Doomsday Book

Apparently two completely different books welded together without any editing oversight: the medieval portion of the story is engrossing and informative; the tortuous “futuristic” portion of the story feels like it was written in the 1950s (were mobile telecoms and computer networking really so unforeseeable when this was actually written in the early 90s?). You could have stripped out all of the Oxford story and been left with an excellent - much shorter - story about surviving the middle ages.