by Connie Willis

isbn: 0553562738
subject: Fiction and Literature, SF
finished: 8/16/1998

Although I had some problems with this book, I ended up enjoying it. It's about Kivrin, a history undergraduate sent on an expedition to the middle ages. Nearly everything possible goes wrong with the trip, and she soon faces the strong possibility of being stranded in the middle of the black plague. The good parts of Doomsday Book take place in medieval England; Kivrin is taken in by a family that contains a number of interesting characters, who she becomes increasingly involved with during her struggle to find the "drop" from where she can return to the future. The descriptions of medieval life are worth reading -- I assume that Willis did her homework, although I probably wouldn't be able to tell if she hadn't. The parts of the book that I didn't like are set in mid 21st century England; the future world is poorly fleshed out and the characters are uninteresting. These scenes are not badly written, but many of them just don't contribute much to either plot or character development. Also, I had problems with Willis's treatment of time travel -- the past is treated just like any other place that one would travel to, and time is assumed to pass in parallel in both the present and past. For example, a few hours after Kivrin leaves one of the characters wanders what she is doing, now that she has been in the past for a few hours. Although this sort of treatment may be handy for narrative purposes, it seems silly to ignore the essential differences between space and time travel. So I thought this was a good book, but not of the quality that I'd expect of a Hugo and Nebula award winner.