Gillian Polack.
Langue[dot]doc 1305.
Next Chapter. 2021
rating : 4 : passes the time
review : 26 April 2025
But time travel is untested, and dangerous. Saint-Guilhem-le-Desert, a village in Languedoc, is a desert of souls. Monastery, pilgrimage path, and legend; that's all there is. Perfect for scientists who have promised their work will not interfere with history.
have nine months, and they're not telling Artemisia about their research. Who needs a historian when the village looks like a gamer's dream?
Prepare for a bumpy ride with bad coffee.
A bunch of ill-prepared scientists and one even less-prepared historian go back to France 1305, to study something or other scientific, but certainly not to study the people. They are supposed to stay hidden, but don't try very hard, so the locals notice them anyway, but mostly ignore them. Artemisia, the historian, tries to convince the scientists that the locals are real people, not zombies, but with little success. After nine months, it’s time to go back to the future, with the scientific results, and without having contaminated the past. Much.
Wow, Polack really doesn’t like scientists, does she? The ones here are an arrogant bunch, completely uninterested in the history and the people, focussed on their work, freezing out Artemisia. I’m a scientist, and have worked with scientists all my life. The ones depicted here, well, I have met some that arrogant, but mostly the ones I’ve worked with have been interested in everything, and would have been soaking up what the historian had to offer. The views of the lives of the locals are certainly fascinating, and provide a counterpoint to the shallowness of these time-travellers. I particularly liked the way a lot of the men are called Guilhem, named for the local saint, so are differentiated as Guilhem-the-this, and Guilhem-the-that. You can almost feel profession-surnames being invented.
I find the idea that the very first use of newly-discovered time travel would be to take a dysfunctional and hastily assembled team back many hundred years for a nine month stay to be somewhat implausible. The plot seems to be leading somewhere interesting, but then fizzles. The team return. Nothing really changes. Nothing seems to have been learned. I must have missed the point somewhere. (The curse is impressively comprehensive, though.)