Review: Doomsday Book (repost from 2016 on GoodReads)

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I found out about this book when GoodReads recommended it after I added To Say Nothing of the Dog. I hadn’t realized it was part of a series. Doomsday Book is the first book in Connie Willis’s Oxford Time Travel series, which is about historians at a near-future version of Oxford University who use time travel as part of their research. It won both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards for Best Novel in 1992.

This novel is a drama with some moments of comic relief, while To Say Nothing of the Dog is a comedy with some dramatic moments. Kivrin, an Oxford student studying medieval history, prepares to visit the fourteenth century. She is supposed to be sent to the year 1320 — but something goes wrong. She ends up in 1348 instead, shortly before Christmas…. which happens to be right before the Black Death arrives in England. Back in modern times, a dangerous strain of flu hits Oxford University. As the faculty tries to figure out what went wrong with Kivrin’s assignment and how to rescue her, they must address a crisis in their own time as well.

The only real complaint I have is about the modern-day section. This was written in 1992, so I can’t really blame Willis for not predicting that there would be cell phones in her near-future setting, but there were definitely answering machines in major institutions in 1992, and there aren’t any here. It’s hard to ignore because much of the plot revolves around telephone communication. But that's a minor thing, and it's an excellent book otherwise.

"Mr Dunworthy had told her it wouldn’t be anything like she imagined, and he was right, of course. But not about this mass. She had imagined it just like this, the stone floor and the murmured Kyrie, the smells of incense and tallow and cold."

"They’ve all died, she thought, and couldn’t make herself believe it. They’ve all been dead over seven hundred years."

"Are these the last days, the end of the world that God’s apostles have foretold?"
Yes, Kivrin thought. "No," she said. "No. It’s only a bad time. A terrible time, but not everyone will die. And there will be wonderful times after this. The Renaissance and class reforms and music. Wonderful times. There will be new medicines, and people won’t have to die from this or smallpox or pneumonia. And everyone will have enough to eat, and their houses will be warm even in the winter." She thought of Oxford, decorated for Christmas, the streets and shops lit. "There will be lights everywhere, and bells that you don’t have to ring."

"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."

"Most of it was terrible," she said softly, "but there were some wonderful things."

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Review: The Fifth Season

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall; Death is the fifth, and master of all”

Synopsis from GoodReads: Three terrible things happen in a single day. Essun, a woman living an ordinary life in a small town, comes home to find that her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter. Meanwhile, mighty Sanze -- the world-spanning empire whose innovations have been civilization's bedrock for a thousand years -- collapses as most of its citizens are murdered to serve a madman's vengeance. And worst of all, across the heart of the vast continent known as the Stillness, a great red rift has been torn into the heart of the earth, spewing ash enough to darken the sky for years. Or centuries.

The book opens with the beginning of the worst Fifth Season in recorded history. The government maintains the Fulcrum, an army of enslaved orogenes with the ability to control energy, particularly that of the ground and temperature. Their abilities give them power geological activity and temperature so that they can both cause and prevent earthquakes.

The Fifth Season is the first book in the Broken Earth Trilogy. I think it could fit into either science fiction or fantasy; it is hard to tell because it leans so heavily on Clarke's Third Law. 

The Fifth Season is darker than most books I read. I suspect the question of whether it has a pessimistic worldview doesn't make much sense outside the context of the trilogy as a whole, so I will come back to that when I finish rereading The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky.

The first book is technically mostly setup when you look at it in relation to the other books, but

it doesn't feel that way! I think this is something to do with how the book does so much of its worldbuilding through characterization & plot. In this book, all those things go together perfectly, while the other books rely more on exposition.

There are three points of view: the young girl Damaya, in training as an orogene; the young woman Syenite; and the grieving mother Essun. Essun's perspective is given in second person and present tense; there is a plot-related reason for that, but Jemisin doesn't reveal it in the first book. I loved the writing! Essun's perspective felt odd at first but I got used to it. Here are some of my favorite quotes:

- “Yumenes is not unique because of its size. There are many large cities in this part of the world, chain-linked along the equator like a continental girdle. Elsewhere in the world villages rarely grow into towns, and towns rarely become cities, because all such polities are hard to keep alive when the earth keeps trying to eat them… but Yumenes has been stable for most of its twenty-seven centuries.

