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Doomsday Book: A Novel of the Oxford Time Travel Series Kindle Edition
“A tour de force.”—The New York Times Book Review
For Kivrin, preparing to travel back in time to study one of the deadliest eras in humanity’s history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received.
But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin—barely of age herself—finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history’s darkest hours.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSpectra
- Publication dateJanuary 5, 2011
- File size4452 KB
- Perhaps that’s what’s wrong with our time, Mr. Dunworthy, it was founded by Maisry and the bishop’s envoy and Sir Bloet. And all the people who stayed and tried to help, like Roche, caught the plague and died.Highlighted by 250 Kindle readers
- 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.Highlighted by 185 Kindle readers
- Everyone looks like a cutthroat by torchlight. No wonder they invented electricity.Highlighted by 151 Kindle readers
From the Publisher
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From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Review
“Splendid work—brutal, gripping and genuinely harrowing, the product of diligent research, fine writing and well-honed instincts, that should appeal far beyond the normal science-fiction constituency.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“The world of 1348 burns in the mind’s eye, and every character alive that year is a fully recognized being. . . . It becomes possible to feel . . . that Connie Willis did, in fact, over the five years Doomsday Book took her to write, open a window to another world, and that she saw something there.”—The Washington Post Book World
From the Publisher
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
"Am I too late?" he said, yanking them off and squinting at Mary.
"Shut the door," she said. "I can't hear you over the sound of those ghastly carols."
Dunworthy closed the door, but it didn't completely shut out the sound of "O Come, All Ye Faithful" wafting in from the quad. "Am I too late?" he said again.
Mary shook her head. "All you've missed is Gilchrist's speech." She leaned back in her chair to let Dunworthy squeeze past her into the narrow observation area. She had taken off her coat and wool hat and set them on the only other chair, along with a large shopping bag full of parcels. Her gray hair was in disarray, as if she had tried to fluff it up after taking her hat off. "A very long speech about Mediaeval's maiden voyage in time," she said, "and the college of Brasenose taking its rightful place as the jewel in history's crown. Is it still raining?"
"Yes," he said, wiping his spectacles on his muffler. He hooked the wire rims over his ears and went up to the thin-glass partition to look at the net. In the center of the laboratory was a smashed-up wagon surrounded by overturned trunks and wooden boxes. Above them hung the protective shields of the net, draped like a gauzy parachute.
Kivrin's tutor Latimer, looking older and even more infirm than usual, was standing next to one of the trunks. Montoya was standing over by the console wearing jeans and a terrorist jacket and looking impatiently at the digital on her wrist. Badri was sitting in front of the console, typing something in and frowning at the display screens.
"Where's Kivrin?" Dunworthy said.
"I haven't seen her," Mary said. "Do come and sit down. The drop isn't scheduled till noon, and I doubt very much that they'll get her off by then. Particularly if Gilchrist makes another speech."
She draped her coat over the back of her own chair and set the shopping bag full of parcels on the floor by her feet. "I do hope this doesn't go all day. I must pick up my great-nephew Colin at the Underground station at three. He's coming in on the tube."
She rummaged in her shopping bag. "My niece Deirdre is off to Kent for the holidays and asked me to look after him. I do hope it doesn't rain the entire time he's here," she said, still rummaging. "He's twelve, a nice boy, very bright, though he has the most wretched vocabulary. Everything is either necrotic or apocalyptic. And Deirdre allows him entirely too many sweets."
She continued to dig through the contents of the shopping bag. "I got this for him for Christmas." She hauled up a narrow red-and-green-striped box. "I'd hoped to get the rest of my shopping done before I came here, but it was pouring rain and I can only tolerate that ghastly digital carillon music on the High Street for brief intervals."
She opened the box and folded back the tissue. "I've no idea what twelve-year-old boys are wearing these days, but mufflers are timeless, don't you think, James? James?"
He turned from where he had been staring blindly at the display screens. "What?"
"I said, mufflers are always an appropriate Christmas gift for boys, don't you think?"
He looked at the muffler she was holding up for his inspection. It was of dark gray plaid wool. He would not have been caught dead in it when he was a boy, and that had been fifty years ago. "Yes," he said, and turned back to the thin-glass.
"What is it, James? Is something wrong?"
Latimer picked up a small brass-bound casket, and then looked vaguely around, as if he had forgotten what he intended to do with it. Montoya glanced impatiently at her digital.
"Where's Gilchrist?" Dunworthy said.
"He went through there," Mary said, pointing at a door on the far side of the net. "He orated on Mediaeval's place in history, talked to Kivrin for a bit, the tech ran some tests, and then Gilchrist and Kivrin went through that door. I assume he's still in there with her, getting her ready."
"Getting her ready," Dunworthy muttered.
"James, do come and sit down, and tell me what's wrong," she said, jamming the muffler back in its box and stuffing it into the shopping bag, "and where you've been? I expected you to be here when I arrived. After all, Kivrin's your favorite pupil."
"I was trying to reach the Head of the History Faculty," Dunworthy said, looking at the display screens.
