From the Bookshelf of Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy…

Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1)

Connie Willis

Start date: January 21, 2014

Finish date: February 20, 2014

Discussion: Book Discussions

Discussion leader: Andreas

Why we're reading this: Group Contemporary Novel discussion, January 2014
Hugo Award Winner 1993 (tie)
Nebula Award Winner 1992
#97 …more
[close] Group Contemporary Novel discussion, January 2014
Hugo Award Winner 1993 (tie)
Nebula Award Winner 1992
#97 on NPR's Top 100 SF/F novels of all time (2011 poll) http://www.npr.org/2011/08/11/1390858...
#37 on Locus Magazines Best SciFi novels of the 20th century http://www.locusmag.com/2012/AllCentu...

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What Members Thought

Jul 11, 2017 Trice rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: scifi-fantasy, europa, library, britannia, ebook-kindle, sff-bkclub, 2017, sff-monopoly

"Io suuicien lui damo amo," she said softly. "You are here in place of the friends I love."

I was really knocking how much I'd seen this praised til I was abou t halfway through, and, whammo. So a book of historian time travelers, bell ringers, epidemics and delirium, love and sacrifice and faith of various kinds. Why does this now make me think of the old Irish blessing, "May the road rise to meet you, may the wind be always at your back, the sun shine warm upon your face... and until we meet ag ...more

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Aug 15, 2018 Stuart McMillan rated it really liked it

I think I picked this up after reading a Tor list of the books that should be made into a movie.

Published in 1992, and winning both Hugo and Nebula awards, this is a deftly conceived time travel story that manages to cleverly portray a parallel series of events in the 1300s and in 'modern' England. ('modern' because it's clearly written in its' time - video screens are fixed line and clearly analogue, mobile phones don't really exist, the tube goes to Oxford(!))

Time travel is a given from the st I think I picked this up after reading a Tor list of the books that should be made into a movie.

Published in 1992, and winning both Hugo and Nebula awards, this is a deftly conceived time travel story that manages to cleverly portray a parallel series of events in the 1300s and in 'modern' England. ('modern' because it's clearly written in its' time - video screens are fixed line and clearly analogue, mobile phones don't really exist, the tube goes to Oxford(!))

Time travel is a given from the start of the novel. It's never really explained - there's no pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo about quantum this or wormhole that - it just is. So much so that historians from Oxford colleges routinely put on period clothes and go and visit past eras with little supervision from technicians.

Kivrin is one such, privileged to be given the first assignment to the 1300s. As any well-researched traveller plans, she believes she is well prepared for the difficulties that will arise when she arrives in the past.

Alas, difficulties also arise in the present as both time-streams become slaves to to illnesses that spiral out of control. Willis manages to spin the same tale twice, paralleling missing riders with missing trains, synthetic drugs with poultices and the endless cold of the 13th C with a chronic lack of toilet paper in this century.

In all this confusion, Kivrin loses her place in the geography and loses her marker that might allow her to return to the present. The academic staff that care about her are utterly frantic in the present-day confusion to bring her back and there's a permanent arc of worry and tension throughout the story as to whether Kivrin will be re-united with the present day, or whether it's just an implanted historical record of her visit to that timeline that we're reading after being dug-up at a local archaeological site.

Indeed, Willis manages to maintain this almost to the last and it is almost in the last few paragraphs that we have the denouement that closes the novel in a satisfying way.

So, why only 4 stars for something that managed to woo fans and the SFWA alike? Perhaps I have become more aware of 21stC grimdark description of grime and gruesomeness, but there's a detachment in the narrative that doesn't convince me that the events are happening to the principles. There's a slight out-of-body experience going on that doesn't persuade me that the protagonists really feel and care about what is happening in a convincing way.

Nevertheless, there's a scripted/filmic quality to the novel that does actually beg the question, 'why hasn't someone made this into a Movie/TV series'? There are enough dramatic moments in here to make satisfying conclusions to any number of episodes!

It's not a long read, so, go and pick this up and see whether the fuss in 1993 was worth it. ...more

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Dec 16, 2013 Fungus Gnat rated it liked it

Sixty years in the future, historians ply their trade by traveling backwards in time and observing the behavior of the “contemps.” Some centuries, though, are considered dangerous ground. Among them—the Middle Ages, where Oxford college student and budding historian Kivrin is about to be sent by a callous, reckless department head. Kivrin is up for it, but her worrywort tutor James Dunworthy thinks the risks are too great. She goes anyway and proves Dunworthy right.

