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

Oct 01, 2013 Alicja rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, arec-for-t, female-author, favorites, sff, time-travel, 5th-16th-century, late-mid-ages-eu-1300-1450, dream-library

rating: 5.5/5

Kivrin, a historian travels back in time to explore the 1300s, while back in 2054 a pandemic spreads as it effects those who were supposed to be watching over her trip.

Damn you Connie Willis!

She lulled me into a false sense of predictability, believing I knew where her clues where heading and then *bam* hit me on the head with a a two-by-four before leaving me an emotional wreck picking up the pieces of my soul.

She isn't an author for everyone, many people get bored with her repet ...more

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Mar 30, 2018 Ash rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, 0-hugo-nebula, time-travel, sf-masterworks, kickass-women, 0-locus, 2018-read, challenge-sf, black-plague, 2018hugos

4.5 stars
Brilliant. Read: Mar 2nd to Mar 30th :O

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Connie Willis is one of the Grand Masters of science fiction and I always wanted to read her books. She is like a Queen of Time Travel with 4 Hugo winning novels based on Time Travel. I love Time Travel stories so I had to check out her books. The first book in her Oxford Time Travel series is Doomsday Book. I had read a short story by this author and it was amazing so I had high expectations going into this book and I still loved it.

The ...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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Sep 02, 2011 Greg rated it really liked it

Shelves: science-fiction, timetravel, apocalyptic, box-w2

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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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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Jan 26, 2014 Karen rated it liked it

Shelves: sf-f-masterworks

This might be a 3.5. I liked the story concept but the writing had its frustrations. The first third of the book can be summarized by a lot of hand wringing and "I know something is wrong, I can just feel it" type conversations. On a whole, I would have enjoyed the book a lot more if only it were shorter. I really did not need to know of every failed telephone call or every time the cow approached someone (and no, I am not being facetious with the latter example). There were lots of useless conv ...more

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