"Basingame? I thought he was off somewhere on Christmas vac."
"He is, and Gilchrist maneuvered to be appointed Acting Head in his absence so he could get the Middle Ages opened to time travel. He rescinded the blanket ranking of ten and arbitrarily assigned rankings to each century. Do you know what he assigned the 1300s? A six. A six! If Basingame had been here, he'd never have allowed it. But the man's nowhere to be found." He looked hopefully at Mary. "You don't know where he is, do you?"
"No," she said. "Somewhere in Scotland, I think."
"Somewhere in Scotland," he said bitterly. "And meanwhile, Gilchrist is sending Kivrin into a century which is clearly a ten, a century which had scrofula and the plague and burned Joan of Arc at the stake."
He looked at Badri, who was speaking into the console's ear now. "You said Badri ran tests. What were they? A coordinates check? A field projection?"
"I don't know." She waved vaguely at the screens, with their constantly changing matrices and columns of figures. "I'm only a doctor, not a net technician. I thought I recognized the technician. He's from Balliol, isn't he?"
Dunworthy nodded. "He's the best tech Balliol has," he said, watching Badri, who was tapping the console's keys one at a time, his eyes on the changing readouts. "All of New College's techs were gone for the vac. Gilchrist was planning to use a first-year apprentice who'd never run a manned drop. A first-year apprentice for a remote! I talked him into using Badri. If I can't stop this drop, at least I can see that it's run by a competent tech."
Badri frowned at the screen, pulled a meter out of his pocket, and started toward the wagon.
"Badri!" Dunworthy called.
Badri gave no indication he'd heard. He walked around the perimeter of the boxes and trunks, looking at the meter. He moved one of the boxes slightly to the left.
"He can't hear you," Mary said.
"Badri!" he shouted. "I need to speak to you."
Mary had stood up. "He can't hear you, James," she said. "The partition's soundproofed."
Badri said something to Latimer, who was still holding the brass-bound casket. Latimer looked bewildered. Badri took the casket from him and set it down on the chalked mark.
Dunworthy looked around for a microphone. He couldn't see one. "How were you able to hear Gilchrist's speech?" he asked Mary.
"Gilchrist pressed a button on the inside there," she said, pointing at a wall panel next to the net.
Badri had sat down in front of the console again and was speaking into the ear. The net shields began to lower into place. Badri said something else, and they rose to where they'd been.
"I told Badri to recheck everything, the net, the apprentice's calculations, everything," he said, "and to abort the drop immediately if he found any errors, no matter what Gilchrist said."
"But surely Gilchrist wouldn't jeopardize Kivrin's safety," Mary protested. "He told me he'd taken every precaution—"
"Every precaution! He hasn't run recon tests or parameter checks. We did two years of unmanneds in Twentieth Century before we sent anyone through. He hasn't done any. Badri told him he should delay the drop until he could do at least one, and instead he moved the drop up two days. The man's a complete incompetent."
"But he explained why the drop had to be today," Mary said. "In his speech. He said the contemps in the 1300s paid no attention to dates, except planting and harvesting times and church holy days. He said the concentration of holy days was greatest around Christmas, and that was why Mediaeval had decided to send Kivrin now, so she could use the Advent holy days to determine her temporal location and ensure her being at the drop site on the twenty-eighth of December."
"His sending her now has nothing to do with Advent or holy days," he said, watching Badri. He was back to tapping one key at a time and frowning. "He could send her next week and use Epiphany for the rendezvous date. He could run unmanneds for six months and then send her lapse-time. Gilchrist is sending her now because Basingame's off on holiday and isn't here to stop him."
"Oh, dear," Mary said. "I rather thought he was rushing it myself When I told him how long I needed Kivrin in Infirmary, he tried to talk me out of it. I had to explain that her inoculations needed time to take effect."
"A rendezvous on the twenty-eighth of December," Dunworthy said bitterly. "Do you realize what holy day that is? The Feast of the Slaughter of the Innocents. Which, in light of how this drop is being run, may be entirely appropriate."
"Why can't you stop it?" Mary said. "You can forbid Kivrin to go, can't you? You're her tutor."
"No," he said. "I'm not. She's a student at Brasenose. Latimer's her tutor." He waved his hand in the direction of Latimer, who had picked up the brass-bound casket again and was peering absentmindedly into it. "She came to Balliol and asked me to tutor her unofficially."
He turned and stared blindly at the thin-glass. "I told her then that she couldn't go."
Product details
- ASIN : B004G60FXG
- Publisher : Spectra (January 5, 2011)
- Publication date : January 5, 2011
- Language : English
- File size : 4452 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 671 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 0450579875
- Best Sellers Rank: #103,156 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #168 in Historical Fantasy Fiction
- #302 in Time Travel Science Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #340 in Humorous Science Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Constance Elaine Trimmer Willis has won, among other accolades, ten HUGO Awards and six NEBULA Awards for her writing, and was recently named an SFWA Grand Master. She lives in Greeley, Colorado with her husband Courtney Willis, a professor of physics at the University of Northern Colorado.
