Fiction Reviews
Doomsday Book
(1992 / 2012) Connie Willis, Gollancz, £14.99 / US$20, pbk,
xv + 389pp, ISBN 978-0-575-13109-5
This is a very fine story very much worthy of your attention, but…
It is the near future – 2054 to be precise – and time travel has become a reality and being used as a research tool by historians at Oxford University. The Head of Oxford's History Department, Basingame, is away on holiday, presumed somewhere in Scotland, and is not contactable. This causes a bit of an issue as the Acting Head of Balliol College, Professor Gilchrist, wants to send a doctoral student, Kivrin Engle, back to 1320. This is a very distant past trip to send a historian and Kirvin is young. For these reasons, her supervisor, James Dunworthy, has doubts but reluctantly agrees, though he changes his mind when he discovers that an experience technician will not be at the time travel controls: it is the run-up to Christmas and some staff are away. Instead, Badri Chaudhuri was to handle the time drop.
Badri Chaudhuri is checking the drop readings to see when Kivrin Engle had been sent: a certain drift is expected with time travel and this can be greater the further back someone is sent. Badri makes his checks and goes to seek out James Dunworthy but collapses before he can report what has happened.
It transpires that Badri has a novel form of influenza and seems to be one of the first to catch this strain which is so severe that it often causes patients to become comatose and in quite a few instances can lead to death.
With modern-day Oxford in the midst of an influenza pandemic and quarantined, and with no technicians available to check things, nobody knows whether Kivrin Engle has arrived at the right date. This is key, as a few years after her destination time, the Black Death spread across England. Fortunately Kivrtin has all her inoculations before she went back in time, but this was a dangerous period and people were even burned at the stake having been accused of causing plague. So it was important that Kivrin went back to before this time.
Now, first up the cover and back cover blurb for this book. Alas, I have issues with both of these. The cover depicts a medieval person dressed in the garb that was used to supposedly 'protect' people from the plague and the short back cover blurb contains a spoiler about which we do not get to know for any certainty until over half way through the book! Indeed, we do not get an encounter with the plague itself until four-fifths the way through, though it is mentioned many times before this. What we do get from early on is an account of the influenza outbreak spreading in modern Oxford and the continued worry about the uncertainty of when Kivrin Engle has been sent.
The story is neatly structured in that there is a symmetry between the influenza outbreak on modern Oxford and the plague in Medieval England. However, it does suffer from some bloat: there is continual modern Oxford worry over Kivrin Engle's fate, the unnecessary sideline having to deal with a visiting troupe of US American bell ringers, and continued failed attempts to contact key people. Enough already, we got the message… Alas I have noted bloat in some of this author's other work and this might just be her writing style.
Adam Roberts in his introduction to this edition makes a virtue of this novel's slowness and size. However, I have noted that I am not alone regarding its bloat issues…
"The one serious issue I had with Doomsday Book is with it's pacing. Even though her character depiction is extremely good, the plot itself moves rather slowly."
Fantasy Book Review"[It] wants to be a fast-paced, airplane read with a few big ideas that stick with you. I was bored after the first third…"
Cult of the New"Bloated, slow and repetitive…"
Worlds Without End"This was a painfully slow and frustrating read..."
The Story Graph."A story that plods and meanders interminably…"
The Bedlam Files.Now, this book was written in 1992, which makes its musings as to life in 2056 interesting to us readers a third of a century on from when it was originally published. Some, not many, in 2056 have a 'bleeper' communication device and the telephone has been upgraded to a videophone. But for the most part, the portrayal of modern Oxford actually has the feel of 1960s Oxford which is kind of odd but, strangely, it largely works.
Where this book really scores is the portrayal of the influenza epidemic. Remember, this was written well before the 2020 CoVID pandemic. There is so much that Connie Willis got right from a toilet paper shortage, through the need to sequence the virus so as to produce a vaccine, and to some folks feeling that the quarantine measures impeded their personal rights. Absolutely on the mark is the origins of the influenza virus (including some people theorising that it escaped from a laboratory). However, when its origins are revealed (towards the end of the book) it explains (though the author does not lay it out for us) certain aspects of its epidemiology. (No spoilers sweetie.)
There is other interesting background too, including the mention of a move to cede Britain from the European Union.
However, we must come to the book's other flaws. As meticulously as the author has researched some aspects of Medieval life, she gets others woefully wrong, principal among which is that cholera was not endemic in Britain in the 14th century but actually first arrived many centuries later. This might have been overlooked by the reader were it not for the fact that this mistake keeps on being repeated several times across the book.
Here I must challenge Adam Roberts, who provides the book's four-page introduction. He says that such flaws will only concern 'pedants'. This betrays Roberts as a non-scientist. To a scientist Pi (π) to three significant places is 3.14: 3.13 or 3.15 simply doesn't cut it! Try being an architect with such lack of precision. I believe that SF authors should try to get these things right as a good proportion of science fiction readers are scientists and accuracy does matter to them. Indeed, because the author has researched many aspects, it is a shame (if not downright sloppy) to get other things so wrong.
And then there were Americanisms that were out of place in a book set in Britain and with British protagonists. For example, over here we have 'porridge' for breakfast not oat-whatever… Please note, all N. American authors… If you are writing a book set in Britain, or that features British protagonists, then for gawd's sake invest in a N. American-to-English dictionary! Your domestic readership may not notice errors but your British Isles readers will be irked by howlers.
Finally, and contributing to the bloat, there were (I presume) attempts at humour, such as with a visiting US troupe of bell-ringers and an over-doting mother of an undergraduate. These did not work for me and Willis' commissioning editor at Bantam-Spectra should really have told her to excise these (in addition to trimming the bloat).
Now, Doomsday Book won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards as well as the Locus Award for 'Best Science Fiction Novel'. Despite some evidently considerable Medieval research by the author, given its factual flaws one might be surprised that it won such prestigious awards until, that is, one notes that these awards are mainly voted on by N. American constituencies: Worldcon attendees in the case of the Hugo, N. American SF writers in the case of the Nebula, and readers of the N. American-based Locus magazine in the case of the Locus Awards. Northern Americans are less likely to have as detailed knowledge of English history, or terminology used in Britain as would a British Award-voting constituency.
For this SF awards reason – and that at this novel's heart there is the symmetry of two (past/future present) epidemics – Gollancz have done us a favour in including this in their SF Masterworks series.
(A tangent for a moment. Doomsday Book actually co-won the 1993 Hugo Award for 'Best Novel' along with Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep. Stan's Red Mars being a notable runner-up that year. Incidentally, both these other novels were also runners-up to the Nebula that year.)
Yet, notwithstanding flaws, Doomsday Book is (bloat aside) an engaging read and is so too for scientists into SF (SF² Concatenation's target audience along with SF aficionados into science). Connie Willis recognises that the big scientists' 'no no' for sci-fi time travel is that it undermines causality. While she does not explore this in huge depth, this potentially paradox-inducing causality problem is mentioned a number of times, both within Doomsday Book and also other stories in her Oxford time-travel series. Connie Willis's get-out-of-jail-free card is in effect what is known as the Novikov self-consistency conjecture (not mentioned in the book but) developed in the mid-1980s, so it is not impossible that Connie Willis came across this when creating her time travel universe (especially as the SF author Larry Niven also adopted this).
With its evident appeal to regular N. American SF readers, its likely also to be enjoyed by those into historical novels (though not necessarily history academics), and now it has post-CoVID relevance too. So, this is a worthy addition to the Gollancz SF Masterwork series. If you have not come across this before, and like the sound of it, then do get it.
Jonathan Cowie
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