Wumpus, I love it. Doomsday Book: The Sequel!
Seriously, justplainDave, this book rocks. Any teacher who assigns it as reading must be ultimately cool.
A highly neglected Connie Willis book: Bellwether. Great, typically complex story about societal trends, chaos theory and a researcher’s campaign for grant money…
Agree about Bellwether.
Passages is excellent as well, and yes, To Say Nothing of the Dog is swell, esp if you have read the original Jerome novel.
However, Doomsday is still my favorite.
It’s well worth reading, and I agree that any teacher who assigns it is very cool.
On my first read, I was pretty sure this was a pretty non-heavy-handed redemption thematic bit. But it seems to me there’s some interesting subtext I can’t quite put my finger on. There’s little hints here and there–the same mannerisms, little habits of speech–that Mary’s, thematically, the same as Roche, simply acting differently only because it’s a different context. Something akin to how water takes on the shape of the vessel it’s poured into. It’s a human equivalent to how the retrovirus sent back from the paradox-source in 2530 triggered both the Plague itself by acting as a mutagenic co-factor, and served as an airborne cure to the ebola-like bioterror agent ripping the world apart in the book’s present-day.