Author photo by Kyle Cassidy
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For one thing, for a book with a lot of dialogue and not a lot of action, many of the characters seem pretty flat, almost caricatures of real people. We have Gilchrist, an impossibly unqualified administrator desperately seeking to blame everything that goes wrong on Dunworthy, one of the protagonists. Add to that an assistant whose obsession with the supply of toilet paper seems positively freudian, a mother of a student who is impossibly overprotective and who insists on reading the most depressing parts of the Old Testament to hospital patients, ostensibly to boost morale, and a cheeky adolescent who is constantly sneaking into hospital rooms. Not a lot of depth here, I'm afraid.
For another, the cavalier attitude of the administrators toward a rather astounding piece of technology is entirely baffling. In the future, time travel has become possible, and universities have the means to send historians back in time. Given the years of preparation required to send someone back in time, and the attendant dangers of such time travel, the idea that various safety protocols could simply be ignored by an administrator in a hurry is laughable, and the idea that no one is double checking (and triple and quadruple checking) the calculations required to send someone back is just not believable.
Finally, the communication difficulties the characters have are maddening. First, although the book was written in 1993, when cell phones were not as common as today, the complete lack of any sort of mobile communications device without any explanation seems quite contrived, and much of the middle of the book is taken up with characters trying, with limited success, to get in touch with one another. The one character who knows what has gone wrong with the planned time travel to the year 1320 spends most of the book delirious with the bad case of the flu, and Dunworthy's repeated attempts to coax some sense out him drag on far longer than they need to.
Where this book really shines is in the efforts of Kivrin, trapped in the past, and Dunworthy once both realize what has gone wrong with the "drop." In Kivrin in particular, we see a strength of character emerge from the chaos around her, as she struggles to help the people she has come to know, believing she is trapped in the past with them. In these last chapters, the book became a page turner, and I found myself staying up late into the night, unwilling to go to bed until I discovered Kivrin's fate. I just wish the first part of the book had been as compelling.
The novel is science-fiction in the sense that those 21st century Brits have the technology to place historians back in time via a sophisticated version of Mr. Peabody’s WAYBAC machine (recall the 1960s cartoon where Mr. Peabody, a bespectacled intellectual dog, and his adopted human son Sherman travel back through time and meet such historical figures as Cleopatra and Nero). Take my word for it here, Doomsday Book’s time-travel and parallel dramas will keep you turning the pages.
And there are a lot of pages to turn, which prompts me to offer a couple of observations about reading longer novels. Really make the commitment by taking notes, creating outlines and sketching maps; a longer novel is a world unto itself and usually requires years for the author to complete. You will be honoring the integrity of the art form by devoting the needed energy to keep up with the details. The payoff is great: you’ll have the enjoyment of living for many hours in a vivid, fictional reality. Also, try listening to the audiobook as listening will open an additional dimension on the world created by the author, especially the various voices of the characters.
Anyway, back on Doomsday Book. I wouldn’t want to say too much about the storylines and thus spoil for readers because this novel is simply too good and has too many unexpected surprises. Briefly, the time-traveler is an medieval historian, a young woman by the name of Kivrin, who has a thirst for first-hand experience of the 14th century. Her wish is granted and we join Kivrin as she travels to a small medieval village and develops a deep emotional connection with a number of the villagers, including 12 year old Rosemond, 6 year old Agnes, and Father Roche, the village priest. Kivrin is given a very real and direct experience as the villagers face challenges and live the cycle of their days and nights in a harsh, hostile, rustic world. By the time I finished the book, I had the feeling I also spent time living with these medieval men, women and children. The novel is that powerful.
Meanwhile, back in 21th century Oxford, Kivrin’s mentor, a scholar by the name of Mr. Dunworthy, has his own problems with the time-travel technology and unfolding events at his school and in his town. He has to deal with an entire range of people, such as Mrs. Gaddson, an overbearing mother of one of the students, Mr. Gilchrist, a power-hungry academic, Colin, a precocious 12 year obsessed with the extremes of medieval history, Badri, a key technician for the time-travel machine, Montoya, an American Archeologist., not to mention a chorus of bell-ringers from America, including their headstrong leader. Again, I really got to know these people via the magic of Ms. Willis’s fiction.
Like all first-rate literature, Doomsday Book provides insight into what makes us all human, our dealing with love and hate, with hope and despair, with the beauty of life and those ugly and disgusting parts of life. However, there is an added component in this novel: Kivrin, our main-character and heroine, lives in a medieval world with the knowledge and historical vision of the 21st century, which adds a real spice. What a fictional world; what a reading and listening experience (I also listened to the audiobook). My modest understanding of what it must have been like to live in the 14th century has been much enriched.
Top reviews from other countries
It was very interesting to compare the book's version of an epidemic with what is happening in 2021.
The medieval part of the story is also very well done.
Add to your reading list if time travel and historical novels are your “thing” 👏👏👏👏