Classic Science Fiction Novels, March 2012

At Oxford University, historians have accessed time travel and in order to conduct field research they travel to the past as observers. Kivrin Engle, a medieval historian, travels back to 1320 against the better judgment of her instructor. The technician in her present soon dies and Kivrin is subsequently stranded in the past. Soon it is discovered that Kivrin has ended up in the wrong time. She has instead landed in the time of the Black Plague. As people around her succumb to the disease, people in present day Oxford are also dying from plague. In THE DOOMSDAY BOOK, Connie Willis gives us history, intensity, sorrow, the sense of humanity no matter what time one finds themselves in, and that despite our insistence on boxing eras into segments of time, we are not so neatly separated.