Doomsday Book

I read two Connie Willis books before I read Lincoln's Dreams. They were To
Say Nothing of the Dog and The Doomsday Book. Both dealt with time travel.
To Say Nothing of the Dog was a fresh book for me and I recommended it to
others. The Doomsday Book, an older book of Willis, was very similar and I
did not like it as much..

I did look forward to reading Lincoln's Dreams. Very disappointing. I did
not want to finish it. I kept wondering why this book was published. It
seemed poorly edited. Lots of problems with the storyline.

I find that people who love science fiction seem to overlook problems with
the plot or character development. They seem so taken with the genre that
they are not always especially discriminating.

I hope I'm not overgeneralizing.

I loved the first half of this book but the second half kind of dies off for me.

The story follows Kivrin going back in time to 14th century England to study the way of life, but she ends up right in the middle of the Plague and she loses her path back home. She must find a way to survive as well as help the people around her but if she shows too much she'll be burned as a witch.

I really enjoyed the historical aspect of this where the author shows how life was back then that you don't really think about. Like how people stank, their teeth rotted, the way treated Illnesses, etc.

Summary: Time travel gone wrong.

I have not been reading nearly enough fiction lately. Doomsday Book was recommended by a friend a year or two ago. It came out nearly 30 years ago while I was in college and in an era where I was not reading a lot of science fiction.

Kivrin is a young ‘historian' at Oxford. Historians go back in time to study a particular historical period. Most historians go back a couple of centuries because the further back, the more unpredictable the exact time you are being sent becomes. There is a problem with ‘drift,' and you can be hours or days or weeks off your predicted location, impacting your retrieval. Part of the science of time travel is that the system prevents you from impacting future history and creating paradoxes.

Kivrin is interested in the Midevil era. Her mentor, Mr. Dunworthy, does not like the idea of sending her to the Midevil era, not because she is unprepared or just because she is a woman in an era that was not kind to women, but because the department that oversees Midevil historians is incompetent. Problems happen.

What I did not know going into this book, and might matter for those that are picking it up now, is that this is a book that is largely concerned with pandemics (a modern one for those that are not time traveling and the ancient ones that occurred during the Black death era.) There is a lot of death and concern about the role of God and people during those deaths. Doomsday Book is not a Christian fiction book, but it (like a lot of SciFi) is theologically interested in the problem of evil.

It is always interesting to see how older SciFi predicted the future. This was written in the early 1990s. It assumes video phones, but there is no mobile phone system. And part of the problem that is happening on the modern side of the story is the inability to track down people that don't answer their landline phones. Something that is really inconceivable today. There are advanced computers, but no ability to email or remotely read the data from those computers, also inconceivable in an era where people are mostly working remotely.

Doomsday Book is well written and engaging, and I will read future books. But it also has some frustrating plot lines and is nearly 600 pages long. It could have been trimmed a bit. But the ethical and theological content and the engaging look at a severe pandemic made it well worth reading.

So much detail about everything! Crazy piles of words about characters running around in circles, making no headway whatsoever. Somehow, still, it was enjoyable to read and the characters were fun (except the overabundance of dudes in Oxford continuing into the mid 21st century – I could not keep them straight). Some ideas about the future were hard to swallow – jammed video phone lines which should have been solved by the internet, lavatory paper shortages which should have been solved by 3D printers, time travel being controlled by historians of all people! – but what fun would science fiction be without those crazy ideas that keep your suspension of disbelief muscles strong.

This was never really clear to me, but was the idea that SpoilerKivrin became infected with the ancient flu virus by digging in the tomb (to improve the historical accuracy of her fingernails) which Badri caught when he moved her arm right before she went through the net? But he must have been infected before then because the people at the dance club or whatever earlier were infected by him, but did he have any contact with Kivrin before then, especially the kind of contact that would specifically infect him and not anyone else during that period? I guess I stopped paying enough attention when the facts came together, but I thought there was an obvious explanation that was never spelled out, which was all the more frustrating because almost every other little thing is completely and entirely spelled out, several times, in this book.

The ending was brutal and horrible and heartbreaking, itself reason enough to read the book.