The Doomsday Book

Author: Connie Willis

Ever since H.G. Wells, time travel has been one of the great staples of science fiction, but few writers have approached the subject as grittily or as thoroughly as Connie Willis. In her loosely linked sequence of novels, time travel is a device used by students at a near-future Oxford University, who travel back for practical experience of the period they are studying. There are limits, points in history that the time machine will not penetrate because the past might be altered or periods that are considered too dangerous to visit. One such period, of course, is the Black Death.Kivrin is sent back to study rural England in 1320, a period safely before the plague struck, but something goes wrong and she arrives more than 20 years later than intended, just as the Black Death reaches the village in Oxfordshire that she is visiting.At the same time, a new strain of influenza hits Oxford just after her departure, incapacitating the time travel technician, leading to the entire city being quarantined and meaning that no-one is aware of exactly when Kivrin is.Alternating between these two times and these two plagues, we get two rather different stories. In 21st century Oxford there's a race against time as people battle illness to try and discover where Kivrin is and how to rescue her. But far more moving is the story set in the 14th century, a harrowing account of the onset and effects of the Black Death, in which Kivrin has to helplessly stand by and watch the villagers, people who have cared for her and who she has got to know, dying one by one. Until finally she is on her own, not strong enough to dig the last grave. Doomsday Book won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and is easily the best of the time travel stories Willis has written. For once, the past that is visited is not prettified, is not colourful and romantic, but harsh, ugly, terrifying and real.

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Willis's other novels about time travellers from Oxford University include To Say Nothing of the Dog, the only one of the time travel novels written as a comedy. In this instance an attempt to recreate Coventry Cathedral as it was immediately before the German air raid that destroyed it somehow ends up in a recreation of Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat in the 1880s. The novel won both the Hugo and Locus awards.

The other time travel work is the diptych Blackout and All Clear, in which three students become trapped in London during the Blitz, where they fear that any change to history they make might affect the outcome of the war. The two books together are far too long for the story they have to tell, nevertheless they won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus Awards.

Willis's other major book is Passage, in which researchers into the phenomenon of near-death experience finally unlock exactly what the brain is trying to do in the moments between death and revival, research which takes us back repeatedly to the Titanic at the moment of disaster. The novel won the Locus Award.