes. But I was inspired by my father telling science fiction bedtime stories that I thought were highly original. How many other kids get that? Later I found out [his stories] had been written by Ray Bradbury and Damon Knight and a few other people. You wrote the novella "Eifelheim" in 1986, which was nominated for a Hugo Award. What made you decide to write the novel? And how different is "Eifelheim" the novella from Eifelheim the book?

Flynn: In the novella, the characters did not exist; there were just two names that made speeches at each other. If you take the novel and only read the parts called "Now," that was the [original] novella. But time and again my agent Eleanor Wood was after me to write the medieval part of the story, so finally I broke down and did. The rest is medieval history.

The inspiration for the original novella was a short story by Harry Turtledove entitled "And So to Bed." The narrator, Samuel Pepys, the 18th-century diarist, slowly puts together some observations and hints and clues and comes to a conclusion of a scientific nature. I like the idea of gradually picking up clues here and there until finally they fit together—that's more or less the idea behind writing Eifelheim.

I had remembered something Carl Sagan wrote in Intelligent Life in the Universe, with Iosef Shklovsky, about evidence of aliens that visited Earth in the past. He said the real proof would be if you found an old manuscript that was also a circuit diagram for some technical gizmo. And the idea of the illuminated manuscript being a circuit diagram was bouncing around my head for years.Did your research for Eifelheim change your perspective about the Middle Ages?

Flynn: When I started writing Eifelheim, I had the real stereotyped version of what the Middle Ages was like. But the more I read about it, the more it became evident that it was not like that at all. I began to wonder if people who put gargoyles on their cathedrals would be all that frightened of aliens. They routinely imagined that there were humans who had no head but had a giant eye in their stomach, or humans who had one huge foot and hopped around, or creatures who were half human and half horse. So here's some [aliens who look like] giant grasshoppers. Some [characters] panic and are frightened. But I wondered just how alien they would seem to people who routinely imagined alien creatures.

To this day, people take the term "medieval" to mean backward and ignorant, but it wasn't that way. That came about because of snooty people, first in the Renaissance but mostly during the Enlightenment, actively and deliberately denigrating the era that came before them—because, having rediscovered ancient Greece and ancient Rome's literature, they had to pretend that nothing had happened between ancient Rome and ancient Greece and themselves. And so the Middle Ages became a time of darkness. Your protagonist, the village priest, is extremely rational and logical. Aren't medieval clergymen, as well as the rest of the Christian world at that time, supposed to be unscientific?

Flynn: The Middle Ages was an age of reason ... and yet we've been taught to think of it as an age of superstition. It probably glorified reason far more than the Age of Reason. The medievals invented the university, with a standard curriculum, courses of study, degrees and, of course, funny hats.

The curriculum that was taught consisted almost entirely of reason, logic and natural philosophy—or, as we'd say, science. They didn't teach humanities, they didn't teach the arts, they taught essentially logical reasoning and natural philosophy. If you wanted to be a doctor of theology, a churchman, you had to first go through a course in science and thinking.

This was an era where the most celebrated theologian of all time was Thomas Aquinas, who dared to apply logic and reason to the study of theology. In fact, theology is the application of logic and reason to religious questions. They must have elevated reason to a pretty high pedestal if they were willing to subject their own religion to it.

In the Middle Ages, they first learned how to apply mathematics to scientific questions. After the time of the story, Nicholas Oresme, who was mentioned briefly in passing, was able to prove the mean speed theorem in physics using principles of Euclidean geometry, which marks the first time a theory had been proven by using mathematics, as opposed to us[ing] mathematics to describe the angle of refraction or to do surveying. What was more difficult to write: your aliens, the Krenken or the medieval humans?

Flynn: One friend said that Eifelheim portrays two groups of sentient beings: One is pretty much like us, and the other is an alien group of beings who are utterly strange to us ... and the weird thing is, the aliens are more like us and the humans seem more alien. And so part of the difficulty was getting inside the medieval way of thinking.

With the single exception that the Krenken [had class structure] built into their genetics, the idea that humans could have rebellions was just horrifying, that they could defy their lords. Well, in the end, so could the Krenken, but they didn't know they could.

I could make the aliens up, but what I wanted were aliens who were sort of like Romans—cruel to one another but accepting the cruelty because of the way things are. The proverb the Romans had was not "Forgive your enemies and love your enemies." [First-century B.C. writer] Publilius Syrus said, "Do not think ill of your enemy, do it."So you modeled the Krenken after the Romans?

