Doomsday Book

"I love Connie Willis’s world-building around time travel. I think some of her most famous books are time travel novels. Doomsday Book is certainly one of her best-known books, although she’s written a number of novels and won lots of awards for them. Like a number of the other authors we’ve talked about – Joanna Russ, Charles Yu, David Gerrold – she has a wicked sense of humour. Doomsday Book is not one of her comic novels, but it has a lot of funny bits. She’s able to balance a very tragic story of a historian going back in time to observe the Black Death – the 14th-century plague that knocked out almost 50% of the population. And she, the historian… I don’t know if this is a spoiler, if the book came out a billion years ago? Well, the historian is just intending to go back for a short period, just to witness – to see what history was really like. But she gets stuck. A classic time travel snafu: something goes wrong when she comes through the portal and she’s trapped in the Middle Ages for months. She has to figure out how to live. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever be rescued. So she integrates herself into the life of a small village. She’s taken in by a family and comes to really love them. As do we, as readers. The thing that Connie Willis is great at – she’s like Charles Dickens – is evoking weird, eccentric lovable characters. By the time you’re halfway through this novel, you’re like: ‘I love all these people. All I want to do is read romance books about the people in this village.’ And that’s when she starts killing them with the plague. It’s a great work – of historical fiction , almost. It really forcefully makes you understand what it’s like to live through a really deadly pandemic , which could literally kill an entire village. You know, we’re in a pandemic right now, so it might be an interesting book for people to pick up, just to make you feel a little better about living through a pandemic that’s killing a very tiny percentage of the population. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I love the conceit that time travel has been invented, but the only people who care about it are historians. It kind of reminds me of a time travel novella which I love by Kelly Robson, called Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach . That’s very similar in that there’s time travel – holy shit! – but the only people who care about it are bureaucrats who work in environmental remediation, because they want to go back to ancient periods of time to take environmental samples, to see what the environment was like before pollution. So it’s a nerdy thing that only dorky scientists do. That’s exactly what Connie Willis captures: for some reason, nobody really cares about time travel except for this group of academics. I definitely stole that idea for my novel, The Future of Another Timeline , where it’s basically academics puttering around in time, mostly just writing papers about it, which no one will read except their colleagues. We always imagine that if we had time travel, our whole world will be transformed, but from Connie Willis’s point of view it’s ‘yeah, a couple of people will write some dissertations.’ At the same time, like I said, it’s an incredibly moving book, and good for our time right now. I did do a lot of research. My characters are from a little bit in the future, 2022. So, present day, basically, and they go back to the 1990s, which I lived through. So it wasn’t hard for me to recreate that. But then they go back to the 1890s, then back to 2000 years ago – classical antiquity. Then they go about half a billion years back, to the Ordovician period, long before there was life on land. Some of those periods I had written about before as a journalist. The Ordovician is one of my favourite geological periods; it was when life diversified the most, and spread across the oceans. Also, there was a giant supercontinent in the southern hemisphere, which is pretty rad. It was just a cool, cool time in the planet’s history. So I already knew about that, although I did still interview a researcher about what you would eat if you went back to the Ordovician. I had thought they would eat trilobites, but he said no – trilobites didn’t have very much meat. He suggested that they eat giant sea snails. So that was fun. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter For the sections in the 1890s, where the characters go back to do political organising, they’re fighting against actual historical figures who were trying to destroy women’s rights. That took a lot of research, and as I was writing I kept doing more research and adding more stuff. Even when I was done, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, the editor-in-chief of Tor Books, read it and said: ‘I spent some time looking at train schedules from the 1890s and, actually, I think this is the train route they would have taken.’ So even the train routes are accurate, thanks to Patrick. There were a lot of very tiny historical details that I was really concerned about. I was interested in things like how much a person would get paid to be a seamstress in 1892, that sort of thing. I wanted the past to feel really lived in. There are a few cosmic moments in the book — they are traveling through time and people talk about goddesses occasionally. But as a writer I was most interested in the research. And of course, I made a lot of charts, planning how the timeline would change and what things would diverge. There’s a twist in the story, so I had to plot all that out. That was fun, but I will never do it again. Way too much plotting for me. In the novel I’m working on now, there’s no twist. There’s a giant volcano war, but no twist. I guess it would depend on what kind of time travel. If it was super safe, I could just go back and hang out and come back Bill and Ted- style, then yes, I definitely would. For sure."