La compasión en tiempos de colapso: comunicación, humanidad y trascendencia en Doomsday Book de Connie Willis

This study aims to analyze how the novel Doomsday Book (1992), by Connie Willis, constructs a symbolic grammar of compassion in contexts of collapse, through the juxtaposition of two pandemics set in different time periods: the Black Death in the fourteenth century and a future epidemic in twenty-first-century Oxford. The research adopts an integrative and interdisciplinary methodology, combining contributions from history, medicine, anthropology, literature, and theology, among other fields.. This approach allows for a synthetic reading better suited to the semantic complexity of speculative fiction. As with any transversal reading, the study assumes a limitation: the difficulty of framing the novel within a single analytical category. Nevertheless, this openness enables a richer and deeper perspective on human responses to catastrophe. The article offers an original contribution by interpreting the novel’s diptych structure not merely as a formal parallelism, but as a mode of mediation between possible worlds. Among the main findings, compassion—embodied by characters facing extreme situations—emerges as a universal language and ethical principle of resistance in the face of suffering. Doomsday Book thus reveals itself as a narrative that transcends the science fiction genre to offer an ethical, aesthetic, and communicative reflection on meaning, care, and hope in times of crisis.