Her descriptions feel just as familiar, if not more, than Dunworthy’s descriptions of the 2054 pandemic. She watches helplessly as villagers shiver and cough under shared blankets during Christmas mass. When she realizes she is dealing with the Black Death, she tries to sanitize objects with liquor and to quarantine and tend the ill while the villagers turn to poultices and prayers. Kivrin, a medieval researcher, is supposed to time-travel to 1320, but she arrives in 1348, at the precise time the plague swept through England. In America nobody would dream of telling you where you can or can’t go.” How often have we heard similar arguments in 2020?īy juxtaposing timelines, Willis shows how much-and how little-humans have changed in 700 years. Dunworthy worries that the same thing could happen again when a stranded and angry American protests lockdown orders, saying: “I’m not used to having my civil liberties taken away like this. Not everyone fared well-in the 2014 one, 30 million Americans died, primarily because of exceptionalist attitudes. This apparatus is in place because of a series of previous pandemics. In the most recent pandemic, in 2014, it took only 18 days. A nurse tells Dunworthy that immunizing the population won’t take long once they’ve manufactured a vaccine (in Willis’ novel, no one appears to be anti-vaccination). The British government mandates that everyone must quarantine until seven days after everyone is vaccinated or 14 days after the last reported case. Willis describes blink-of-an-eye vaccine development and immediate lockdown measures as though any other response would be unthinkable. Willis underscores a poignant truth, particularly for contemporary readers: A pandemic’s true toll is determined not by doctors and politicians, but by everyone else. In this future, there are governmental and scientific systems in place to respond rapidly to a new contagion.

The very night he is hospitalized, public health workers begin tracking down his primary and secondary contacts and researchers begin sequencing the virus. Afterward, the time travel device technician who helped send the student back in time falls seriously ill with an unknown virus.

In Oxford, England, history professor Dunworthy sends an undergraduate researcher back in time to what he thinks is 1320.

The net prevents time travelers from altering history, so its main use is for historians conducting research. In the 2054 timeline of Doomsday Book, there are no cellphones, but thanks to a complex machine called the “net,” time travel exists. Doomsday Book-whose name is a nod to the Domesday Book, a 1086 survey commissioned by William the Conqueror-features two protagonists who try to stop the spread of deadly contagions 700 years apart.

Doomsday book willis