On one hand, there’s a lot of truth in what you say. On the other hand, you miss what the fans of the book really like about it.
Connie Willis isn’t known for introducing wonderful speculative new science. That’s important to a lot of science fiction, but the fact is that a lot of fans don’t consider it to be the end-all and be-all of good science fiction. Indeed, Willis doesn’t even do a good job of projecting current technology. The plot of Doomsday Book falls apart if anybody in it has cell phones. It came out in 1992. There were already cell phones. Not putting them in a story set in 2054 makes no sense.
It’s true that the story was slow. It’s true that the organization of the time travel unit was bizarre. I was confused when you referred to “the hero.” Mr. Dunworthy isn’t really the hero of the story. Kivrin is the heroine. The book is about her travel to the past, and the stuff set in twentieth century Oxford is merely there to explain how she got there. Dunworthy is only a sort of secondary hero with some interesting parallels in his actions to Kivrin.
Doomsday Book is one of those novels that take a long time to get to the really interesting parts of the book. The interesting parts are those in the past in the last half of the book. That’s the heart of the book, and Kivrin is an interesting character there.
This is not to say that I consider Doomsday Book to be a great novel. I don’t. The points that you make are mostly correct. The fans of the book (and I’m not really one of them) don’t think that they are important though.
Bumping this old thread to say that I just read this pair of books and GRR.
That ended up being a weirdly depressing, frustrating as hell, and way too long read.
What I don’t get about the “drops” problem is why they wouldn’t go back into time and rent rooms in various locales for a set amount of time then have all of the people who need to go to that locale use a drop that is set up in that room. So everyone going to London between 1936 and 1946 goes through a drop in apartment 3 of 1230 W. Drop Place, Dropside. I know that wouldn’t have solved some of the issues these people were having, but the constant drop worry is just annoying as hell.
Oh, and no way I’d decide to spend the rest of my life hanging out in the mid 20th century.
I enjoyed them, although the frustration about the drops got to me, too. They seemed to know well enough in the future what was bombed and what wasn’t, so they could try to rent a place that was safe, but I’m not sure how much each person going back altered events just a little so that after a while what they knew in the future wasnt correct, if that makes sense.
It makes sense after reading the books, but the accepted wisdom in the future is that they weren’t changing the past, so they should have thought they could do it.
And it seems the theme was supposed to be that they were changing the past, but that they were changing the past in the exact ways that they had already changed the past, so the addresses would still be right because they had already changed the past.
I enjoy reading her books so much that I sort of skip over things like that unless they’re hitting me in the face.
This was supposed to be an edit to my previous post, not a new post, but even though it was only about five seconds later, and I clicked on edit, I got a new post.
