The Evolution of Science Fiction discussion

This is to discuss one of Feburary 2018's group reads, Doomsday Book by Connie Willis.

I read this one with a different bookclub at the end of last year. I'm interested to see what everyone thinks.

Started it today. I saw some reviews, serious complaints about it being very boring. On the other hand high ratings. We'll see.

I've read half a dozen of Connie Willis's books. I think Doomsday Book is her best. It tends to be a bit more somber than her other works. The dysfunction of the team of time traveling Oxford historians under professor Dunsworthy is there but it's not nearly as silly as in the other works. We come to identify with Kivrin, the protagonist, and fret for her increasingly dire situation.

It reads like Young Adult.

Leo wrote: "It reads like Young Adult."

It didn't strike me that way. Granted it meets some of the general criteria for YA: the protagonist is young - a university student, and there's no sex nor vulgar language that I recall.

This book struck me as both a historical novel and a commentary on human progress, all wrapped up in sci fi. Yeah it slowed down somewhat in middle part of the book, but there was a good deal of humor, and a lot was being set up for the ending. Then it turned pretty somber and serious in the last third. I think its a worthy read.

Buck wrote: "Leo wrote: "It reads like Young Adult."

It didn't strike me that way. Granted it meets some of the general criteria for YA: the protagonist is young - a university student, and there's no sex nor ..."
That, and I think some of the characters are behaving immature. Like it's written for children.
Anyway, it's not an unpleasant read so far (25%).

I'm right now in the middle of the book, and while it is a decent read, I cannot see how it managed to get both Hugo and Nebula, as a few books did.
Face masks against viruses? Almost soap-opera inability to get what went wrong with the fix? Historians who don't know very well the period they study?

Oleksandr wrote: "Almost soap-opera inability to get what went wrong with the fix?"

The is typical of Willis's Oxford time-travel books. The folks running the show are inept.

Oleksandr wrote: "... Historians who don't know very well the period they study ?..."

I read this more than 10 years ago, so I don't remember as much as I should, but I think the traveller had studied the period pretty well. The point was that not all the information she had available was accurate. Also, she showed-up 30 years later than she'd planned. The fact that she had trouble with the language is meant to point out that we don't know as much as we think we do about how people actually spoke at that time. Certainly the pronunciation could be quite different from what she'd been taught.

I'm not going to re-read this one right now. But I remember liking it enough that I loaned it to a friend and also went on to read To Say Nothing of the Dog (which I did not like much). To say nothing.... is a much more lighthearted story containing more of the stuff that Willis, but not me, thinks is funny. Doomsday has a lot of very serious stuff that balances-out the humor.

Buck: "typical of Willis's Oxford time-travel books. The folks running the show are inept"

... and the researchers sent to the field aren't much less inept (more 'ept'?) than the people back in the office.

I remember that the descriptions of inter-department office politics and budget issues felt very real to me, and I have worked in scientific research as a doctoral student and post-doc. But it does get repetitive after reading several of her books.

My favorite still remains Bellwether, which I found very funny. It has some more of that academic office politics humor, plus musings about how fads come and go and why some catch on and others don't.

Ed wrote: "My favorite still remains Bellwether, which I found very funny. It has some more of that academic office politics humor, plus musings about how fads come and go and why some catch on and others don't."

I read Bellwether a long time ago. I don't remember it much except that everything everybody did was affected by the red tape they had to go through to do it.

Something that drove me crazy in the Oxford time travel books is the way that someone needs information so he asks a question and it is ignored, so he just goes away. He doesn't persevere in getting the answer he needs. It is a running theme in Willis's books.

