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1-Page Summary of Doomsday Book
Overall Summary
In 1992, Connie Willis wrote a book called Doomsday Book. In it, the main character is a young historian who travels into the past to study the medieval period. She has to get inoculations for fourteenth-century diseases and her instructors are very careful when they do this because of how contagious these diseases were in that time period. The historians also have to figure out where she should be dropped off so she can be picked up later on by someone from her own time period. This is all done through calculations and other methods of figuring out where exactly she needs to go in order for everything to work properly. However, things don’t go according to plan and Kivrin Engle finds herself stuck back in the middle ages with no way home until someone comes along and saves her from danger—and this happens more than once during the story as well as some other interesting events that happen throughout it too!
Doomsday Book is set in the mid twenty-first century at Oxford University. The plot centers around time travel, which has been around since the year 2054. It’s used by historians to observe the past and gather information about it. As a result of this premise, history resists any attempts to change it through time travel because that would alter what happened in the past. Any attempt to do so will cause “slippage” (a slight shift in time), moving you to another point on Earth where there is no paradox or harm done to your surroundings.
The book opens with Kivrin Engle, a young historian who specializes in the medieval period. She asks her professor and the authorities that run the project to send her back to Oxford in 1320. There are concerns that this is too dangerous because it would be three hundred years earlier than anyone has ever been sent back through time travel.
A professor persuades the authorities to allow a trip back in time, skipping protocols that would ensure Kivrin’s safety. She is sent back to the fourteenth century, where she falls ill and has trouble remembering her purpose there. Badri Chaudhuri collapses from an epidemic that disrupts the university and eventually leads to a quarantine of the whole city. Kivrin wakes up at a manor house, surrounded by people who have been nursing her for several days. She doesn’t know where to go or when she can return home until she learns about a prearranged time for returning through a gateway.
The narrative switches between Kivrin’s experience and the flu epidemic in Oxford. She quickly learns that she needs to do things differently than what she planned, such as her clothes, dialect, maps and literacy.
Kivrin searches for the drop off point and then becomes integrated into society in a way that makes Dunworthy worried. Meanwhile, Professor Gilchrist tries to figure out if Kivrin is safe through time travel.
In the book, Kivrin is accidentally sent back to 1348 during the Black Death. She was supposed to go back to a different time period, which would have been safer for her. The professor and Badri realize this error and try to figure out how they can get her back safely. They come up with an idea that Professor Dunworthy will travel through time himself in order to rescue Kivrin from 1348 before she dies of the plague. Meanwhile, Kivrin watches as all the people she has come to know die of the Black Death disease throughout her stay at manor house in England during medieval times. She sits with Father Roche while he’s dying because he brought her into his home after finding her at the drop site when she came through time travel net on Christmas Eve. He tells Kivrin that he thought God had brought him a saint but then realizes it was just a girl who got lost on Christmas Eve due to being ill herself from traveling through time by mistake using incorrect code given by Badri so many years ago.