Connie Willis gets a lot righ Sixty years in the future, historians ply their trade by traveling backwards in time and observing the behavior of the “contemps.” Some centuries, though, are considered dangerous ground. Among them—the Middle Ages, where Oxford college student and budding historian Kivrin is about to be sent by a callous, reckless department head. Kivrin is up for it, but her worrywort tutor James Dunworthy thinks the risks are too great. She goes anyway and proves Dunworthy right.

Connie Willis gets a lot right too in this nearly-600-page tome that tracks two stories, one in the mid-21st century and one in the 14th, each from the viewpoint of a single character. Her attention to detail brings these disparate ages to life—particularly the medieval. Willis cuts through the romantic film so many SF writers throw across the Middle Ages and shows them for what they were—a time of abject poverty, disease, and exposure to the elements. The focus, though, is on disease, which highlights the dramatic distinction in human suffering between the earlier times and a medically sophisticated future decade that is only a plausible extrapolation of our own. Willis’s writing on disease’s physical and psychic ravages is chilling, and it is disease that provides the spring that winds and releases the plot’s action. And for her action, Willis forsakes the grand tableaux of Fantasy and Romance, homing in on the actions of a handful of characters in the 21st century and little more than a single family in the 14th. These still leave plenty of scope for heroism and a bit of villainy as well. The narrative set-up of the book’s first half pays off in an absorbing second half that made me shudder while reading and that claimed some place in my brain when I was not.

Notwithstanding all that, I had somewhat mixed feelings toward this book. I credit the set-up for an involving pay-off, but I still wonder if the story really had to move as deliberately as it did in the book’s first half. Seems to me a hundred pages could have been tossed with little harm, and that’s no exaggeration. (Willis has a habit of describing every action in excruciating detail.) And, despite the care with which she humanizes her characters, the little flaws that at some times make them interesting at other times widen to make them exasperating. Kivrin’s early flight through wintry cold to try to find where the time machine had dropped her, well before she needs to, seems an act of colossal stupidity coming from one limned as resourceful and intelligent. Her state of mind at the book’s end is puzzling—Willis may have erred here in sticking with Dunworthy’s perspective. As for Dunworthy, he has his own occasional lapses, even before he comes under the “care” of a youngster, Colin, who fortuitously develops a consuming concern for the time traveler (when he first speaks to Dunworthy about her, she is only “your girl"). And it is not just character that is manipulated but aspects of story as well. Take, for example, the degree to which hundreds of pages’ worth of suspense depend on a few words uttered by a delirious tech near the outset. Then there are the dates. The story depends crucially on when Kivrin’s sojourn begins and ends and what the current date is, yet Willis can’t seem to keep them straight (and that's after taking into account the change in calendars). And the “translator”: Why does it translate Middle English into stilted, archaic English instead of fully modern English?

Okay, now I'm being picky. Let me just step back a moment and observe that Willis’s book is as much a historical novel as an SF one, and it draws equally from both genres. While what happens to people in the 21st century is the work of imagination, what happened in the 14th was real and happened to real people, and that gives the book more of a punch. At the same time, the SF genre allows the linked parallel stories that are also crucial to the book’s success. For its startling ambition in tying stories worlds apart together, its demonstration that humanity is humanity--past and future, good, mundane, and sometimes venal--and its brave, unflinching take on the plague, this book surely merits the term “apocalyptic”—a favored word of Colin’s.
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Feb 07, 2013 S H A R O N rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fantasy, faves, science-fiction, time-travel, historical-fiction, 2018

I started reading this book (about time travel and disease - specifically a flu outbreak) while on Christmas vacation...in a town dealing with a flu outbreak. Hospitals were restricting visitors to avoid exposure and nursing homes were on "lock down" to keep the residents as healthy as possible. I watched the characters in the story deal with the same measures (and more) as they tried to stall the spread of an unknown flu virus. I had no idea that Doomsday Book would fit so (creepily) well with ...more

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Jan 22, 2014 Sarah rated it really liked it

This was an intriguing science fiction/fantasy book. I enjoyed the time travel and the parallel story about the epidemic in the past and the present was well written. The ending felt abrupt. I wanted to see a little more of the past.

Well written and inventive.

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