Doomsday Book (SF) - Connie Willis ***

Having enjoyed Connie Willis's collection of award winning stories, Time is the Fire, I thought I'd follow up with her 1992 novel (winner of both SF's major book awards). To be honest, I struggled with this one.

In my review of Time is the Fire I suggested a couple of the stories were unnecessary long - this doubly applies to Doomsday Book. It is so slow, there's a feeling it's going to come to an absolute stop any time soon. I know the topic is time travel, but this made time go very slowly indeed. Just one example - a character bursts into a pub with an important piece of information and collapses. We then get what feels like 100 pages of him not quite telling us what he wanted to say. In his excellent introduction (the best bit of the book) Adam Roberts says 'Doomsday Book is a long novel, and it starts slowly; but its length is not egregious.' Well, no, I suppose it's not - but it is distinctly painful.

I ought to mention that the underlying concept is excellent. The book is set in the 2050s where there are political shenanigans between different parts of the Oxford University history department. The goodies are 20th century historians, who are thoughtful and careful - contrasted with the careless medieval historians who send the heroine Kivrin back to the fourteenth century unprepared for what she will meet. The book then alternates between the 2050s and Kivrin's experiences.

Particular resonant now are the 'present day' scenes, which feature Oxford locking down after a virus outbreak - a process that has become standard since an earlier pandemic. Meanwhile, as Roberts points out, while Willis doesn't play with the mind-bending aspects of time travel (and gets a fair number of historical details wrong), she nonetheless does an excellent job of exposing us with Kivrin to the less than jolly aspects of life and death in the thirteenth century. It's just done at a glacial pace.

One strange aspect is Willis's portrayal of 2050s Oxford. Bizarrely, someone is bought a Christmas present of a 'muffler' - a word that was already antiquated when the novel came out. In fact, Willis's 2050s social setting feels far more like the 1930s than 60 years ahead of when it was written. Almost everyone is very formal and stiff. The dialogue and general social attitudes could come straight out of, say, C. S. Lewis's 1938 Out of the Silent Planet. This just feels very odd.

All in all, while the concept was great, I couldn't get on with the way this book was written - it was a disappointment.

Paperback:

Kindle:
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Comments

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

The New Lunar Society - David Mindell *****

David Mindell's take on learning lessons for the present from the eighteenth century Lunar Society could easily have been a dull academic tome, but instead it was a delight to read. Mindell splits the book into a series of short essay-like chapters which includes details of the characters involved in and impact of the Lunar Society, which effectively kick-started the Industrial Revolution, interwoven with an analysis of the decline of industry in modern twentieth and twenty-first century America, plus the potential for taking a Lunar Society approach to revitalise industry for the future. We see how a group of men (they were all men back then) based in the English Midlands (though with a strong Scottish contingent) brought together science, engineering and artisan skills in a way that made the Industrial Revolution and its (eventual) impact on improving the lot of the masses possible. Interlaced with this, Mindell shows us how 'industrial' has become something of a dirty wo...

Search This Blog