To Say Nothing of the Dog
Hugo and Locus winner: the proof that a time-travel comedy of manners could stand beside the genre's tragedies — and the gateway through which countless non-SF readers entered the field.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
Doomsday Book
by Connie Willis · 1992 · Oxford Time Travel, book 1
What is Doomsday Book about?
Kivrin Engle, Oxford history undergraduate, is sent to 1320 for a fortnight's fieldwork — except a technician's fever garbles the fix, the present is locked down by an epidemic of its own, and Kivrin has arrived in 1348, the year the Black Death crosses England. While her tutor Dunworthy fights quarantine bureaucracy to retrieve her, Kivrin nurses a doomed village through its extinction, recording everything for an audience she no longer expects to see. Willis's twin epidemics — one medieval and merciless, one modern and farcical — converge on the book's unbearable centre: the bell tolled by hand, name by name.
Why it matters
Hugo and Nebula winner, regularly cited among the greatest time-travel novels ever written; its pandemic chapters acquired a second life in 2020 for obvious reasons.
Where does it sit in the series?
Willis's sequence of future Oxford historians field-tripping into the Black Death, the Blitz and Victorian England, where the past defends itself with chaos and coincidence.
In the Guide from Oxford Time Travel:
- Doomsday Book (1992)
- To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998)
- Blackout / All Clear (2010)
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