For me, this read blazingly fast. I loved every page of it.

"Apocalyptic!" ( )

People have been telling me to read this book for years. I don't know what made me pick it up now. Other than knowing that it was about time travel I did not know a thing about the subject matter so it came as a surprise that it was about two pandemics, one in the 21st century, a heretofore unknown virus quickly brought under control through immunization, and the black death in the middle ages that killed 90% of the people in the places it reached. The book is filled with death, heartbreak, and the consequences of selfishness and vanity. But those things come in second place because the book is even more filled with the best of what makes humans human, ingenuity, a sense of duty, and a capacity for love. It really is a beautiful and engaging story and Kivrin is a dazzling heroine.

And yet. The problem with the book is that it was set somewhere around 2050 and everyone behaved as if they were in Oxford in the 1980's. Fusty old men (some kind and decent, others not) ran everything. Aunts bought tween nephews woolen mufflers for Christmas. Earnest American housewives traveled to the UK to perform in bell-ringing performances. There were no screens (not even TVs that I can recall) . Things sent arrived late and by post. People were screwed if they could not find their NHS cards. The medications available were throwbacks, no broad spectrum anti-biotics or post-infection anti-virals. And the technology was straight out of the 70s. The only advanced technology on the page was designed to allow historians to time travel, which...well, please. No tech for profit just to increase knowledge? There were no substantial computer systems, no portable phones, no security measures more effective than jotting things down in notebooks. I don't expect SF writers to be prescient, but this was published in 1990 when all of these things existed. I am not generally an early adopter, but my firm gave me my first mobile phone 1n 1994 (it was outrageously expensive to use, you paid by the minute and you paid both when you were the caller and the recipient), and when I got that I already had a Palm Pilot. I think it is fair to say that people would have been able to guess these technologies would merge. I don't think people knew smartphones would be in the hands of every person over the age of 10 and that they would have processing power 1000x what a desktop computer had then, but certainly no one thought the future was landlines attached to monitors for video calls. It strikes me as lazy to build suspense on things that were already just a few years from obsolescence when the book was written.

An enjoyable read that could have been brilliant. A 3.5 I think. I will definitely be reading the second in the series and hope some of the wrinkles were ironed out in that book. ( )

I miss the characters in this book already. This is an instant favorite. ( )

Time travel is a very hackneyed concept in science fiction. After all it was done first, and arguably best, by H.G.Wells in The Time Machine, more than a century ago. But Connie Willis has managed to grab hold of the idea and make it interesting again.

In Willis’ near-term future (2054 AD), time travel has been invented and is in the hands of academics at Oxford University. Doomsday Book details a research trip to the early 1300s to investigate mediaeval life and settle academic questions about the way the English language was spoken.

But things go horribly wrong and the time-traveller, a young woman called Kivrin, ends up arriving at a time right when the Black Death hits England. Co-incidentally, an epidemic of severe flu afflicts 21st century Britain, throwing all into confusion at both ends of the time travel voyage.

Willis seems to effortlessly combine comedy and tragedy in this book, no mean feat. We certainly feel the tragedy of the Black Death, because Kivrin, and ourselves as readers, come to know the people whom it affects, and feel their suffering. Contrast this with the almost dismissive treatment of the same plague by Ken Follett in World Without End in which the only people to die are characters we don’t much care about.

I really enjoyed this book. ( )

This book is so depressing without a lot of joy or intrigue to carry you through. I cried for most of the last half because the detailed descriptions of death by bubonic plague are agonizing. ( )