Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy discussion

This is the discussion for our chosen January Contemporary SF/F Novel read and discussion:


Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

Winner of the Hugo, Nebula and Locus Awards for Best Novel of 1992.

I'm just going to start by saying that this book is brilliant, one of my all time favorites, and in my opinion one of the most engrossing reads in science fiction.

Within this time-travel novel, Willis gives us two stories into different times, unfolding in parallel.

Kivrin, a bright student of medieval history, becomes the first historian to use the new Oxford time travel device to venture into the 14th century (stretching the capabilities of the device several hundred years beyond its previous use.) But due to an error on the part of one of the technicians, Badri, instead of reaching the intended year of 1320, she ends up in 1348, during the Black Death. And there she comes on a small rural farming estate and village.

Meanwhile, in the "present" of 2054, Mr. Dunworthy and his crew of technicians, historians, and scientists, try to maintain the schedule for recovering their time-traveling historian, Kivrin, while coping with a modern epidemic of their own.

The stories are unfolding tragedies on both ends. Willis introduces so many splendid characters in both time periods. It's among the saddest, most depressing books I've read, and the first sci-fi book I can recall reducing me to tears.

Thanks for the introduction!
I'll start reading this next week.
I haven't read many time travel books - The Anubis Gates, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court or Timeline come to mind. Can you contrast it to them?

I also love this book - the characters are so very real, the tension in both time periods is gripping, the sadness, the little bits of humor, mostly the courage of everyone as they all fight against disease in their own ways...I might not re-read this one as often as I read her To Say Nothing of The Dog (which always makes me laugh), but I don't need to, it's so unforgettable.

I just want to let you all know the audiobook version is excellent too.

@Andreas I haven't read Anubis Gates or Connecticut Yankee, but compared to Timeline this is much more a character story - no war, not a lot of physical action. It has a very British feel, you really get into the life of both the medieval village and the near-future Oxford University. It also seems much more realistic and I liked that the time travel is controlled by a school instead of a money-hungry corporation. Kivrin is of course much more prepared (though not for the plague!).

Michele wrote: "the little bits of humor..."

I do like the way Willis used the visiting American bell carolers (who came to Oxford to give a Christmas concert) as a foil for some comic relief. The obsessive, overly focused personalities that can somehow cling to a goal, oblivious to so many more important problems that engulf them, seems to be one of Willis's favorites. (Lady Schrapnell serves that role in To Say Nothing of the Dog, which is a lot more fun than Doomsday Book.)

Andreas wrote: "I haven't read many time travel books - The Anubis Gates, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court or Timeline come to mind. Can you contrast it to them?..."

As Michele said, Willis's characters are very real, there's no grand epic heroism, just small acts of personal courage (or pettiness). And there's certainly not a lot of action or swordplay or battles or conspiracies; the twin stories offer plenty of tiny heroes but no villains. Our emotional attachment to those characters is incredibly deep.

Willis's time travel eschews the usual concern about paradoxes or time loops that seem so beloved of sci-fi writers. As is explained early on, the physics of time travel prevent access to any time/place where it might change history. That means there is an uncertainty in the time travel: you pick a date/time for destination, but the actual arrival may be some time later in order to prevent such potential paradoxes. It's called "slippage", and measuring it is the first thing the Oxford technicians do after sending someone into the past. One of the big frustrations of the historians is that they can't get anytime near the battle of Waterloo.

Michele wrote: "It has a very British feel, you really get into the life of both the medieval village and the near-future Oxford University...."

Doomsday Book was the first book I read by Connie Willis, and based on the Oxford time travel series I thought she was British. It wasn't until I read her All Seated on the Ground, which had an incredible eye for details of Americana, that I looked up her bio and discovered she was born and raised and still lives in Colorado.

Connie Willis is one of my favorite authors and Doomsday Book is one of her best. As others have mentioned, Doomsday Book is character-driven; there's very little explanation of the "science" behind the time travel machine, except as it directly relates to the plot (i.e., the whole slippage concept). In future books, Blackout and All Clear, Willis clarifies that (for some unexplained reason) it's fatal for a person to show up twice at the same moment in time, which is a major factor driving the plotline in those books.

