Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1) in SciFi and Fantasy Book Club

Feb 12, 2013 mark monday rated it did not like it

Shelves: into-the-past, scifi-modern

and what exactly was the point of this nearly 600-page novel? that people can be incredibly annoying and repetitious? that the Black Death kills? i can't believe i wasted so many hours reading this flabby, irritating nonsense. i could have been spending time with friends or exercising or taking naps. or reading another book. the entire thing is a monument to wasted time - my time and the characters' time and the 5 years of time it took to write this extravagantly dreary ode to pointlessness.

real ...more

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Jul 08, 2007 Zen Cho rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: sff, historical

I liked the Black Death stuff the best, and was a little annoyed at first that it took so long to get to it, but I have to admit that the plague bits wouldn't have worked half so well without all the build-up that came beforehand. We needed to get to know the characters before Willis could kill them off. I still think there must have been some way to get to the plague that would have been more interesting; the first chunk of the book felt unaccountably long to me.

This is kind of an ungenerous ni I liked the Black Death stuff the best, and was a little annoyed at first that it took so long to get to it, but I have to admit that the plague bits wouldn't have worked half so well without all the build-up that came beforehand. We needed to get to know the characters before Willis could kill them off. I still think there must have been some way to get to the plague that would have been more interesting; the first chunk of the book felt unaccountably long to me.

This is kind of an ungenerous nitpick, since it's not something that could really be helped, but the Oxford stuff didn't quite ring true to me. The red tape was excellent -- I wanted to tear my hair out just reading it, which was probably the point -- but it made no sense that they'd all have videophones but not use e-mail. You hear the occasional story of the supervisor who won't countenance phones and demands that all work be posted to him, but everyone else organises their lives via e-mail. Also I don't quite get how the history faculty operates -- why does each college take charge of an era? Is that what they do now? I'd've thought the University would take charge of all the eras -- have subdepartments or whatever in charge of Medieval, Twentieth Century, etc. Whereas it kinda looks in the book like Brasenose is in charge of Medieval, but maybe I read it wrong.

Things I liked: the bell-ringers. The portrayal of the 14th century. Agnes. (*snf*) I got caught up in Mr. Dunworthy's concern for Kivrin, even though it still puzzles me -- why does he care so much about a student he only met a term or two ago? Doesn't he have lots of other students? Doesn't he have, well, teaching duties? Research? Is signing off on toilet paper all he does?

But I'm basically repeating the same thing, which is that the medieval parts were great, the modern-day parts not so much.

Edited to add: My copy has a hilarious cover featuring this blonde girl, cheesily beautiful in a fantasy-art kind of way, and some rugged dude on a horse, who may or may not be Father Roche. I love it, it is so blindingly stupid, and it makes me sad that I cannot find the cover on GoodReads or Amazon. ...more

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Jun 03, 2017 Esther rated it liked it

Shelves: historical, my-mooches, fantasy, __given-away, england, oxford-abingdon, alternate-history, author-female, 20th-century, 14th-century

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I was very disappointed with this book. Having received so many glowing recommendations I was expecting something uniquely amazing but the reality was lacking both in the writing and in the storyline.
From the beginning I found her writing style monotonous and repetitive. The language is fine but her habit of having her characters ‘worry away’ at a subject by repeating the same phrases over and over again just set my teeth on edge and most of the tertiary charters seem to be one-note – only exist I was very disappointed with this book. Having received so many glowing recommendations I was expecting something uniquely amazing but the reality was lacking both in the writing and in the storyline.
From the beginning I found her writing style monotonous and repetitive. The language is fine but her habit of having her characters ‘worry away’ at a subject by repeating the same phrases over and over again just set my teeth on edge and most of the tertiary charters seem to be one-note – only existing to act as obstacles and annoyances to the main protagonist. This gave some episodes an atmosphere of farce but minus the humour which left them feeling tiresome rather than funny.