Yumenes is unique because here alone have human beings dared to build not for safety, not for comfort, not even for beauty, but for bravery. The city’s walls are a masterwork of delicate mosaics and embossing detailing its people’s long and brutal history. The clumping masses of its buildings are punctuated by great high towers like fingers of stone, hand-wrought lanterns powered by the modern marvel of hydroelectricity, delicately arching bridges woven of glass and audacity, and architectural structures called balconies that are so simple, yet so breathtakingly foolish, that no one has ever built them before in written history. (But much of history is unwritten. Remember this.)”

- “This is what you must remember: the ending of one story is just the beginning of another. This has happened before, after all. People die. old orders pass. New societies are born. When we say the world has ended, it's usually a lie, because the planet is just fine. But this is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. For the last time.”

- “Friends do not exist. The Fulcrum is not a school. Grits are not children. Orogenes are not people. Weapons have no need of friends.”

Review: The Sandman Vol. 2: The Doll's House (repost from 2016)

"We don't have a clue what's really going down, we just kid ourselves that we're in control of our lives while a paper's thickness away things that would drive us mad if we thought about them for too long play with us, and move us around from room to room, and put us away at night when they're tired, or bored."

I decided to start rereading Sandman here, as I don’t really feel like reading vol. 1 again and this one stands alone pretty well. The first two volumes are more horror-centric than most of the later ones; after this, most of the stories are fantasy, with some occasional horror elements. It’s the kind of fantasy where, as one of the characters says, "the world’s about as solid and as reliable as a layer of scum on the top of a well of black water which goes down forever, and there are things in the depths that I don’t even want to think about." My favorite parts are the two short stories.

This volume opens with a prologue, "Tales in the Sand," that tells the story of Nada, last seen in Dream’s visit to Hell in vol. 1, and explains what happened between her and Dream. I don’t think it’s coincidence that the teller of this tale (in the frame story) is a man; it’s a nice contrast to the main arc, which is primarily a women’s story.

Dream observed in the previous volume that, although people don’t fear him the way they fear Death, he is actually more terrible than she is. This story is an example of that…

The main arc of this volume focuses on Rose Walker, granddaughter of Unity Kincaid, as she searches for her brother. Meanwhile, Dream searches for four missing inhabitants of his realm and keeps an eye on Rose, for his own reasons. I love the dream sequences in this volume; the unusual layout and lettering fits them well, and provide an effect you can’t get with text alone.

There is also another short story, "Men of Good Fortune" which tells the story of Hob Gadling, a man who refuses to die throughout different eras of history, starting in the year 1389. This is one of my favorite stories in Sandman. My favorite line is Hob’s admission that immortality hasn’t made him wiser: "I’ve learned from my mistakes, but I’ve had more time to commit more mistakes." If you pay attention to the fragments of conversations in the pub going on in different eras, you’ll notice that they cover the same topics repeatedly (taxes, complaints about the breakdown of law and order, disease, and almost the same punchline from a joke) just slightly reworded. I like the description of Lady Johanna: "Her kind walk amid the flotsam of lives they have sacrificed for their own purposes, till friendless and alone they needs must make the final sacrifice." There’s also an impressive bit of foreshadowing: In 1889, Dream tells Hob that he saw Lady Johanna again when she fulfilled a task for Dream. I remember that! But I didn’t remember any references to it this far in advance.

I was looking at the TV Tropes page for Sandman and came across something too good not to share here.

"There's one particularly unsettling implication in 'Men of Good Fortune' that isn't so much 'horrific' as 'incredibly depressing.' In the course of that story, we learn that Hob Gadling managed to get fabulously wealthy at two points in his life by getting involved in two historically important business ventures: the printing business in the 15th century, and the Atlantic slave trade in the 18th century. Note that he predicts that printing will never be a truly profitable business ('There'll never be a real demand for it'), and only takes it up as a trade because he's a professional soldier who needs a steady job in peacetime, and because it's a relatively new business that doesn't require guild membership. On the other hand, he's absolutely certain that shipping slaves will net him a tidy profit, and (initially) considers it one of his best ideas. In other words, The Everyman Hob doesn't recognize the true potential of spreading and preserving literature through the printing press, but he has no trouble seeing the potential of buying and selling Africans as property."

The ending ties together the two different threads of the plot: Rose’s quest and Dream’s.