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Blackout Connie Willis 9780553803198 Books

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Blackout Connie Willis 9780553803198 Books

In "Blackout", Connie Willis brings the same quality storytelling and grasp of history to the London Blitz that she previously applied to the black death in her Hugo and Nebula Award winning novel "Doomsday Book". In Willis' novel, historians Michael Davies, Merope Ward, and Polly Churchill travel from 2060 Oxford to 1940 London, Dover, and Backbury. Events collude to prevent all three from returning to their own time when they should and Michael and Merope converge on London to seek Polly's help. Willis' historical background and use of detail help to recreate the long-past world of 1940 England and infuse a sense of tension into the story as characters try to avoid being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Additionally, while Willis' version of time travel supposedly precludes the ability to change history, her characters begin to fear that their actions are altering events. As an historian myself, I find the premise fascinating and tempting. Willis writes of the technology and those who use it, "Which is why historians must do on-site research, Polly thought. There were simply too many errors in the historical record" (pg. 100). The ability to verify the historical record would offer a nice advantage, though Willis makes it clear that traditional research would continue to play a role. Her writing blends the best of science- and historical-fiction.


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Blackout Connie Willis 9780553803198 Books Reviews

I've been looking forward to a new Connie Willis novel for years and years, and I was very happy to finally get Blackout for Christmas. And I must say that I enjoyed reading it. But it just isn't up to the level of her previous time travel stories.

I love Willis's work so much that I'm perfectly willing to cut her some slack. But in this story there's just too much (or correspondingly too little) of a lot of things

LACK OF HUMOR--Even Willis's most depressing stories usually contain amusing twists. But Blackout seemed...well...darker than usual. Even the "funny stuff" was just too grim.

LACK OF PREPARATION--After the intensive research that Kivrin had to do in order to go back to the Middle Ages in Doomsday Book, I found it appalling that the young historians in Blackout were running around WWII Britain without anything like an adequate broad knowledge of WWII history. (And Dunworthy, who was fanatical about preparation in Doomsday Book, has become downright cavalier about the subject, mixing up drop schedules--with resulting poorer preparation by historians--with no explanation so far.) Eileen/Merope didn't bother to study anything about the Blitz because she was staying the countryside and leaving before it began???? It didn't occur to Polly to just BUY A SKIRT??? It's evident that Colin is better-prepared than any of these students in their 20s. But the most annoying aspect of all this is that Willis seems to have done it purely for the purpose of obfuscation, which is much sloppier than her usual effort.

TOO MANY CHARACTERS--We finally seem to settle down to Mike, Polly, and Eileen/Merope, but we also have chapters with unnamed (or virtually unnamed) characters that seem to have very little to do with the rest of the plot. Considering that Blackout is only the first half of the story, I still have some faith that Willis will pull all this together by the ending. But again, the way it plays out in Blackout seems sloppy and designed purely for obfuscation--to keep the reader from knowing what is going on.

I will reserve further judgment until I've had a chance to read All Clear, but I have to admit that I'm worried.
I am reading the Nebula Award winning novels in chronological order. This is the winner for 2011.

I read another novel in this universe, The Doomsday Book, which was the Nebula Award winner for 1993. I liked that book considerably better than this one. But part of that isn't really fair. The first book felt new and engaging, this book did not have the advantage of being a new world.

I've got some issues with this novel. The first is that it is absolutely NOT a standalone novel. To get the story you must read the second book in the series--All Clear. I don't like that in a series. I want each book to have some closure. It's okay if it makes you want to learn more, but this book basically just stops right in the middle, as if the end was determined solely based on page count.

There are three main story lines following each of three "historians" from 2050 (I think) who go back to 1940 to observe various aspects of the English reaction to the ongoing war. The three characters all find that they cannot get back to their "drop" to return to their present day for one reason for another. Finally they all end up together in London during the Blitz trying to figure out some way to get home.

I have to say, these people are whiners. Yes, they admire the everyday bravery of the "contemps" around them. Yes, they display some of that bravery themselves -- although it's easier to be brave when you know when and where the bombs are going to land and who is going to win the war. Nevertheless, the spend an inordinate amount of time complaining about how hard their lives are and, especially, how much they want to go home. They also worry incessantly about whether they have, or even can, change history. Every move they take makes them think that they've lost the war.
Another thing is that each of them is constantly trying to hide things from the other two to spare them from some thing that they might worry about. That gives the person with the secret something else to whine about. Since they're all doing it, they're all whining about it.

The characters, Mike, Polly, and Eileen, are actively looking for a way back by finding another time traveler. In the meantime, they are also waiting for a rescue team to come get them. Sometimes they realize the temporal implications of this and sometimes they don't. While trying madly to find an historian who traveled to 1940 from their past -- say 2040 -- they also acknowledge that this would create a time paradox which they know is impossible. While waiting for the rescue team, they sometimes admit that any rescue would have to be immediate since their rescuers would literally have an infinite time to come back to rescue them in what could be the next minute in their 1940 timeframe . Sometimes they think about that, sometimes not.

Lastley, Polly has what's called a "deadline," a time when she would exist twice due to a previous historical assignment. It is unclear what happens when this deadline is reached but it's something drastic, like maybe she disappears into a puff of smoke. I know I shouldn't care, but why does this apply only to humans? Already they have broken the physical law concerning conservation of matter (or energy). The universe apparently thinks that's okay as long as the same person does not exist twice. It leads to the question of how does the universe recognize what a person is. I know, almost all time travel stories suffer from this issue, but not all of them, and most of them don't keep harping on it the way this book does.

Still, I found I had to get the second book since I got caught up enough to want to know how it resolves. I have this to say about that. The second book has all of the same issues.
In "Blackout", Connie Willis brings the same quality storytelling and grasp of history to the London Blitz that she previously applied to the black death in her Hugo and Nebula Award winning novel "Doomsday Book". In Willis' novel, historians Michael Davies, Merope Ward, and Polly Churchill travel from 2060 Oxford to 1940 London, Dover, and Backbury. Events collude to prevent all three from returning to their own time when they should and Michael and Merope converge on London to seek Polly's help. Willis' historical background and use of detail help to recreate the long-past world of 1940 England and infuse a sense of tension into the story as characters try to avoid being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Additionally, while Willis' version of time travel supposedly precludes the ability to change history, her characters begin to fear that their actions are altering events. As an historian myself, I find the premise fascinating and tempting. Willis writes of the technology and those who use it, "Which is why historians must do on-site research, Polly thought. There were simply too many errors in the historical record" (pg. 100). The ability to verify the historical record would offer a nice advantage, though Willis makes it clear that traditional research would continue to play a role. Her writing blends the best of science- and historical-fiction.