Fictional Time Machine Book Group: Current Selection

Call or email Eileen in Adult Services to get more information, to register, or ask any questions!
edennis.hav@rcls.org
845-786-3800 extension 23 (feel free to leave a voicemail if I'm not at my desk!)

Our next meeting will be on August 4 at 7pm.

To join our book club, click here and fill out this form.

Connie Willis

Willis is an American science fiction and fantasy writer, a graduate of Colorado State College with degrees in English and Elementary Education. She and her husband currently live in Greeley, Colorado. She was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2009, and was the winner of eleven Hugo Awards and seven Nebula Awards.

Other novels include:
To Say Nothing of the Dog, Passage, Remake, Blackout/All Clear, The Road to Roswell

Author's Amazon Storefront

Connie Willis discussed her works with Report from Sante Fe, part of the Healy Foundation in New Mexico.

1. What role does Dunworthy play in Kivrin's journey? How does he feel about her decision to go?

2. What are your impressions of how historians are going about the study in 2054?

3. Religion is everywhere in this novel. How do you interpret the perceived differences between the religion of the past and the religion that's practiced in the future?

4. How do the bells add to the narrative?

5. What do you think Willis is trying to say about compassion and suffering?

Doomsday Book, written by Connie Willis
Published by Spectra, August 1, 1993
592 pages

This month, the themed snack will be:

Stay tuned!

For Kivrin, preparing an on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in humanity's history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received.

But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin--barely of age herself-- finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history's darkest hours.

“Splendid work—brutal, gripping and genuinely harrowing, the product of diligent research, fine writing and well-honed instincts, that should appeal far beyond the normal science-fiction constituency.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“The world of 1348 burns in the mind’s eye, and every character alive that year is a fully recognized being. . . . It becomes possible to feel . . . that Connie Willis did, in fact, over the five years Doomsday Book took her to write, open a window to another world, and that she saw something there.”

—The Washington Post

"A tour de force."
—The New York Times

“A stunning novel that encompasses both suffering and hope ... The best work yet from one of science fiction's best writers.”

—The Denver Post