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

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

Shelves: scifi-modern, into-the-past

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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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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Jan 02, 2018 Kelley J rated it really liked it

Shelves: science-fiction, historical-fiction

I have to admit that I read "To Say Nothing of the Dog," "Blackout," and "All Clear" before I read "Doomsday Book" so I was already familiar with Willis' frustrating style of writing and character conflict development but had skipped the book that essentially introduced us to how time travel exists in this future, as well several characters who appear all throughout the series at various levels of importance.

I honestly went back and forth over whether or not to rate this book a 3 or a 4 and ult I have to admit that I read "To Say Nothing of the Dog," "Blackout," and "All Clear" before I read "Doomsday Book" so I was already familiar with Willis' frustrating style of writing and character conflict development but had skipped the book that essentially introduced us to how time travel exists in this future, as well several characters who appear all throughout the series at various levels of importance.

I honestly went back and forth over whether or not to rate this book a 3 or a 4 and ultimately settled on the higher end because by the time it was over, I was in love with the characters and the setting and the concept, even if the execution was clunky. I could see this book hooking me in even if I hadn't already read the next in the series which is enough for me since I tend to rate more with head heart than I do with my head.

That being said, there are a couple of things about this book that could frustrate readers. Others have pointed out the issue of having time travel but not cell phones. I can overlook this because I know the book was written in the early 90's and while it was indeed an oversight for a science fiction writer (the technology was new and novel at the time but it did exist and if 60's Star Trek could figure out portable communication, 90's time travel could do the same) the shtick of constantly missing calls and not being able to get in touch with the appropriate people for me was somewhat humorous (in the next novel at least) so I looked past it. It did, however, get old after a while. There are times when I began to believe certain characters existed only to be hard to reach just so there would be unnecessary conflict. And this is probably my main issue with the book and with Willis' writing in general. This is her main go-to whenever she needs something to get in her characters' way of accomplishing her goal. She's not good at branching off into other possible avenues of roadblocks so resorts to "I need to reach so-and-so and get their permission" only to spend 100 pages chasing so-and-so down. But then a major even happens, like a character death, that we don't even get to see and gets explained away in one simple sentence. This to me just isn't fair to the characters or to the reader.

But beyond this, Doomsday book does a great job of balancing two simultaneous stories. In Middle Ages, Kivrin has been sent 20 years too late into the future and finds herself at the start of the Black Death in England. Just as she gets to know the people of the village, she has to watch them be overcome with illness and struggle to accept what is happening to them and that there is little she can do to stop it. Meanwhile, in the present day, a new super flu hits and begins to infect the very people who can pull her out of the past. The city is put under quarantine as they try to discover the origins of the flu and how they can treat it. The story goes back and forth between the two times as we witness to parallel events and what the characters must do to survive.

Overall I thought the book was effective and a good kickoff to what is an interesting series. "To Say Nothing of the Dog" will forever and always be my favorite, but this is without a doubt a great introduction to a different take on the standard time travel story. ...more

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Jun 14, 2012 Katherine Coble rated it it was ok

Shelves: animal-dies, library-checkout

What a dreadful book.

What would have been a fine novella has been ridiculously stuffed with improbable filler in order to create a book-length story.

For some reason I'm supposed to believe that a world which has systemized time travel and eliminated the common cold cannot have a functioning telephone system. ...more

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Jan 14, 2014 Taylor rated it it was amazing

Shelves: home, favorites

Okay, I read this after "To Say Nothing of the Dog" and I loved it just as much, but it is darker. Particularly after the humor of "To Say Nothing of the Dog." Still has moments of laughter, but more tears. So be prepared. ...more

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Jan 15, 2014 Kristen rated it really liked it

Shelves: sci-fi, england, historical-fiction, 2014, black-plague

I had thought I'd read this back in high school or college, but I think I was wrong. It was awesome. I have a morbid fascination with the Black Death and its ramifications on culture and society. But this book showed daily life during the plague, and how it impacted individuals.

The only thing I didn't care for was that I felt story line with the virus in 2054 dragged on too much. ...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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