One of Willis' major themes in this and some of her other books is lack of communication. Doomsday Book was published in 1992 and preceded the cell phone era, which would have negated several of her plotlines. I heard that she later retconned this in another book by explaining that cell phones were found to be physically dangerous and were discontinued. :) Anyway, just roll with it.

Willis does a ton of research for her books and has an amazing eye for detail. Sometimes I think she needs an editor that will make her be less long-winded (she really goes overboard with detailed tangential storylines in Blackout and All Clear), but in Doomsday Book I think it worked out well for her. I especially appreciated her acknowledgement that the English language in the 1300's was a very different beast than modern English. Read Canterbury Tales, which was written in the late 1300's! The written language is almost incomprehensible to the untrained person without detailed footnotes, and spoken is even worse (I once had to memorize and recite 100 lines of Chaucer for an English class in college). Ever since reading Doomsday Book I've had little patience with time travel stories that don't acknowledge the language shift.

G33z3r wrote: "still lives in Colorado"

Ha, that's where my brother lives. But I don't think that a more exact place is given (like "Boulder, CO").

Tadiana wrote: "Doomsday Book was published in 1992 and preceded the cell phone era, which would have negated several of her plotlines. ..."

Willis joins a long list of distinguished SF authors who failed to see portable wireless telephones (much less smart phones.) The problem of writing about the future is you will almost certainly be wrong about some of it.

The double plot works nicely

I started this yesterday and I'm on page 100.

Willis uses every now and then summarizing repetitions of what happened directly before. I don't need those because the plot line isn't that complex or in need of further explanation.

Most characterizations are excellent. Not everyone is likeable, e.g. I find Gilchris' objections to be quite annoying. Sometimes, I think "ok, Mrs Willis, I understood that he is an ass. Do we really need to have yet another utterance from him?"

World-building doesn't convince me - Willis doesn't seem to be interested in building a believable future setting of Oxford in 2054. It feels more like a 1950s version with some minor futuristic assets here and there. When the novel was first published in 1992, networked computers were well-known. I don't blame her that she didn't bring in the ubiquitous WWW. Compare that to Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep from the same year where he used discussion forums extensively. But she could have used cell phones.

The long exposition is fine though I wish I could read more of Kivrin's journey.

So far, I'd give the novel 3 stars hoping for more :)

BTW I found out that she lives in Greeley, CO.

My edition from SF Masterworks contains an excellent introduction to this "trilogy" of time travel books. It mentions her Nebula award winning novelette Fire Watch from 1982 which is freely available at http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories...
Did anyone read that?

Andreas wrote: "SF Masterworks ... mentions [Willis's] Nebula award winning novelette Fire Watch from 1982... Did anyone read that? ..."

As it happens, I pulled Fire Watch out last night to reread it as well. Excellent story. I had completely forgotten that Kivrin appears in it (mostly as a character who Fire Watch's time traveler, Bartholomew, knows in 2050 and refers to a couple of times, not as a participating character.) It's interesting that Fire Watch was written a full 10 years before Doomsday Book was published, and yet Willis saw fit to feature a minor character, whose story is foreshadowed by one of Bartholomew's comments, "[Enola] looked as if she had been crying. Kivrin has looked like that since she got back from her practicum. The Middle Ages were too much for her."

Anne McCaffrey, discussing her Pern novels, used to talk about how sometimes a minor "spear carrier" character in one book would later inspire her to write lengthy stories of their own.

(And speaking of missing cell phones, the use of microfilm to carry the OED around in 1982's version of 2050 is pretty nostalgic.)

I've read half of the book.

The novel is in urgent need of an editor.
Most of the 2054 story line is very annoying: Everyday problems like toilet paper shortage, phone handling, mom war, etc. are just ridiculous. There is not a page where Dunworthy doesn't worry about Kivrin. While there's nothing wrong with this in itself, it's just that Dunworthy doesn't seem to have an existence outside of that worrying. The conversations don't build relationships but are endlessly repetitious.

