Eighteen years ago readers got lucky–Connie Willis brought us the wonderful Doomsday Book, a novel that would go on to win both the Nebula and Hugo Awards. Time-traveling, the plague, and Connie’s trademark wit–it was a brilliant combination that I will admit blew me away when I read it.
It also introduced us to Colin, a character that she would revisit in her books Blackout and the upcoming All Clear.
Today we get lucky again, because Connie has written a piece about this novel.
In addition, Suvudu blogger Rhea Lyons enthusiastically discusses her love of this book.
I was watching the movie Julie and Julia the other day, and it struck me that it was exactly what writing Doomsday Book was like. Well, not exactly–I mean, I didn’t have to cook anything, and I don’t look like Amy Adams or Meryl Streep (or Stanley Tucci, for that matter), and nobody died in the movie. But it was a lot like it.
Everything that could go wrong with Doomsday Book did. There were endless complications and obstacles, from Middle English to the Georgian calendar to what mittens looked like in 1349. I had to rewrite Chapter Twelve a hundred times before I finally got it right. And what seemed like a simple project–send a young historian off to the Middle Ages–turned into an endless ordeal. I wasn’t even allowed to feel sorry for myself or fling myself down on the kitchen floor and throw a tantrum like Julie because no matter how badly things were going, it was better than having to actually cope with the bubonic plague.
I was convinced throughout the entire five-year project of writing Doomsday Book that I couldn’t do it, it would never be finished, and that even if I did finish it, no one would read it, which was probably just as well because it had been a terrible idea in the first place. I mean, who wants to read about the Black Death?
Amazingly, Bantam Spectra put up with me through the whole thing, just like Julie and Julia’s husbands. Thanks, Spectra, for being so supportive and patient and for believing in Doomsday Book! And congratulations on twenty-five years of being such a great publisher!
–Connie Willis, June 2010
Summer in Colorado (as I’m sure Connie could tell you) can be intolerably hot. The desert climate yields for a much cooler nighttime, but the house I grew up in was never less than stifling on the inside. We tried what we called “operation cool down,” which involved keeping all the windows shut during the daytime and then, as soon as the sun began to set and the air began to cool, we would open every window in the house and turn on every fan, in hopes of pushing out the hot stale air of the day and welcome in the night air. But for some reason the room I shared with my sister was always miserable. In order to beat the heat, we’d spend nights together on a futon in our basement.
The basement was always a little scary (as unfinished basements are to an 11 year old), but it was better than being hot. Barely. My sister and I used to pretend that if we were completely under the blankets, no bugs or spiders or ghosts or evil nighttime miscellany would get us.
One summer I started reading Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. The more I got sucked in, the more effort it took to convince me to put down the book at mealtime, or to brush my teeth. The more I read, the more my copy acquired toothpaste, pizza, and grass stains–and the more reality slipped away from me.
When I turned the last page, the first thing I noticed was silence. Awareness crept in, and I found myself sitting on the steps to my basement with a bare bulb overhead. My sister had kicked me out of our futon because she refused to let me keep the light on to finish the book. That meant she was hogging the blanked that kept the evils of our basement at bay. Looking down, I saw a spider crawl dangerously close to my foot. I didn’t even flinch.
Inspired by my newfound bravery, I crept upstairs to see what time it was. I was on top of the world–never before had I felt so comfortable in the darkness. My mind was still reeling with the events of the book, so perhaps I didn’t have time to fully comprehend how exposed I was to the mysteries of my house at night.
I froze when I heard a clank outside the front door. The clank was followed by a few more clanks. I crept to the window and saw some guy fiddling with the milk box. The milkman! Mysterious bringer of milk and eggs! I had never quite believed my mom when she told me about the milkman–I think I had always glossed over the fact that a person must be involved with the transportation between the milk place and the box on my front step, and they didn’t magically just appear there (although at this point I probably could have just assumed that there was a drop located in the milk box, and that the Milk Lab sent out milk to patrons across the world just like how Kivrin traveled back in time in the book I just devoured). But now I saw there was a man there. An actual man, who worked all night long going up to people’s houses and giving them milk when the people inside were sleeping. Extremely creepy, actually, when you think about it. I realized that in the adult world, there must be a bond of trust between adults and milkmen worldwide. I mean, adults know that there’s this guy that comes right up to their front door in the middle of the night and leave milk there. Who is this guy, anyway? He could break in, couldn’t he? Yet adults pay him to creep around their front doors in the middle of the night. It may sound silly, but that moment–listening to this guy shuffling around outside my front door and hiding next to the fridge in my kitchen (so he didn’t see me)–I felt that I had just gotten special access to this very adult-level secret.
I, too, trusted the milkman.
After that night, the act of reading changed for me. I realized that the power of a good book went beyond the pages, and that reading can make fantastic things happen (like taking a risk to lose that security blanket and wander around in the dark*). Doomsday Book inspired in me the desire to keep searching for that particularly magical experience of being totally and completely immersed in reading, a desire which has been the undercurrent of my professional and personal life thus far.
Thanks, Connie Willis.
*I guess I would have grown out of my fear of my basement anyway, but I’ll thank the Doomsday Book for helping that along. Also who knows–the milkman probably isn’t the only secret about the world I have yet to discover.
–Rhea Lyons, RHPG Subsidiary Rights
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