Having been moved from the “drop point” of her arrival, Kivrin is unsure where to go to return home, as the gateway will open to return her at a prearranged time. After several days of delirium and fever, Kivrin awakens at a manor, surrounded by the residents who have been nursing her. Kivrin is also ill when she arrives in the fourteenth century. He is an early victim of a fatal flu epidemic that disrupts the university and eventually results in the whole city being quarantined. Soon after Kivrin is sent to the fourteenth century, Badri Chaudhuri, the technician who entered the time travel coordinates for the trip, suddenly collapses. The first of the historians to visit that time period, she feels confident that she is fully prepared for what she will face. Professor Gilchrist, who takes charge of the project, persuades the authorities to allow her journey to take place in order to enhance his own prestige, skipping various protocols that would ensure Kivrin’s safety. There are concerns that this period is too dangerous to travel to because the journey would take Kivrin three hundred years earlier than the time travel machine has ever brought anyone to. She asks her instructor, Professor James Dunworthy, and the authorities that run the project to send her to Oxford in the year 1320. As the book opens, Kivrin Engle is a young historian who specializes in the medieval period. In cases of “slippage,” a slight shift in the precise time target will occur, with the time traveler arriving at the nearest suitable time and place to avoid creating a paradox, which can produce a window of variance between five minutes and five years. The time travel machine typically refuses to operate, making such trips impossible. As part of the book’s premise, history resists any time travel that would alter the past by preventing visits to certain times and places. Doomsday Book is set in mid-twenty-first-century England at the University of Oxford, where historians conduct field observations using time travel. Her journey raises the ageless issues of good and evil and the will of the human spirit. Kivrin is forced to rely on herself in a time of great fear and superstition. However, when Kivrin finds herself amid a strange crisis linking the past to the present, her instructors must struggle desperately to rescue her. As Kivrin receives inoculations against fourteenth-century diseases, her twenty-first-century instructors perform meticulous calculations to determine the rendezvous location in which she will be received. Written in 1992, Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book follows Kivrin Engle, a young historian who is preparing to study the medieval period by traveling into the past as an observer.
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