The Kivrin part is ok - nothing grand, though.

1.5 stars, so far.

I've finished the novel.

The last quarter was better. But the overall problem continued - lots of annoying and irrelevant discussions, tasks and repetitions. I don't have real problems with annoyance - for example, I like Kafka's works (e.g. the process) when it is used as an art form. But in this book I never have got the feeling that those repetitions or annoyances are needed.
I think that cutting 200 pages would have been really good for the book.

Due to the somewhat better flowing last part, I round up to 2 stars. But it was merely ok for me and I cannot say that I like it. I don't know how someone can ignore or enjoy those annyoances and repetitions or think that they have literaric quality. I don't get it how it could have won those awards.

I don't know if I'll read the second novel in the trilogy. It was on my shortlist-tbr but went off after this experience.

I've read this before, but I had forgotten how Dunworthy's plot, which is after all the one where the problems start first, was the opening.

I observe that To Say Nothing of the Dog has the time travel in common but is otherwise very different. As in, comic.

Andreas wrote: "I've read half of the book...."

I have the impression you & I read two entirely different books. :)

Where you see repetition, I see real people struggling tenaciously (even futilely) against implacable forces, ignorant bureaucrats, and petty obsessions.

G33z3r wrote: "I have the impression you & I read two entirely different books. :)

Where you see repetition, I see real people struggling tenaciously (even futilely) against implacable forces, ignorant bureaucrats, and petty obsessions."

I have absolutely no objection against one of those, as they are used in many works and to quite some excess in Kafka's works. I loath mindless repetitions without variation: Did you count how often "toilet paper shortage" was mentioned? I didn't but it felt like 20 times. That's just one example. I wouldn't mind if she'd brought up the same issue a couple of times. But there is a difference between "a couple" and "annoying often" repetition.
The repetition wasn't restricted to those occurrences, she used it to recap scenes which happened a couple of pages ago. I always thought "uhoh, I just read that, why do you recap that for me again?"

I could ramble on. But I think it is really as you said it: reading different books - or more correctly: Different people reading the same book.

I've seen a couple of reviews here on GR and on Worldswithoutend. Some people seem to have exactly the same problem like me with the book. Some don't.

It is just that I don't fully understand why I'm annoyed and people like you, G33z3r, aren't.

G33z3r wrote: "Willis used the visiting American bell carolers (who came to Oxford to give a Christmas concert) as a foil for some comic relief. ..."

By the way, I liked the way Willis uses the bells for dramatic irony at the end. After Mr. Dunworthy complains about their constant chiming at Oxford, and the obsessive complaints of their leader about putting on a concert, (view spoiler)[ it's the bell of the old 1348 church that finally leads him to Kivrin, and finally he agrees to toll the bell himself for the priest, Roche. (hide spoiler)]

I was never annoyed by any repetition either. To me it all seems so realistic - the way all the little things could build into a picture of just how much was going wrong, of how people can be so self-centered, and so oblivious to the madness all around them. It's being Christmas only adds to all the confusion.

Also how only Mr. Dunworthy is aware of just what Kivrin may be suffering, he knows that he mustn't give up because he's her only hope of getting back, the only one who cares about what happened to her. I see him as a mother hen clucking over his lost chick - all his students are his children and Kivrin is a favorite.

I loved all the little details of the eccentric Oxford masters, wonderful Mr. Finch, Colin and his nasty gobstopper, little Agnes and her whining. And how in the end, despite all the petty problems, people pull together and soldier on in that very British way.

There's something of a mystique about Oxford from its heyday in the late 1800s - early 1900s, back when Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, and all the other crazy Dons were wandering around lost in their own little worlds of philosophy, or language, or whatever that Willis has managed to carryover into this future world in a way I find delightful.

