[conspire] (forw) Re: CA.US COVID-19 booster shots widely available for adults as of?2021-11-18

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Akkana Peck (akkana at shallowsky.com):

> In case people can't get enough of this sort of thing, I have to
> recommend _Doomsday_Book_ by Connie Willis. Not recent - 1992 -- but
> it's about epidemics/pandemics, both modern and medieval (there's a
> time travel element). It's a great story (though I'm biased, since
> she's probably my favorite modern author.) I re-read it last year,
> and although the pandemic in the book has substantial differences
> from COVID, a lot of it will seem eerily familiar after living
> through 2020.

I remember it well!  It was, naturally, just a bit harrowing,  

This was the first in Connie Willis's loosely connected series of novels
involving time-traveling Oxford historian.  In this case, a young
researcher is sent back to the time machine with the intended time
target being Oxford in 1320, and ends up accidentally having been sent
to 1348, just in time for the Black Death.  Meanwhile, a new and deadly
form of influenza is running through the 2054 Oxford that she came from.

The follow-on 1997 novel _To Say Nothing of the Dog: or, How We Found
the Bishop's Bird Stump at Last_, a romantic-comedy homage to Jerome K.
Jerome's sentimenal comic classic _Three Men in a Boat, To Say Nothing
of the Dog_, where the time-travelling reserchers have a task in
Victorian England, is a great deal cheerier, and a personal favourite.

Both of those Willis works got the Hugo Award for Best Novel in their
respective years.  So did the two-part 2010 novel (in the same loose
series) _Blackout_ and _All Clear_ (which both also got the Nebula
Award), set in WWII England, though I personally didn't think as highly
of those.

Connie herself is a fabulous person.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connie_Willis