Naturally, when time travel is invented, it will be invented at Balliol College, Oxford, my beloved alma mater, and once it has been invented, it will be protected and controlled not by money or barbed wire but by a large pack of dizzy academics and a heavy haze of bureaucracy. This is of course how everything ought to be, and the first reason why I loved this book (and, indeed, the series it forms part of).

Doomsday Book is set in Oxford in the 2040s, where a little has changed, but not a lot, and time travel is administered by the history faculty, who send historians on controlled "drops" into the past, allowing for paradoxes and slippages and whatnot. Kivrin is young and very dedicated and wants to go the Middle Ages, the first historian to do so; her longsuffering tutor, Dunworthy, wishes she wouldn't, but knows he can't stop her. And so she goes, and Dunworthy stays behind, and the point of view alternates between them.

There is a disease in modern Oxford, beginning to creep; in the past, there is a great deal afoot, which is obscured and made mysterious very effectively by how Willis writes Kivrin's disorientation. The details of both places are beautifully written, beautifully realised, and the research on the past that must have been done is palpable. Even so, I mostly prefer Dunworthy's sections with their larger, more vibrant cast - Colin, the unfortunate small boy trapped in the Oxford quarantine is an unexpexted joy, and so is Dunworthy himself, a quiet epicentre of chaos.

(Note: a lot of people criticise this novel because so much of the plot could be resolved by the invention of the mobile phone, which had been invented when I came up to Oxford in 2005, so it is a great shame that Willis doesn't include it; but that said, her particular type of plotty politicking couldn't work otherwise (Passage and Lincoln's Dreams wouldn't work with mobile phones, either), and it's easy to suspend one's disbelief when the rest of the novel is so richly written.)

In the end, the novel comes across as a real achievement - it balances theme, plot and character beautifully, with some oddly effective mirroring between times (the absent Head of History, Basingame, for example, ends up playing much the same role in the twenty-first century as God does in the fourteenth), and it never does anything easy, or simplistic. Not as technicaly sophisticated as To Say Nothing of the Dog, set in the same universe, but deeper. ( )

too much holes, no technological details, tried too hard to write like a Brit. ( )

In the near future, humans have figured out how to time travel back to the past. This leads to historians visiting the past to learn about time periods but the technology is new enough so they have not travelled to "dangerous" periods yet. Kivrin, a young female historian, has decided to be the first person to travel back to England in the Middle Ages, a dangerous time. Mr. Dunsworthy is her mentor, but he is constantly afraid that bad things will happen to Kivrin, but he helps prepare her, nonetheless. On the appointed day, Kivrin is sent through time successfully, but she becomes sick on her arrival. Her technician becomes sick, as well, which leads to parallel stories in time for both Kivrin and Dunsworthy (who frantically tries to get Kivrin back).

For a Hugo and Nebula winner, I felt this book underperformed. In my opinion, the real genre of this book is historical fiction. Anything that had to do with the time travel, or "science" was glossed over with the barest of explanation. I still have no idea how the time machine worked, yet with any mention of a time "fix" it seem presumed that we knew what that meant. For another example, the author explains away the problems of time paradoxes by saying (paraphrasing) "Time does not allow time travellers to disrupt anything important in temporal history. If it is important, the person the machine won't allow the time fix and we can't send the person back". I'm really sorry, but that feels like a huge cop out. Don't worry about paradoxes! Time doesn't let them happen! Forget about it! As a Trekker since I was two years old, I have a massive affection to what is known as the "Temporal Prime Directive". And because of it, any book I read about time travel I expect some sort of rational explanation of how people make sure they don't accidentally kill the Lincoln's mother, or something-or-other. The fact that this book kept glossing over any "Sci-Fi", irritated me throughout the book.

However, anything that had to do with history and the Middle Ages was amazing. Willis obviously did a lot of research and is able to craft a tale where I felt I learned so much about the early 1300s while this part of the story was engaging. You really feel the muck, the dirt and the disease that was prevalent at this time. The relationships between an individual, their community and how they see their place with the world was thoroughly explored. The author even uses an ingenious way of making the reader learn how Middle English evolved and was spoken. You feel for Kivrin as she tries to fit into this world even though many of her assumptions (and the history texts) were wrong.

In the end, I only give could only give this book an average rating. There were a lot of plot devices and plot holes that should have been tied up at the end, but were not. There were too many instances of where I couldn't become engaged in the story because it asked to turn off the rational part of my brain (ie. Why would a newly-graduated student be allowed to time jump to a dangerous period alone? Wouldn't you send her to the 1960s first for some experience? Why do people go alone - that seems dumb?). The time travel explanations irked me and Willis didn't incorporate new and obvious technologies when she wrote this in the early 1990s such as the coming age of cellphones (everyone in the book has a land line in the mid 2050s). It seemed that the author put all her effort into researching history and none into researching time travel and science. ( )

One of the best books about time travel ever (along with other Connie Willies titles...)! ( )

Again I must say, this was one of the best books I've read this year. It was entertaining and enlightening and all those other things that make novels particularly impressive. It didn't mess with history for the sake of the narrative and it didn't try to create romance in a situation where romance would be seriously out of place.

Other than that it's hard to really describe this one. As I was reading other more negative reviews, I could see where most of their writers were coming from. If you are looking for a particularly fast paced novel, this probably isn't the book to pick up. It steadily works it's way towards the conclusion without cutting corners or forgetting to detail the mediaeval world that makes this book so engrossing. The modern storyline could become tedious, but I found the way Willis tied the two together engaging. Without Dunworthy's story, I'm afraid the message of historical repetition would have been lost on me. The future also let in the comic relief that was necessary to cut the high drama of the mediaeval sections for me.

I can see why this was given so many awards, it was well researched and put together and allowed me to recall the power of storytelling (something I believe every good novel should do). This is highly recommended to those who like science fiction, historical fiction, or stories of good and evil. ( )