Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

[lightreads]

Set in the same universe as the wonderful To Say Nothing of the Dog. Oxford, 2054, where time travel is the purview of historians. We begin with Kivrin, plucky undergraduate, going back to explore and record in 1320. Except something has gone wrong with her coordinates, she doesn't feel well at all, and back in 2054 an epidemic is sweeping through Oxford.

Huh! There are some neat narrative things going on here – our two point of view characters are historians, and Kivrin's chapters are interspersed with first-person transcripts of the recordings she made while in the past. And the whole thing is put together really nicely from the ground up to talk about history and storytelling and observation and involvement. And aside from that, it's a pretty great story – it takes its time and does the right work, and yeah I totally sniffled into my pillow more than once. Because ouch.

But . . . dunno. I really dug To Say Nothing of the Dog because it's so charming and weird. This book has less charming (not none, mind) and very little funny (plague, you know). And so I spent more time muttering about how I saw every major twist coming, and also how incredibly enraging some of the secondary characters are. Both these things are fitting, you understand – it's a novel pretending to be the historical record of something, so yeah you can see the shape of the thing, and the secondary characters are supposed to be enragingly incompetent. But that didn't stop them from being enraging in the not fun way.

Recommended, because it's unusual and fundamentally cool, but it didn't blow my mind like I thought it might.

Comments

[readerjane]

This one did blow my mind. I read it before To Say Nothing, then had the opposite reaction to TSN: I expected TSN to blow my mind in the same way that DB did, and was frustrated because there was so much madcap.

I decided that was okay, because they're very different stories set in the same world. Same social and historical and time-twisting factors affecting both, but on top of that worldbuilding there are different characters, whose lives are impacted according to their measure.

[treewishes.livejournal.com]

Fascinating to see these two points of view -- makes me think this is a one-book universe?

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

It's been a while since I've read either, but...my recollection is that the books have very different overall tones. That may be what's going on here, more than a lack of material? (Though I read Doomsday Book first and prefer that one, so I'm not sure I qualify as evidence against your theory.)

There are several shorts set in the same universe, too.

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I suspect this is one of those 'what order you read it in is pretty determinative' things.

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

I think this is one of those where the order you come at it determines a lot.

[hamsterwoman]

I just finished Doomsday Book and came back to read the review I remembered from a few weeks ago, and thought I'd way in on the "order read vs. mind-blowing" experience, even though I'm kind of late to the party.

I read TSN first, and I loved that book. I definitely *enjoyed* TSN more, but felt Doomsday Book to be more mind-blowing. I think that if I'd read them in a different order, I might have been kind of disappointed in TSN, actually. Because if you go into Doomsday Book expecting the same sort of lighthearted charm as TSN and get hit with what's actually there (and it's not like I didn't know the book was set during the Black Plague, but the extent of the devastation still came as a shock), I think that works pretty well with the character reactions. But if you go into TSN expecting something along the lines of Doomsday Book, that would probably be just puzzling.

[cincodemaygirl.livejournal.com]

I see this discussion ended awhile ago, but for the record: I read DB first and loved it, but I read TSN next and loved it even more. While they are very different books, I think that TSN is the better work--more complete, more skillfully written. DB is wonderful but it's missing something--not that I know what.