Ed wrote: " I think the traveller had studied the period pretty well."
Not exactly, she knew it well according to the novel. At the same time it is said in the book that the Black Death was called a blue sickness and she hears the term at the start of her contact with contemps but doesn't pay in any attention - if she was as good as it was suggested it is one slippage of many. I perfectly understand and agree with the point that it can be that what we know about that period is not what actually happened or at least we lost a lot of info. What irked me was that she barged with modern attitude to the past and she risks creating time paradoxes without any scruples.
p.s. thanks for writing that she was in 1348 before it was revealed in the book :D you killed the intrigue

Hopefully nothing in my comment is spoilery - I’ve tried to stay away from anything plot-related. I just finished the book and enjoyed it very much, although for the middle 200-ish pages it got so. Darn. Frustrating. I couldn’t believe how thick the characters were, even the brilliant ones like Mary, and how long it took them to figure out what had gone wrong. As someone else mentioned, like a soap opera. (How many chapters ended with Badri collapsing mid-sentence? Seriously.) I honestly think Willis could have cut a couple hundred pages, mainly by shortening a lot of the back-and-forth in the modern era with Dunworthy puttering around and being an angry curmudgeon to everyone, including innocent people trying to help him.

What I loved most about the book was how Willis humanizes the historical characters. She manages to show that despite our modern arrogance (see Kivrin’s periodic notes on how things supposedly were “back in the Middle Ages”, despite the evidence before her eyes, to say nothing of the borderline criminal antics of Gilchrist), humans are much the same as we’ve always been. In times of crisis we panic, we make the same awful mistakes over and over again, and ultimately we cling to each other.

Bonus points for the unintelligible Middle English, I got a huge kick out of that. Poor Latimer will be so disappointed. Also, random, but I can see the YA comment, this book is totally something I’d have read (had I been aware of it at that age). I don’t see that as a negative. It does seem more mature to me than a lot of YA I’ve come across these days, more along the lines of The Golden Compass in its tone.

I started this book with high hopes. I'm 20% in, and so far it's mostly phone calls and flu symptoms. Sometimes a character makes a pot of tea.

At least the characters are pleasant company and the prose is light. If Gene Wolfe wrote 100 pages of phone calls and tea drinking it would kill me dead. I'm pushing through to discover what all the hype is about.

At 2/3 and the contemporary part still is about flu and phonecalls and grown ups behaving like children. I do like the part that plays in the middle ages though. It's almost like reading two different books.

Leo wrote: "At 2/3 and the contemporary part still is about flu and phonecalls and grown ups behaving like children. I do like the part that plays in the middle ages though. It's almost like reading two differ..."

Supposedly, Michael Crichton is a middle-brow populist and Connie Willis is a high-brow master. I'm not feeling that so far. Has anyone else here read Crichton's Timeline?

Leo wrote: " I do like the part that plays in the middle ages though. It's almost like reading two differ..."

I agree that the medieval part reads better. However, if I'd like to know more about the period I'd read something akin to A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

The contemporary part is typical of Willis's Oxford time travel books. It seemed to me that there is less of it in Doomsday Book; or maybe it's just that the historical part is so serious.

Phil wrote: "Supposedly, Michael Crichton is a middle-brow populist and Connie Willis is a high-brow master. I'm not feeling that so far. Has anyone else here read Crichton's Timeline?"

I have. I didn't like it much, actually thought it was one of his worst, but I see the similarities.

I came across the book Fire Watch containing the story Fire Watch in a little free library a few days ago, so I decided to re-read that story. It is the first of the "Oxford Time-Travel" stories. It was written about 10 years before "Doomsday Book", yet it already includes the characters Kivrin and Dunsworthy and others.

Coincidentally, I discovered a local reading group that was reading "Doomsday Book" so I went and discussed it with them.

In the short story, Kivrin has already come back from her travels to the past. Yet she will tell very little to Bartholomew, who is about to go on his travel, about what happened.

There are quite a few similarities between this story and the novel "Doomsday Book".

In both, they end-up in a place/time they were not intending to go to because of mistakes by the Oxford folks. Kivrin had planned to go to England in 1320 but ends-up in 1348. Bartholomew had intended to go to 1st century to travel with Saint Paul, but instead goes to Saint Paul's cathedral in 1940s. (Some inept Oxford guy, or his computer, added the "s"!)

