Blackout

Winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, Connie Willis' Blackout is yet another science fiction novel that has left me disappointed, but for different reasons. This one, though set in the future, takes place mostly in the past, specifically 1940, but a promising idea gets bogged down in minutiae, and then doesn't wrap up before the end of the novel.

The book begins in Oxford in 2060. Time travel has been invented, and historians routinely travel back to observe history first-hand. This is not the first book Willis has written about time travel, so not all the rules are clearly spelled out, but I grasped that those traveling back in time could not, by the rules of the system, change events. However, one character spends a lot of time worrying about just that, which made me wonder how it could be a rule. There is also talk about divergence points--those places in time in which momentous events happen--supposedly historians could not be present at them, but again, the rules aren't clear.

The book follows three such historians: Merope is back and working as a maid in a country house that took in evacuated children during the Battle of Britain; Michael went back masquerading as an American reporter during the evacuation of troops from Dunkirk; and Polly is observing the blitz by getting a job as a shopgirl. They each have thoroughly studied the records of the time, so know when certain bombs will drop, etc. However, Michael and Polly both experience "slippage," that is they arrive not in the exact date and time in which they will think they appear. All three also have trouble with their "drops"--the portals they go back and through to their current time. If the drop is seen by a person from that era, a "contemp," it will not open.

Though each of them went to different times during 1940, they will each have trouble getting back home, and one waits the whole book for their inevitable meeting. Along the way they will experience the quotidian parts of life that are interesting to historians, but maybe not to the casual reader. I found it all a bit of a slog, as they struggled with catching buses, or trying to figure out where a "retrieval team" would be--they are the persons that ordinarily would come after them should they be slow to report in.

The book ends telling us the exciting conclusion will be in the next book, All Clear, which I knew when I started but doesn't lessen the frustration that I will have to read another tedious book to get the answers. Willis' style of writing is a gee-whiz, juvenile, and not for a minute did I believe these were actual historians. One of them asks, I kid you not, "When was Pearl Harbor?" I know they're British, but for goodness' sake, how could anyone get a history degree and honestly ask that question?