#Doomsday book

[clonerightsagenda]

One of Doomsday Book's central themes is "why does God seem to abandon us in times of crisis" and one of the answers it posits is "maybe God is having IT problems"

[victusinveritas]

Domesday Book shit.

[higharollakockamamie]

The first thing I love about Doomsday Book by Connie Willis is my edition’s incredibly 90s cover.

The second thing I love about Doomsday Book is how it defies what I think of as the Kingdom Come Deliverance Assumption: the idea that women doing stuff was invented around 1989.

Doomsday Book is set in the 14th century yet is almost entirely woman-focused. The main tension, and it is seriously anxiety-inducing, is social: the time-traveling main character trying to locate her rendezvous point so she can get home. The family’s men are all off in the city trying to deal with some legal troubles. There’s a guy she should be able to get info about the rendezvous point from, but getting him alone to talk to without rousing anybody’s suspicions is not an easy task. There’s also things like, what if this little girl’s scraped knee gets infected? The MC has modern knowledge, but no stash of penicillin. Then things really go to hell.

It's an extremely sad book, but a really good one, especially if you have any interest in the time period or the contemporary language. There's also some stuff about a disease outbreak in the future period that is eerily prescient.

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[riley1cannon]

This is one of treasures, a postcard Connie Willis sent in reply to a fan letter I sent her, gushing about how much I loved this book. Makes a lovely bookmark.

Tagged @oraclecat

[kindercelery]

11th century phonebook came in today

[inlovewithquotes]

I wanted to come, and if I hadn't, they would have been all alone, and nobody would have ever known how frightened and brave and irreplaceable they were.

-Doomsday Book

[fandomibatrix]

So curious, but did anyone else feel really bad for the fully uddered wandering cow in Connie Willis's Doomsday Book? It gets mentioned awfully a lot!

(this meme could have originated from a time traveling historian's doodling or colin's)

[clonerightsagenda]

Reread Doomsday Book (oof) and realized after the reminders that the net won't let anything through that might change history, the reason Kirvin was allowed through with all her anachronisms and babbling in Modern English was because every single person she met was going to die anyway.

[victusinveritas]

[needle-rose]

I just finished listening to Doomsday Book and.

Ow.

Part of me wants to dive immediately into To Say Nothing Of The Dog, but knowing that’s apparently a romantic comedy versus a harrowing exploration of mortality and human connection makes me inclined to just. Sit with my feelings for a bit.

Seriously, ouch.

[herbofgraceandpeace]

Here’s the thing about Doomsday Book that I can’t stand. Kivrin is the dumbest person in the whole world, ever, in any century.

I’m supposed to believe that she was the “brightest and most resourceful” Oxford student? She can’t critical think for shit, if you’ll pardon my language. What do they teach them at these schools???

aside from her oddly specific areas of medical knowledge and ignorance (she has the symptoms of a bajillion diseases memorized, but she doesn’t know that being unconscious for several hours is totally abnormal and signifies serious brain damage?), she’s ridiculously ignorant about what the Middle Ages were actually like (and the author is at fault here for not knowing either).

but it’s really the critical thinking (or lack of it) that gets my goat. Her whole objective TWO-THIRDS OF THE WAY THROUGH THE BOOK has been to figure out where the drop is by getting Gawain to tell her. He has refused to do so BECAUSE SHE CANNOT BE TROUBLED RO INVENT A COMPELLING OR CONVINCING REASON FOR WANTING TO DO SO. She spends ages thinking of ways to get close enough to Gawain to ask but no time at all thinking of how to convince him to tell her!!!!

what’s worse, much of this could be solved if the author had simply thrown in the fact that Kivrin is a terrible liar, or has an aversion to lying, or even simply feels bad lying in this particular situation. Any of those would serve as an explanation for why she isn’t putting any thought into how to get what she wants from these people and keeps trying the same dumb thing over and over again. Like, girl, your life is at stake, can you be bothered to invest some energy into saving it???

also, it would be less annoying if she wasn’t supposed to be a particularly bright AND RESOURCEFUL AND PREPARED person!!! I do not know of anybody less resourceful!!! I don’t think I would mind so much if she tried to come up with solutions and failed . But she doesn’t even try most of the time, and the few times she does, she puts in the minimum effort to come up with a very silly excuse and is shocked when no one believes her.

it’s been really weird to dislike this book and it’s protagonists so much when I absolutely loved both in To Say Nothing of the Dog. Ned and Verity were far more resourceful and had more genuine reason to be befuddled by their circumstances!

SPOILERS BELOW

*john mulaney voice, “and now there’s bubonic plague again.”

But can Kivrin be bothered to think of a convincing lie to keep everyone away from the sick person? No, she just yells at them, ignoring the fact that from their perspective she lacks authority and expertise and even a sound mind.

Sigh

[nevinslibrary]

Weird & Wonderful Wednesday

Time travel book. Ouch. (That was my brain). But oh such a good ouch.

Kivrin is a student in 2048 who, to study the Middle Ages, is going to go back to the 14th Century. But, oops, she sorta lands in the past around the time of the bubonic plague. Oh, and add to that, there’s a pandemic going on in the ‘present’ as well.

The links between past and present were interesting. And, I really liked the characters, especially those in the Middle Ages. And, while I wondered how the fact that Kivrin is a woman would play out, and, I thought that was well done too. One warning is that it is a very long book again. (Almost 600 pages). But, other than that it was a really really fun read (even if it was a bit dark).

You may like this book If you Liked: In the Garden of Iden by Kage Baker, Eifelheim by Michael Flynn, or The Scribe of Siena by Melodie Winawer

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

[aldoodles]

Warm, thread, and safety as I play doomsday catchup

[pine-dragon]

Yeah we've got #doomsday2024 for the next couple weeks. No, nothing's wrong, we do this annually. There's just a special fandom holiday we decided to create and call it doomsday. It's nothing bad, in fact it's quite pleasant. It's just that this is a fandom for a book series which contains 0 normal names for things.