Subject: Book Review - Doomsday Book

From: [email-masked] (Danny)
Date: 20 Dec 93 03:00:49 GMT

title: Doomsday Book
        by: Connie Willis
 publisher: Hodder and Stoughton 1993
  subjects: science fiction
     other: 650 pages, A$14.95
   summary: parallel plagues in 1348 and 2054

In general I strongly dislike time-travel stories with their attendant
implausiblities, but sometimes they have other qualities which redeem
them.  _Doomsday Book_ is set in 2054, when time travel is run of the
mill but everything else is, rather implausibly, pretty much like the
present.  (The only real exception is a random collection of tech gadgets
such as video phones and laser candles.)  Kivrin, a female undergraduate
history student at Oxford, is to be the first person sent back to the
Middle Ages (to 1320), because - wait for it - no qualified historian is
available!.  Everything goes wrong with the mission (the bungling
incompetence of the academics organising it is, unfortunately, quite
plausible), and she is delivered instead to 1348, the year the Black
Plague reached England.  Meanwhile a flu epidemic has hit 2054, and
Oxford is quarantined.  The bulk of the book consists of parallel
accounts of the effects of the two epidemics, and this is worked out
much better than the time-travel setup.  

Despite the weaknesses in the science and the implausible 2054 Oxford, I
enjoyed _Doomsday Book_ a lot.  (I much prefer well-written books with
lousy science to engineering manuals dressed up as novels!)  I'm not sure
it deserved its Hugo award (shared with _A Fire Upon the Deep_), but
_Doomsday Book_ is definitely worth a read, especially if you are
interested in epidemiology (used to produce a rather clever "detective
problem") or medieval English history.  

--

%T 	Doomsday Book
%A 	Connie Willis
%I 	Hodder and Stoughton
%D 	1993
%O 	paperback, A$14.95
%G 	ISBN 0-450-57987-5
%P 	650pp
%K 	science fiction

Danny Yee ([email-masked])
19/12/93

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