And poor Kivrin, who like every other young adult ever, thought she knew everything and could handle anything, gets quite a harsh lesson in reality and deals with it all in a very courageous way, stepping up and fighting as well as she can against such a horrible situation. She could have sat back and watched with the eyes of a detached observer, but it's her inexperience that allows us to follow her as she wades right in, comes to care for the people, and gets torn up by the sadness/helplessness of the tragedy that always accompanies an epidemic.

Gosh, I love this book. I'm sorry there's some out there who don't, but I completely understand. People like what they like.

Michele wrote: "It's being Christmas only adds to all the confusion."

The Christmas setting worked quite good for me because it is so near - we even have our Christmas crib in the living room (our tradition is to pack it away on Februar 2, which is the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin). I couldn't have read that setting during summer!

Michele wrote: "There's something of a mystique about Oxford from its heyday in the late 1800s - early 1900s, back when Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, and all the other crazy Dons were wandering around lost in their own little worlds of philosophy, or language, or whatever that Willis has managed to carryover into this future world in a way I find delightful."

Not that I'm an expert of British culture, but it felt more like 1950-60s for me. Where Willis completely failed was transporting that feeling to a future world: Simply, because she didn't write a future setting at all; I don't even think that she wanted to do so. That is why I ignored that 2049 references and simply thought "ok, that is set in Oxford of 1960 and somehow they invented time travel". In summary, I don't think that it matters at all, when the second part happened as long as it is post-industrial.

Well, 1950s were after a disaster, and so is this. The Pandemic obviously did a lot of damage. Perhaps that influenced culture.

Fire Watch is the short story that introduced me to Connie Willis. Until G33z3r mentioned it, I'd not noticed that the main character carries around the OED on microfiche. Heh. I did notice that she did some retconning on Kivrin when she decided to use her as the main character in Doomsday Book. In Fire Watch Kivrin tells Bartholomew that she was sent to the plague year because she has a "natural immunity" to the plague.

Tadiana wrote: " I did notice that she did some retconning on Kivrin when she decided to use her as the main character in Doomsday Book...."

I tend to think of each of the four works as separate, rather than an attempt at a consistent universe. The main characters of one book don't appear in any significant way in others, and events in previous books don't influence events in the next book. (And in the decade between Fire Watch and Doomsday Book, Willis changed her mind about the future history Of 2050 on some points, too. (In fact I think Andreas is quite right that Willis doesn't care about her 2050 very much, beyond the fact that there is a time machine. She's not trying to be a futurist about 2050.)

G33z3r wrote: "In fact I think Andreas is quite right that Willis doesn't care about her 2050 very much, beyond the fact that there is a time machine. She's not trying to be a futurist about 2050."

Very good point. Willis is not a science fiction writer who's really interested in the technology of the future. I'd say she's simply using the future setting (because it has nifty gadgets like time machines that are useful as plot devices) as a way to say something timeless about the human condition.

The enduring image I have of Doomsday Book is...
(view spoiler)[ Kivrin slumped against one of the grave markers in the church's cemetery having broken the spade trying to dig a grave in the frozen ground for Father Roche (having previously failed to ring the church bell the required number of times to accompany his death, because of broken ribs.) That's one of the images of sci-fi literature that's burned into my brain.

I also like Kivrin's final entry in her journal (which she called her Doomsday Book.) After realizing she is probably stranded in 1349, she writes to Dunworthy (sure that one day he will unearth the journal):

I don’t want you to blame yourself for what happened. I know you would have come to get me if you could, but I couldn’t have gone anyway, not with Agnes ill.

It's interesting that even knowing the outcome, that Agnes will die, Kivrin is still committed to nursing her in her illness. She continues:

I wanted to come, and if I hadn’t, they would have been all alone, and nobody would have ever known how frightened and brave and irreplaceable they were.

Which I suppose is the central lesson of time travel (introduced in Fire Watch), that everyone you meet in the past will be dead when you return to your own time.
(hide spoiler)]

The scenes where she's wrestling with the language are fun.