Flynn: Yeah. And I also threw in a bit of instinctive social-insect kind of thing. But [the Krenken] had no idea of concert, of doing things together in a disparate way. The humans would play different instruments and it would all blend together, and the dancing would blend in with the music and so forth. This, despite their social insect background, struck [the Krenken] as weird. They could work together but only if someone ordered it. They could not do it spontaneously.I needed a dictionary to understand some of the words you used, like "chased," "guttering," "aquamanile," and "predieu." Are you naturally logophilic?

Flynn: Probably. Although I have to admit that when I went to school was a long time ago and reading wasn't as quite as dumbed-down as I think it is today. Of course, when writing about science, you pretty much have to use the technical terms. When you're discussing something in the book, and you have a culture like the Middle Ages, you have to express things in medieval terms. [The language] struck people that I know as the most difficult thing.In two of your books, In the Country of the Blind and Eifelheim, the concept of cliology appears. What is cliology?

Flynn: Cliology is the mathematical study of history; I invented the name but not the concept. "Psychohistory" is what Isaac Asimov called it.

[Cliology] would outrage my old history professor, John Lukasc. He said that science could be studied historically, but history can't be studied scientifically. I'm sort of sympathetic to that, because what you can learn about history mathematically are some very broad trends and patterns. You can't put ... personality and character in mathematics. But broad patterns and trends, sure, because you can see these patterns exist.

In Looking at History Through Mathematics, Nicholas Rashevsky discussed how in principle various historical processes could be described mathematically. How large can a village grow before it has to split? Assume that the villagers all live in the village, and they all have to walk out to their fields in the morning and then come back in the evening, and there're no streetlights. If you figure a certain area of land has to support each person in the village, and a certain amount of time has to be spent walking to your plot of ground and back in the afternoon, there's a certain maximum area that your village can utilize. And when the village gets bigger than that, some people have to leave and start a new village. Things like that you can express mathematically.

But what [mathematics] won't tell you is who's going to leave, and why they're going to leave, and about the families that get broken up and are never seen again, and what it's like to hie off to the east to live among the wild Slavs and build stockaded villages. The concept of clilogy appears in two seemingly unrelated novels. Are these books part of a shared universe?

Flynn: Not that I know of, although there may be something in one of the Firestar books that actually does tie them together, but who knows? Even I don't know. What I'll wind up doing at some point is make some surreptitious connection, and then some graduate student years from now will discover it and write a senior thesis about it.You tend to place your settings in the present or near-present, rather than the far-flung future. Why is that?

Flynn: Stan Schmidt, the editor of Analog magazine, once made the comment that, up until that time, every story he had bought from me had been set in the past or the present, which is an odd thing for science fiction, which is mostly the future. I said some of it's in the future, and he said, "Yeah but it's in the immediate recognizable future, not 100 years from now or even 50 years from now." I think because it's an area that a lot of people don't get into—but it's in my next book.

Once I set a science-fiction story, "The Steel Driver" ... in the 1890s, about the new invention of the steam drill. And when you think about it, what is more of a science-fiction story than what happens to people as a result of new technologies?

You collaborated with [Larry] Niven and [Jerry] Pournelle for your second novel, Fallen Angels. What did you learn from that experience?

Flynn: What I've been trying to learn from [the experience] is how not to go on and on. The temptation is to put all [your research] in the book, and you're not supposed to dump on the reader and say, "Look at all the research I did." In other words, once I get to the middle of the book I keep going, so I had to learn how to stop. I had to cut it short. There were a lot of episodes that never made it into the book essentially because of that.

I always hate not to use information.So what did you do with the rest of the research you did for Eifelheim?

Flynn: I wrote an alternate-history story about the scientific revolution in the Middle Ages, and then I wrote a fact article discussing why there wasn't a scientific revolution in the Middle Ages. On a whim, I wrote [the article] up in a medieval format, called the Dialectic: State the question, then you state the all arguments against it, then you state the argument in favor, then you do your synthesis, the conclusion you draw from balancing all the arguments, and you do a response to each one of the original objections.

Stan [Schmidt] thought it would be an interesting idea to have the story and the fact article as a companion piece. I don't know whether it will go over or not.Can you tell me about the book you're currently working on?

Flynn: It's called The January Dancer, and it's about one-third done. It's not so serious as Eifelheim or The Wreck. It's far-future stuff with lots of woo-hoo futuristic things. The idea is that the stars are connected by superluminal roads, which are creases in space created by plasma currents that connect the stars. Once you get into one of these creases, you can go faster than the speed of light, because you're outside the regular universe. You go star to star in a matter of weeks. In fact, on some trips, it takes longer to get from the planet to the road than it does to get from star to star, which is what they call "the crawl." Think of it as Chutes and Ladders. Last but not least—does your work as a statistician help your writing?

Flynn: Some people say that problem-solving quality management principles have shown up in my books. It probably does, but I hope it's not conscious, because when you try to do things like that deliberately it comes out artificial.