Doomsday Book
- 1993 Hugo
- 1993 Nebula
- by Connie Willis
- Novel
- Science Fiction
- Adults
- Definite Time Travel
- English
- Doomsday Book by Connie Willis (Bantam Spectra, July 1992).
We may never know just how young Kivrin Engle wrangled her academic advisor and the powers-that-be at the University of Oxford into sending her to previously off-limits, 14th-century England, but her timing was not ideal given that she’dd just been exposed to a recently re-emerged influenza virus. Oh, and the inexperience tech who also got hit with the virus with the virus after the drop may have sent Kivrin to the wrong year.
—Ruthie Mariner
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 Miss 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.
Tags
(12)
- Time Periods
- Middle Ages (AD 476 to 1454): destination time period, 14th century
- Circa AD 2000 to 2099: starting time period, 2054–55
- Timeline Models
- Unexplained Timeline Model: It’s unclear whether the net prevents new timelines altogether.
- Themes
- Chronology Protection Conjecture: The net either rejects any travel that could cause a paradox or injects a time slippage large enough to avoid the paradox.
- Language Difficulties: Initially, Kivrin’s translater had problems.
- Synchronized Time
- Time Corps
- Time Historians
- Time Travel Sickness, Injuries, and Mixed-Up Body Parts: Initially, Kivrin thinks her influenza symptoms are nothing more than “time lag.”
- Real-World Tags
- Groupings
Variants
(1)
- Doomsday Book by Connie Willis (Bantam Spectra, July 1992).