lightreads (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lightreads) wrote2008-08-03 05:50 pm
lightreads) wrote2008-08-03 05:50 pm
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Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
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.
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.
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There are several shorts set in the same universe, too.
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