Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

Hello, Stranger.

Let's talk about Connie Willis's Doomsday Book.

The Short of It

Plot: A historian's time travel to the Middle Ages grows more and more complicated - and a crisis in the present adds new dangers.

Page Count: 592

Award: 1992 Hugo, 1992 Locus SF, 1992 Nebula

Worth a read: Yes.
Primary Driver: (Plot, World, or Character)
Bechdel Test: Past
Technobabble: Some babble, but often relevant.
Review: An array of excellent characters and compelling relationships ground two parallel stories. World building is excellent and remarkably prescient. Brilliant use of small setting details work wonders. Willis uses tropes well - leaning into some and spinning others in unexpected ways. A few unnecessary subplots stretch the length of this novel and slow pacing, but that is the only real issue. 

The Medium of It

Spoiler Free!

Wait a second! Aren't you jumping a few years in your reviews? Are you just trying to avoid writing up the Vorkosigan Saga reviews because you haven't figured out how to do sixteen interrelated books without spoilers in each?

Stranger, you know me too well.

There are so many excellent authorial choices made in this book. The story begins not with time travel, or adventure, or anything like that. It kicks off with interdepartmental politics at a university: 

Gilchrist's face took on its pinched look. "It strikes me as somewhat unjust that you constantly assume Mediaeval is incapable of carrying out a successful practicum," he said.

Ah, the classic fight! Which department gets the credit?  

Willis places it at a point when time travel is accepted as a normal thing but is still relatively rare. She can have her cake and eat it too: people are excited enough about time travel, and worried enough about it, that there are plenty of scenes to set up the rules of how it works. But things are normal enough that this is not a "device testing" story. Rules are vital in a book like this. Almost any time travel story begs the question, "Why not just go back again to fix it?" Willis addresses this directly.

"Do you know what he said when I told him he should run at least one unmanned? He said, 'If something unfortunate does happen, we can go back in time and pull Ms. Engle out before it happens, can't we?' The man has no notion of how the net works, no notion of the paradoxes, no notion that Kivrin is there, and what happens to her is real and irrevocable."

Plenty of stories have characters who are there purely to dump exposition on the reader. They often have ham-fisted dialogue where they lecture others on things they are aware of, purely for the sake of appeasing us, the viewer. Why, after all, would a character spend so much time telling others things that they already know? Professor Dunworthy is the perfect answer. Because he's a worrier. He repeats things that people know because he's afraid for them, and he complains about the ignorance of others, as above, when it intersects with his worries. Instead of coming off as unrealistic, each time he says something to the reader by reassuring someone else his character as a concerned father-figure is reinforced. And what a good way to establish high stakes immediately!

"It's impossible," he'd said. "Even if it were opened, Mediaeval wouldn't send a woman. An unaccompanied woman was unheard of in the fourteenth century. Only women of the lowest class went about alone, and they were fair game for any man or beast who happened along..."

He had stopped, finally coming to his senses. "Do you know what you need to learn?" he had said, watching her, earnestly bent over the list she was scribbling, her braids dangling over her shoulders. "How to treat open sores and infected wounds, how to prepare a child's body for burial, how to dig a grave. The mortality rate will still be worth a ten, even if Gilchrist somehow succeeds in getting the ranking changed. The average life expectancy in 1300 was thirty-eight. You have no business going there."

Boom. Is that first chapter a cow on stilts? Because those are some high stakes.

Important characters are all extremely compelling. Each has one or two core characteristics that define their actions. For Kivrin, it's curiosity. Professor Dunworthy: Concern. Gilchrist: Pride. Montoya: obsession with work. Mary: Care and loyalty. And so on. On top of this single point they have more complicated facets. Dunworthy is easily irritated, Glichrist is territorial, Kivrin wants approval. What makes them all so compelling, though, is that they all have certain aspects which are counter to their defining characteristics. It makes them more human. No real person is 100% one thing or another, and Willis complicates her characters sufficiently to make them real.

The only exceptions to this are characters who are so completely one note that it is clearly a joke, and for the most part, the joke lands. William Gaddson, for example, is the true hero of this story, but that'll come up in the spoilers section. 

As far as plot goes: it's a time travel story. If you think things are going to go wrong in the past and the present, gold star! One could probably make a taxonomy of time travel tales (a TTTT, as it were), and split things into a few chunks. The specifics of events in the past and present are generally compelling. However, this is one of the few weaknesses of the story as a whole - lots of subplots feel more like delaying actions, as they end up having little impact other than filling time. Characters are good enough to get past this, but it is quite slow at points. If it were 20% shorter, this book would be incredible. 

It's hard to say anything else without spoiling some storyline or another, so I'll leave it at that for this portion. Though I should offer a small confession. 

If you're reading this blog, you may have noticed that I enjoy science fiction. I also have a fancy piece of paper that proclaims me a "Master of Arts in Late Antique, Medieval, and Early Modern Studies." Now, it's up for debate what Arts I have Mastered, but... pretty hard for me to not like this book.

If this one sounds like a worthwhile use of time, continue traveling to the following link! I'll get a few cents at no extra cost to you.

The Doomsday Link

The Long of It

Spoilers Ahead!

What's wrong in the past? Plague!

What's wrong in the present? Pandemic!

Again, to clarify, Doomsday Book came out in 1992. Some choice quotes.

Quarantine. Of course, Dunworthy thought. 

"Should I ration the toilet paper, do you think, sir," Finch said, "or put up notices asking everyone to conserve?"