I don't think I can figure out any of the ones she gets phonetically, and I can guess at only a few.

Mary wrote: "The scenes where she's wrestling with the language are fun. I don't think I can figure out any of the ones she gets phonetically, and I can guess at only a few."

Those were fun, weren't they? I was able to figure out maybe half to two-thirds of it, mostly because I speak German and have studied Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. I wonder a little how accurate Willis' take on Middle English is, but I give her major props for doing it.

"I wanted to come, and if I hadn’t, they would have been all alone, and nobody would have ever known how frightened and brave and irreplaceable they were."

--One of the most poignant sentences ever written in science fiction.

Tadiana wrote: "mostly because I speak German "

Me too :) But I thought the Middle High German were only in my German translation of the novel. I didn't know that Willis used the same in the English original.
I didn't quite get it, because Middle High German is quite different from contemporary - it really is a complete different language, for me.

So's Middle English, for us!

Corrected my post above to refer to Middle English rather than Old. Old English is Beowulf-era stuff, which is another huge leap away from modern English. (The only comprehensible line for me is "Beowulf is min nama.")

You guys keep me on my toes.

G33z3r wrote: "Which I suppose is the central lesson of time travel (introduced in Fire Watch), that everyone you meet in the past will be dead when you return to your own time."

Everyone does die, you know. We're rather known for it, in fact.

I like the way that Dunsworthy's Christmas present to Colin, and his reading, is used to info-dump facts.

I really love the 14th century parts for great characters and Willis' attention to the details, but I think the 2054 parts could have been a bit shorter.

I like how it ties together how Kivrin could go through the net while sick, since she can't infect them.

I think the various characters in this book are what really made me enjoy it. Colin and his gobstopper. William Gaddson and his overbearing mother and many, many female friends, Father Roche, little Agnes, Eliwys and her overbearing mother-in-law, and so on. I actually liked the start of the book better, before we focused on Kivrin and the effects of the plague in the village. Mr. Dunworthy's running around, frantically trying to phone someone for help, while being badgered by Finch about lavatory paper and Mrs. Gaddson about her son, made me laugh.

One problem was how obvious some of the "revelations" were. I knew immediately, as soon as she met him in the church, that Father Roche had been the one to find Kivrin, and also that he saw her come through the machine. I knew immediately why Rosemund began acting up when Sir Bloet showed up. I also knew that Kivrin wasn't in 1320 at all. I don't know if the author intended these points to be so obvious to the reader but not to the characters.

I'm also a little confused by a future that has eradicated almost all illness, including the common cold, but couldn't respond to the influenza outbreak efficiently and quickly. I suppose that's what happens when there seems to be a dodgy phone system and no internet.

But despite those flaws, this was a fun book to read (up until it became depressing).

I think the point of the 2050 part of the story is a reminder to us that no matter how smart or modern we become we are still human and still subject to all the silliness and petty behaviors of those that came before us. It is also a reminds us that we are not as immune to the troubles of the world. Influenza is still not completely under our control. A pandemic like the Spanish flu during World War I would have the same results in our world today.

I didn't mind the repetition with the people worrying over things, like the toilet paper shortage, people worrying about people. Even how much of a jerk Gilchris is. To me it made it feel like real people. It is during an epidemic, under quarantine so Id imagine some people would be like the characters in this book.
The only annoyance I had was the summarizing of what was just written sometimes, but I think it was done little enough that I didn't feel like it was tedious or I wanted to just skim or walk away.
I don't know that I would absolutely love this one, but it was good. The characters had a real feel to them. Sometimes the pacing was a bit slow, but it gave a real feel for the place and time settings. I did feel like the 2050 wasn't very futuristic, except they had a time machine. 1300s parts were interesting.
The revelations did seem obvious as a reader, but it didn't frustrate me to think why the characters didn't know. I thought the way it was written and the way the characters were written, and what they focused on also made it so they wouldn't easily figure it out. It was interesting to see if they would ever get it!

