Doomsday Book

Doomsday Book was written by Connie Willis and published in 1992. It won a Hugo Award and a Nebula Award.  (Spoiler Alert.)  Part Time Machine and part Canterbury Tales, it's a book about time travel back to the middle ages, set 50 years or so from now.  It's soft on the sci-fi and hard on the historical reconstruction, which, in this case, is o.k.  This book is kinda like that Led Zeppelin song "Stairway to Heaven."  It meanders along nice and pretty, all strings and woodwinds...very English, with pubs, and tea...la de da... until page 386;  then the John Bonham drums kick in (Book Three), and you are on a hellish 200 page gallop as Kivrin the time traveling historian takes on the black plague with a bottle of wine and a pocket knife.  There is some great writing about the role of the church in medieval times, and Kivrin is the most heroic female in literature;  mostly it's pure doom of the blackest and grimmest and most heartbreaking kind.  It's well written for sure; I love the fact that she can incorporate three languages (2 dead) and a malfunctioning translator and her work never loses it's clarity, and Willis deserves the awards for crafting the most down to earth (6 ft. under) science-fiction ever made.  There is nothing outlandish about it, no big ideas or wild conceits to groove on (well, besides time travel), just the cold, hard truth of inescapable death, death, death: the horror, the horror...

As she's being crushed by the pile up of diseased corpses, Kirvin muses,  "Perhaps that's what's wrong with our time, Mr. Dunworthy, it was founded by Maisry and the bishop's envoy and Sir Bloet.  And all the people who stayed and tried to help, like Roche, caught the plague and died."

She's basically saying that evolution sometimes doesn't go to the worthy, who stand and fight and comfort and divide the word of truth (to be a rock, and not to roll...), but to the swift who race away from responsibility and basic human decency.  And Kirvin, she's doing what needs to be done as she approached sainthood...

     "For one human being to love another,
      that is the ultimate test and proof,
      for which all other work is but preparation."
                            -Rainer Maria Rilke

After reading this, I will never hear church bells in the same way again, well because bells were a way of communicating news before the web.

Is Willis a great writer, or a great manipulator, or are they the same thing?  Death is the topic here, make no mistake, and it is a serious business with Mrs. Willis.  She does not pander, or insult your intelligence about anything.  She makes you care about children that existed 650 years ago in a work of fiction!  I suppose that's why this is an uncomfortable book; because it's so true.  Yes, these people did exist, or if not these particular fictional ones, then people just like them, in the same bind, with the same suffering, in the same boat, with the same shared history....Willis makes you want to own them, and own up to our history....it's amazing, really.  This is a very emotional science fiction book that would probably appeal to those not necessarily enticed by standard science fiction tropes.

I suppose one could take this opportunity to discuss things like AIDS, or Haiti, or any number of contemporary plagues (bats, bees, birds falling out of the sky...) but I can't wait to get back to the doom and gloom of future dystopias...where there's still a fighting chance...