If I recall correctly, Perry White's car phone was powered by a hand-crank generator. I have the entire series on DVD, and in this case, I seem to remember that episode pretty well. I believe it was the one where he and Jimmy were vacationing on an island populated by a family of counterfeiters who were using the old haunted house scam to cover their crimes, because you know once a place gets a reputation for being haunted, people stay far away from it. Just ask the thousands of visitors that flock to the Whaley House in San Diego, California each year in hopes of catching a glimpse of the ghost of a Whaley family member who died inside the house if that isn't true.

I have to say I was hooked from the beginning. That isn't usual for me. I found I didn't put the book down nearly as often as I should have. :o

I agree that it was strange that there were no cell phones. When I stopped considering the book as futuristic and considered it (well, blast, can't think of the proper word! LOL) a different development of society, it was fine. When I thought of it as a different Earth, I had no problem with the lack of cell phones.

I found the parts in the past more riveting than the present but enjoyed the whole book a great deal.

The following is placed in spoilers because it's a continuation of the car phone trivia and is only peripherally related to the topic at hand.

Did anyone else feel this book was written on a word processor? What I mean is that I encountered several passages that seemed to repeat in a cut-and-paste manner, sometimes almost word for word.

Now you mention it, yes! Especially some of the descriptions of Colin with his gobstopper and muffler.

This is one of my favourite books. I didn't re-read it for this challenge so I'm unlikely to provide great detail.

I never had an issue with the future Oxford, but it was never the focus for me. The plague was my focus and I ate that up. Loved every word of it. :)

This is veering off course a little but I recently read Passage by Connie Willis. Some of the writing for this novel was quite frustrating until I realised that it was deliberately frustrating and ended up making the book stronger.

I wonder if the "2D" aspect of future Oxford that people are discussing was a deliberate way of making the 14th century sections more alive. For some reason any memories I have of future Oxford seem to be de-saturated, but the 14th century is still vivid and colourful to me.

Perhaps the term on the tip of your tongue is "alternate reality" or "parallel world".

Yes, I agree that it would easily solve the problem of the future Oxford she creates.

Only if you can believe that time machines could be simpler to build and operate than mobile phone networks....


But it's not really the technology that's the problem in the Oxford sections. It's the characters (& their actions) that don't ring true, IMO.

Agreed!:2thumbsup

Parallel world was what I was trying to come up with. I thought of it later and then forgot to post it. :o A parallel world would also work.

I've been on vacation at Cape Hatteras and so missed most of the discussion, but reading older SF is always a chancy business if you care about technical accuracy especially the technology that the story isn't focused on. The cellphone thing is a complete non-issue with me.
It's been a while but it's the scenes in the past that stand out most vividly so you may be right about the future scenes being somewhat lacking.

I enjoyed the next book, To Say Nothing of the Dog, more than The Doomsday Book. It has mostly new characters and a completely different tone - it's light comedy rather than this book's doom and gloom.

I got hooked on the book so wanted to read more. Now you said, To Say Nothing of the Dog, is the next in the series. When I checked, I found Blackout was next, so that was the one I had started. Today after reading your post, I checked another site and it stays Fire Watch is first with Doomsday as second!

I wonder what is really true? :blink:

The order they were published in is:
Fire Watch - 1982
Doomsday Book - 1992
To Say Nothing of the Dog - 1998
Blackout/All Clear - 2010

Maybe the internal chronology is different, but I don't think you can go wrong reading them in published order.

Firewatch is a short story with an Oxford student visiting London during the Blitz. There is a collection of her short stories also called Firewatch which has it.

In the end, I didn't think much of this book. I didn't mind the retro-future and actually found it entertaining as a strange alternate universe, and I admired and enjoyed the factual and realistic look at a small English town as the plague hit. I also liked the time-travel device because it allowed me to relate to Kivrin as a modern observer of that time and notice its subtleties and differences, whereas with books simply written to be in another historical era, it's much easier to forget or not focus on that and instead is often more about the plot. Maybe it would be better said that with this book, I felt more a part of that town in the middle ages as I went there vicariously through Kivrin rather than so many historical books where I feel more like I'm viewing history from the outside.

That said, the book just didn't compel me very much. So many characters in the future part of the book bordered on the ridiculous, and it was a very bizarre combination when a major point of the book is to experience realistic people and towns from a former time. As for the past, while I really appreciated the concern with realness and detail, I still felt the story was slightly flat and somehow a bit off.

However, when the plague truly struck the town in the past, I was very impressed that the author was willing to kill off everyone. I kept envisioning Kivrin saving someone and even possibly bringing them back to the future with her - the young girl especially, then Rosamund, then the priest, or saving anyone through her "lancing the boils" trials, and though I was sad to see them die (especially the young girl), it was realistic and really gave me a feel for what it might have been like on a town where the mortality rate was 100%. I was duly impressed that the author kept giving the impression over and over again that Kivrin would save someone only to then fail; I really respected that.

But respect does not make a good book, and to top it all the ending was pretty awful aside from the obliteration of the mediaeval town. I could even overlook the deus ex machina - I really didn't think it was a deus ex machina because the author had made it clear that Kivrin couldn't possibly be caught with anything modern while she was there, while the boy was only to be there very quickly and wasn't supposed to have come anyway. I thought the more eyeroll-worthy part was when the professor knows it is Kivrin when she rings the bell. I thought perhaps it'd be explained that she rang some special combination that they both knew about, but no, it's never explained and as far as I can remember wasn't mentioned anywhere beforehand, so we just must believe that somehow he "knew" a random bell ringing in the middle ages was Kivrin.

Frankly, I think the author almost ruined the weight of letting all the people from that town die by letting the professor and boy zap in from the future and rescue her so easily and at such a perfect moment just after everyone had died. I don't know, if it were me, I'd almost rather Rosamund had lived (she was past the main sickness and some people did survive after all) and Kivrin and Rosamund had taken off for Scotland and the professor found an empty town at the end, or something similar.

Anyway, the main thing I want to know is - where in the &%*@ *#@&! was the head of the program?!?!? It was never explained and I spent the entire book thinking he must be the priest in disguise or something and perhaps he had arrived a long time before by secret and accident and had to live in the middle ages for years and years, stuck, and for some reason couldn't tell Kivrin if he knew she were from the future. I respect the author if that were her intention, to misguide us for awhile, and I'm fine and actually happy that the head hadn't "snuck" back in time somehow because it just would've made things even sillier, but the author should've at least given us a sentence to explain where in the world he was during everything. I suppose a vindictive salmon must've caught him and dragged him under on his trip or some such.