At first I assumed Kivrin’s the monotonous repetition was supposed to symbolize her feverish confusion though it still seems a little ridiculous that she is so deprived of her senses she keeps asking about 'the drop' when it would have be just as easy and more logical for her to simply ask about where they found her.
However about half way through, when she is sitting in the village hut, she repeats 3 times in the space of half a page that she can't let the rat out and then use the few sentences between to info dump about why rats were dangerous. Was that really necessary?

To make matters worse Kivrin’s travel to the past seems a little pointless as she spends most of her time and effort figuring out how to locate the drop site. Surely her time would be better spent recuperating, learning about her surroundings and improving her communication with the locals.
And yes – about her search for the drop site. Considering that the drop site has to be out of the way so no one can see her mysteriously appearing did it never occur to anyone that a modern town-bred student might have trouble finding their way back to a location ‘somewhere near a forest’ when at the time England was covered in forests, had few paved roads and fewer signposts.
Then suddenly towards the end Colin turns up with a locator!!! They managed to hide recording equipment on her person but did not think that some form of locator might be useful?

If Kivrin had been less pre-occupied with finding the drop-site she might have had time to get to know Eliwys. I would have been interested in how a medieval women thinks, what is important to her, what life is like for her. Unfortunately Kivrin seemed to keep her distance from any real interaction with the adults and her interaction with the children gave her a very restricted view on life. The only adult with whom Kivrin made any proper connection was Father Roche.

In both the past and the ‘present’ the dialogue was particularly uninspired being mainly functional: and barely that with ‘failure to communicate’ being a leitmotif of the whole novel - the constant connection problems with the phones and people saying half a vital sentence then collapsing or getting disconnected was an unoriginal and irritating delaying tactic used as a poor substitute for good plotting.

I love when a storyteller lets me use my own intelligence to work things out – I don’t need to be told 3 times that rats posed a danger in the time of the plague. However at times certain connections in this narrative were so vague it felt as if some vital plot point or expository line of dialogue had been accidently edited out of the text.

One dangling plot point was that when Father Roche brought Kivrin to ‘drop’ she couldn’t recognize the place because of the snow and was convinced it wasn’t the drop mainly because of the missing casket. Then seemingly out of the blue, towards the end Dunworthy finds the casket had been taken by the steward of the other village. But there is no connection between this discovery and Kivrin’s realization that Father Roche did take her to the right place, after all.

An even bigger red herring is the fact that the parallel epidemics of flu in the ‘present’ and plague in the past are purely coincidental. Even though the contamination point of the ‘present day’ flu is the excavation of the medieval grave it is totally unconnected with the plague that Kivrin is experiencing.
Are we supposed to conclude that because the flu came from the same time period as Kivrin’s hosts they had already developed some kind of immunity and didn’t become infected even though the modern hyper-vaccinated and hyper-medicated modern people were dropping like flies?

For me a prime example of the rather slipshod attitude to both language and narrative consistency was the fact that although the book took place in Oxford the author used the terms oatmeal and muffler.
In England oats are used to make porridge for breakfast and we wrap scarves round our necks to keep the chill out. A muffler is use to decrease the noise emitted from a car exhaust. ...more

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Oct 21, 2015 Emily rated it liked it

In Willis's world of time travelers, this book is a handsome but grim tail of death by disease. Enjoyable in its clarity and imagination, but missing the humor and warmth of Willis's other stories. ...more

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Nov 14, 2008 Snail in Danger (Sid) Nicolaides marked it as decided-not-to-read

Shelves: science-fiction

I tried to read this once before, years ago, and couldn't finish it, IIRC. Same result this time. For a more entertaining take on devious time travel, I'd suggest the first few novels in Kage Baker's Company series. ...more

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Feb 07, 2012 valpal rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites

Wow! This one goes on the favorites shelf. I was shocked to see that this book was written 20 years ago. How did I miss it? Mystery, History, and Science Fiction all rolled into one rollicking adventure!

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