A Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel
It’s hard for me to even calm down enough to gather my thoughts and write about Blackout. It’s just that good. At least, as a pretty longtime fan of Connie Willis’s work, I knew that something this awesome was coming before I opened the book.
Blackout is a return to Willis’s creatively imagined future in which academics time travel from Oxford University to observe history as it happens. Of course, the story doesn’t stay at Oxford for long, but instead follows a few of these historians as they duck and weave their way through England during World War II. Things don’t go so well for them, of course, and all of their foreknowledge and confidence in the laws of time travel might not be enough to get them out of their sticky situations.
This book is tense with furious action, but not all of it is avoiding bombs during the Blitz or trying to avoid changing history at Dunkirk. Willis manages to make events as simple as someone looking for someone else exciting. There’s a lot of running around and trying to figure out what’s going on, and what has gone wrong. Of course there’s not a little bomb-dodging as well.
I really loved this book, which I found not only entertaining and fun to read, but also downright informative (the historical research is fabulous). It was very hard to get anything else done before I had turned the last page. There’s only one thing disappointing about Blackout: the story doesn’t end on that last page! I’ve been left hanging! All Clear is the continuing volume, but I don’t currently have my hands on a copy! I can’t stand it!
A Year Of Books I Should Have Read By Now
Blackout by Connie Willis wasn't on my radar screen until a friend told me I should read All Clear. It only took me about 30 pages of All Clear to realize that I was in the middle of a story, so it was off to the library to get to the beginning of the story. Let me preface this by saying I've never read any of Connie Willis's work, so I can't review this from the angle of her prior novels and stories, which sound like they are very well liked by others.
ReplyDeleteWith Blackout, I found myself thrown deep into the events of World War II England via time-travel, and Willis does an excellent job on the details. The story primarily revolves around three historians from Oxford in 2060 traveling back in time to observe certain events surrounding WWII, and the possibility that their drop points may not be working any longer in order for them to return. They are relatively well prepared for their trips to England, in that they've memorized reported bombings and destroyed locations so they can avoid being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. But as their scheduled end dates pass without a way back to 2060, they are at the mercy of the events surrounding them. They also struggle with the uncertainty of whether they've changed history by their interactions with others.