I read this one recently, my first Willis book. Like many of those above I got frustrated at what felt like a slow pace and some overwriting, particularly in the modern day sections. The parts of the book set in the past were interesting and gave me a lot to think about. When we think of the past I suppose we don't think about simple things such as how bad everything smells and how unremarkable that is to the people of that time. Kivrin remarked at one point that her teeth were far too straight and healthy, which made me chuckle since it reminded me of Austin Powers. The part about the difference in the language reminded me of the famous saying that the English and Americans are "one people separated by a common language."

G33z3r is right that the best parts of this book are the small things and also the fondness we develop for some of the characters. A lesser author could have written that (view spoiler)[the Black Plague is bad, but Willis shows us how it wiped out everything, and we get a chance to think about what that means. Children, who are so often unharmed or never placed in peril by most authors, suffer and die, and our hearts break. The ending was tough to read. (hide spoiler)] Tighten it up a bit (I bet 150 pages could have been taken out without much loss) and I would have rated it higher than 3 stars.

The comedy bits in the modern era never made me laugh but they didn't bother me much either. I actually started imagining the cast of Monty Python playing some of the various roles and it gave me a more pleasant perspective on those chapters. They did serve the important function of balancing out the much more serious plotline in the past.

Also some of the scenes in the past reminded me of Michael Crichton's Timeline which was not one of my favorites by him but it did a good job of illustrating how different the world was in the 14th century than the world of today.

Also, phones. It's comical to read about someone having such a hard time finding a phone when we are surrounded by them now. And my 14 year old daughter doesn't even realize they are for TALKING - to her they are for texting, social media, taking pictures and video, and playing games. I'm not mad at Willis for not predicting the future, but it's one of those things that really stands out 25 years after publication, like watching computers explode on the Enterprise because they are processing too much data.

Randy wrote: "Also, phones. ..."

A common problem with a lot of books – and movies! – pre mobile phones. Willis has mentioned this. Since she continued to write novels about the Oxford Time Travelers in the mobile phone era, she needed to come up with a reason they didn't exist in 2055. I think she waved her hands about something something the atomic war something something.

G33z3r wrote: "Randy wrote: "Also, phones. ..."

A common problem with a lot of books – and movies! – pre mobile phones. Willis has mentioned this. Since she continued to write novels about the Oxford Time Travel..."

Right. I always try to imagine classic SF as sort of inhabiting an alternate dimension or timeline, especially when we've already overtaken the time period of the book in the real world (1984, 2001, etc.). But I got a kick out of it anyway. I mean, in 1992 when this book was published I didn't have a problem finding a phone (I actually had a job where I had to drive around a lot and I had a calling card I would use at pay phones) so it's weird to think that Willis thought we might have LESS communication in the future than we did in 1992. Not mad at her though - it vaguely reminds of the scene in Superman the Movie when he went to a phone booth but it was one of those half-booth things so he used a revolving door instead. Ah, progress.

I loved this book. I listened to it on audio, and it never dragged in my opinion. The medieval world was really confronting to me, the hardships even aside from disease. I like historical fiction, but I gravitate to elegant times and places in developed countries (and even they were pretty crude in real life). But this really grabbed me. The Middle English is brilliantly done on audio so you can kind of understand it.

This is a very humanist book, as are Blackout and All Clear. Everyone makes a difference, even those who seem small and unimportant. We often don't appreciate the difference we make. Kivrin felt she had failed and yet she had done so much for the village.

There are some comments above from a couple of years ago about how unlikely a pandemic like that would be in the future, but this year it's all over the news as a scientific likelihood. I listened to this in 2001 when cell phones and even the internet weren't as ubiquitous as today, so that didn't really bother me.

After 17 years, I still remember a lot from this book, which shows how much it impressed me.

My negative review:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

When I look over the comments and reviews, it seems clearly divided between "stupid plot" and "heartwrenching characters." If you're more of a plot reader like me, then this book is frustrating. If you're looking for characters to fall in love with, then you might enjoy it.