In both they have difficulty with the language. Obviously Old English is more difficult, but 1940s slang wasn't easy either.

In both the traveler is delirious for a while. In Doomsday book it is because she is sick. In Fire Watch it is because he gets no sleep.

In both they have many misunderstandings about what is happening around them.

One odd difference in detail: in Fire Watch it is said that Kivrin was trying to go to 1400, not 1320, though in both stories she actually went to 1348.

Interesting details: in the future Oxford there are apparently no cats. Bartholomew was fascinated by seeing one. In this time-line, communists blew-up Saint Paul's cathedral in 2006. Glad that didn't happen! I guess I'm also happy we still have cats.

The short story is only about 40 pages in the edition I have, so you may want to give it a try. It is certainly shorter than her recent Blackout and All Clear which covers time travel to the same period.

Since I’m seeing mention of Michael Crichton, I figured I’d bring up something that’s been bugging me and pose a question. In Doomsday Book there’s a lot of talk around science-y things, but I never really got the same sense of expertise and “realism” that I always felt in Crichton’s books, or other sci-fi authors, for that matter. Maybe that was part of what I found so obnoxious about the modern-day sections of the book (besides the largely distasteful characters and the too thinly spread plot). The net, for example: I don’t have any idea how it actually works, beyond some vague references to string theory and (forgive me) “wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey” things.

I guess what I’m getting at is, what designates this novel as sci-fi as opposed to some other genre, e.g. historical fiction (which seems the more obvious choice)? I’m not complaining as I would not have come across the book had this group not elected to read it. This is a serious question from someone who truly has no idea where and how these lines are drawn. :)

Also, thanks to those who have mentioned related reading, plenty of good ideas for my next read.

Erin wrote: "Since I’m seeing mention of Michael Crichton, I figured I’d bring up something that’s been bugging me and pose a question. In Doomsday Book there’s a lot of talk around science-y things, but I neve..."

I read Crichton's Timeline about 20 years ago. I remember liking it. As far as the science goes, he had some explanation involving subatomic particles, but it didn't really make any more sense than Willis'.

The other scientific difference between the books is that I remember thinking a bunch of Americans had way too easy a time blending into medieval England. The language stuck out particularly- in Crichton's book, they just have to remember not to use modern vocabulary. I think Willis' treatment is much more realistic, not only of the 700 year language gap, but also of the limits of our modern knowledge of what it was really like back then.

I’m fine with no explanation about how time travel works, because I highly doubt the possibility of any backward time travel. What I was not fine with, is that it isn’t clear are time paradoxes possible or not? One way is All You Zombies where everything is predetermined, including the travel and another is A Sound of Thunder, where a small change leads to a fully different time path. It is hinted that this time travel is closer to the second, but in this case Kivrin’s attempt to run away is extremely dangerous – she is likely a carrier of both plague and flu – and if she succeeded then may be there were no humans in future any more – this I call an extreme unprofessionalism of time travelers.

I had forgotten that I had read Chrichton's Timeline; and that I had written a quickie review of it; and that I had compared it to Doomsday Book.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

It’s funny that of all the Crichton books, Timeline is one of the few I never made time to read. Phil, per your comment, the treatment of time travel “science” in that book (particularly Americans just dropping into medieval England) does sound rather silly. In Doomsday, I still would have liked some sense - any sense - of what exactly was going on technologically and physically speaking, but with time travel I guess we are already suspending disbelief so much that less specific is probably better.

And Oleksandr, point well taken about the unprofessionalism of the scientists. After the talk early on in the book about how the plague may have decimated medieval Europe in part because the population was weakened by a flu epidemic, that was honestly all I could think of as Kivrin, Colin, and Dunworthy were waiting for the net to reopen. Yikes.

Erin wrote: "what designates this novel as sci-fi as opposed to some other genre, e.g. historical fiction (which seems the more obvious choice)?..."

It can be both!

As for why I'd call it SF rather than Fantasy: the story suggests that there is a scientific explanation for the time travel. It doesn't have to be truly explained. Just stating that there is a scientific explanation makes it SF. If she'd gone back in time because a magical fairy sent her there, then it would be fantasy.