"No, sir, I'm just on my way. What should I do about supplies, sir? We've adequate stores of soap, but we're very low on lavatory paper."

Only a few of them were wearing their face masks. By day after tomorrow they'll all be down with it, Dunworthy thought.

They ran out, as Finch had predicted, of clean linens and NHS masks, and more urgently, of temps, antimicrobials, and aspirin.

"How long will nationwide immunization take?"

"Once we get sufficient supplies of the vaccine, not long..."

A woman in a Burberry stood in front of the casualties ward holding a picket sign that said, "Ban Foreign Diseases." A man wearing a regulation face mask opened the door for them and handed Dunworthy a very damp flyer...

Dunworthy asked at the admissions desk for Mary and then read the flyer. In boldface type it said, "FIGHT INFLUENZA. VOTE TO SECEDE FROM THE EC." Underneath was a paragraph: "Why will you be separated from your loved ones this Christmas? Why are you forced to stay in Oxford? Why are you in danger of getting ill and DYING? Because the EC allows infected foreigners to enter England, and England doesn't have a thing to say about it. An Indian immigrant carrying a deadly virus -- "

Dunworthy didn't read the rest. He turned it over. It read, "A Vote for Secession is a Vote for Health. Committee for an Independent Great Britain."

1992! Willis's depictions of the ways that people respond to a pandemic are almost troublingly astute. Almost like time travel... or almost as if fiction is written as a reflection of the real world or something. But time travel is more likely. Toilet paper (excuse me, lavatory paper) is mentioned 18 times.

Running parallel to the present day disease story is that of Kivrin in the past, coping with plague. This emerges in a slightly frustrating way - everyone insists that she was sent to a period before the Bubonic Plague was doing its thing, so it should be fine. We spend a lot of time learning that historians are wrong about a lot of stuff, so it seemed likely that there was, in fact, plague. Turns out she was just sent later than intended. This is offered as a big twist, but has no real impact - it's obviously plague. Whether she is later or it is earlier has very little impact. 

Here's another example of awesome authorial choice:

"What are you doing?" Colin asked sleepily.

"Reading about the Black Death," he whispered. "Go back to sleep."

...Where it had gone, it had swept through the countryside like the Angel of Death, devastating entire villages, leaving no one alive to administer the last rites or bury the putrefying bodies. In one monastery, all but one of the monks had died.

The single survivor, John Clyn, had left a record: "And lest things which should be remembered perish with time and vanish from the memory of those who are to come after us," he had written, "I, seeing so many evils and the whole world, as it were, placed within the grasp of the Evil One, being myself as if among the dead, I, waiting for death, have put into writing all the things that I have witnessed."

He had written it all down, a true historian, and then died himself, all alone. His words trailed off, and below them, in another hand, someone had written, "Here, it seems, the author died."

Kivrin has a recorder embedded in her body, so that should she die, there will still be a record. Although she does end up surviving, that little bit above set the tone - that maybe, Kivrin, who repeats over and over again that she is an historian, might not make it out. 

Kivrin is given some wrenching scenes of gore, the toll that the plague takes on people and places. Her slowly crumbling faith in things getting better is painful to read - as she watches one person get sick, then another, and another, she thinks, "He'll make it, there were always survivors. She'll pull through." And one by one, the whole town dies off, and part of Kivrin with them.

This review is already too long - lots of things about this book were good!

But before wrapping up, it's time to talk about the hero, the legend, William Gaddson.

"I've just thought who you remind me of," Mary said, setting down her plate and a napkin. "William Gaddson's mother."
That was a truly unfair remark. William Gaddson was one of his first-year students. His mother had been up six times this term, the first time to bring William a pair of earmuffs.
"He catches a chill if he doesn't wear them," she had told Dunworthy. "Willy's always been susceptible to chill, and now he's so far away from home and all. His tutor isn't taking proper care of him, even though I've spoken to him repeatedly."

Just a poor nerd with an over-protective mother. Except that is not his one defining characteristic. William Gaddson is, to put the finest of points on it, a total slut. That's his deal. And it's great. Many stories need a "fixer" of some kind, someone who can get other characters what they need. Sometimes it's an information broker, or a mob informant, or a computer hacker. William Gaddson is the guy who knows a guy - except that his network is just the women that he's sleeping with. You need a nurse? Sure. Tech? Of course. Someone to alter records? William's got it covered. His price? Dunworthy offers to keep William's overbearing mother out of the way. The first time this happens feels cheap - "How convenient, William's girlfriend just happens to be useful." By the fourth time someone pops up who happens to be "William's friend" it's hilarious.

"He's a friend of mine," she said, flushing such a bright pink he could see it through her imperm mask.

"You're a friend of his?" Dunworthy said, wondering if she would blush like the blonde student nurse.

"Don't tell me, she's a friend of William's," Dunworthy said, looking after her.

"I know a student who might be able to rig it, though. I've got her number in my rooms." He left, holding hands with the blonde.

"The nurse just came on duty, but you needn't worry about her either. She's in the linen room with William Gaddson." 

"William's taken her into the linen room."

"Who, the nurse?" Dunworthy asked, still groggy. "Why is she on duty?"

"Not the nurse. The sister. William's keeping her in there till we're gone."

"You wouldn't know if William has any other girlfriends, would you?"

"No," Dunworthy said.

"I'll put William on it," he said.  

Do you think you could resist William Gaddson, Stranger?
And don't forget to read a book!