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Doomsday Book, Connie Willis's second novel, is set in the same universe as her Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novella "Fire Watch," a world where post-graduate historians at Oxford University must complete a practicum assignment by traveling into and studying the past.
Doomsday Book is the story of Kivrin Engle, an ambitious young medieval scholar who wants to be the first historian to visit the hazardous Middle Ages. Opposed to the project is Professor James Dunworthy, a twentieth-century expert who nonetheless agrees to tutor Kivrin.
Dunworthy is afraid the inexperienced Medieval department will bungle the drop, and mistakes duly occur. Instead of visiting 1320, Kivrin arrives in Oxford during the 1348 Christmas season, just in time for an outbreak of the Black Death. To make matters worse, an epidemic of influenza in the present shuts down the time travel laboratory. WhenKivrin comes down with the influenza herself, she loses track of the pre-arranged pick-up point. As a result, she is trapped in the past.
Spoiler Warning: Plot details and/or information about the ending follow. If you wish to enjoy the work first, stop reading here and return at another time.
Willis plays out both epidemics in detail, showing how far medical technology has developed in the centuries between 1348 and her near-future setting. . . and how little human nature has changed over the centuries. The helplessness of the medieval villagers against the plague is contrasted with a frantic high-tech effort by the university community to fight the influenza. The same fears and conflicts arise in both situations as people, medieval and modern, fight for their lives and grieve their losses.
Mankind's physical vulnerability in the face of infectious disease is hardly the only theme of this novel, whose true subject matter is the human capacity for love, courage and faith. Kivrin cannot save the plague victims from death, but—of course—defeating death is never a possibility. In Doomsday Book, as in her other work, Willis reminds readers that nobody escapes dying. What Kivrin does save the medieval villagers from is indignity, fear and despair.
Time travel novels must always deal with the question of temporal paradox--whether a person visiting the past can alter history, and if so whether this alteration will have an affect on the present? Willis side-steps these issues with unusual grace. The net used for time travel
automatically moves visitors forward in time, jumping them past any moments where they would be tempted to change history. In Doomsday Book, this mechanism, known as slippage, forms a plot point, as does the net's refusal to open if a visitor attempts to carry back any material—even viruses--from the past. In a later comic novel, To Say Nothing of the Dog, the rules are explained further: the net will open if an object can be carried through without changing either the past or present.
Professor Dunworthy is featured in all of Willis's Oxford time travel tales, while the character of Kivrin appears briefly in "Fire Watch" (which was written prior to this novel but takes place after the events of Doomsday Book). She is referred to, in that novella, as Saint Kivrin.
Published in 1992, Doomsday Book won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novel.
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