Currently 1900 users here tag it as SF, 1000 as historical fiction, and 500 shelve it as fantasy. Probably most of those are applying more than one tag.

Ed wrote: "If she'd gone back in time because a magical fairy sent her there, then it would be fantasy."
I'd say that it can still be s SF if this fairy is an alien :) or more seriously I disagree that fantasy defined by presence of some creatures and not others.

Oleksandr wrote: "I disagree that fantasy defined by presence of some creatures and not others...."

That isn't what I meant. An SF story could contain a fairy, though I don't know any examples.

I was trying to say that I personally call this story SF because the things that happen in it are justified by reference to science. If the time travel was justified by reference to fairy magic, I probably wouldn't call it SF, unless there was some other science involved. (In this case, maybe epidemiology counts.)

And I also count this as historical fiction.

Everyone will classify stories differently, and that is OK with me!

Ed wrote: "That isn't what I meant. An SF story could contain a fairy, though I don't know any examples..."

The Warlock in Spite of Himself springs to mind.

In the end, I did like the book. Got used to the contemporary parts which I did not care much for and could have been shorter. But it did not keep me from reading on. The plague was impressive.

Leo wrote: "In the end, I did like the book. Got used to the contemporary parts which I did not care much for and could have been shorter. But it did not keep me from reading on. The plague was impressive."

Pretty much the same way I feel about it.

Kind of amazing to think about the scope of the black plague in comparison to the flu bug we're experiencing today.

Oleksandr wrote: "What I was not fine with, is that it isn’t clear are time paradoxes possible or not?"

It seemed pretty clear that they are not. "Slippages" occur because the time barrier will not allow you to travel to a point that would cause a paradox.

Did anyone enjoy the humor of the Oxford sections?

Phil wrote: "Oleksandr wrote: "What I was not fine with, is that it isn’t clear are time paradoxes possible or not?"

It seemed pretty clear that they are not."

If so - why bother to look authentic, to prevent spreading viruses from the future, to hide recording devices, etc? If history cannot be changed you can go with all cool 2054 stuff because you know it wasn't noted in history.

Here's my negative review:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Oleksandr wrote: "If so - why bother to look authentic, to prevent spreading viruses from the future, to hide recording devices, etc? If history cannot be changed you can go with all cool 2054 stuff because you know it wasn't noted in history."

That's a really good question, and Willis does not answer it. If I was going to make something up, I would say that the timestream is not omniscient, and only prevents immediate paradoxes like introduced viruses, but not more indirect paradoxes like, for example, leaving a battery lying around for someone to find.

Phil wrote: "Did anyone enjoy the humor of the Oxford sections?"

I didn't find it particularly humorous and indeed it became annoying. For me, this is the great flaw in Willis's books. I found it an irritation that a character seeks information, asks a question, it is deflected, and the character does not pursue it. This trope is in all her books.

As for humor, it was ok, but from recent time travel books with academia jokes I prefer The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson

Buck wrote: "Phil wrote: "Did anyone enjoy the humor of the Oxford sections?"

I didn't find it particularly humorous and indeed it became annoying. For me, this is the great flaw in Willis's books. I found it ..."

In the beginning I found it irritating. Then I started imagining the Oxford folks as the cast of Monty Python and it was a little better.

Phil wrote: "Oleksandr wrote: "If so - why bother to look authentic, to prevent spreading viruses from the future, to hide recording devices, etc?..."

Yep, that is a very interesting question! Time (in her version) somehow resists allow you to change anything significant. It doesn't completely make sense. But time travel stories always require you to suspend disbelief. If she or anyone else really knew how time travel works, they probably wouldn't be writing fiction.

Phil wrote: "Did anyone enjoy the humor of the Oxford sections?"

Yes, somewhat, but they became tiresome. And as already pointed out, the characters are idiots, which is true in many of her stories. The sections in the past were the most engaging.