Doomsday Book
by Connie Willis
Summary
In a near future Oxford, history is a field discipline. Historians travel to the period they study, and Kivrin, a student, has spent years preparing to go to the fourteenth century: the language, the manners, the inoculations, the cover story. Her tutor thinks it is far too dangerous. She goes anyway.
Something goes wrong with the drop, and it goes wrong quietly enough that nobody notices at first. Meanwhile the twenty first century Oxford she left is hit by an epidemic of its own, the technician who ran her transfer collapses before he can say what he knows, and the city goes into quarantine while her tutor tries to work out how to reach her.
Willis runs the two timelines in parallel and the effect is remarkable, because the modern half is largely comic. There are exasperating bureaucrats, a relentlessly cheerful American bell ringing troupe, and a mother who will not stop telephoning, and the comedy keeps running right up to the point where it stops being funny at all.
The medieval half is where the book earns its reputation. Kivrin comes to know a household completely, and then the plague arrives, and Willis simply stays with her and does not look away. It is a long novel and the first two hundred pages take their time setting the pieces out. Stay with it. It is also one of the most devastating things science fiction has produced, and readers routinely describe finishing it in tears and then being unable to start anything else for a week.
Historical Context & Significance
Doomsday Book was published in 1992 and swept the following year, taking the Nebula Award, the Locus Science Fiction Award, and sharing the Hugo Award for Best Novel as joint winner with Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep.
It is the first of Willis's Oxford time travel novels, a loosely connected sequence that also includes To Say Nothing of the Dog, itself a Hugo winner and almost the tonal opposite, being a farce. Readers who arrive at the series through one book are often startled by the other.
The novel acquired an unexpected second life in 2020, when its account of an epidemic reaching a modern city, and of the improvised institutional response to it, was widely rediscovered and passed around by readers who found it uncomfortably recognisable.