Blackout

Connie Willis

Mar 2010 · Allen & Unwin

About this ebook

In her first novel since 2002, Nebula and Hugo award-winning author Connie Willis returns with a stunning, enormously entertaining novel of time travel, war, and the deeds - great and small - of ordinary people that shape history and, alarmingly perhaps, the future.

The year is 2060, the fourth decade since the invention of time travel by a scientist who would not have been born had Hitler won World War II. At Oxford University, historians jockey for plum assignments, to carry out first-person research in the era of their specialty, from the Crusades to the Plague or the aftermath of the devastating nuclear attack on London.

In the face of increasing scientific criticism of time travel - and the possibility that it could shatter the space-time continuum - three academics are in the heart of World War II in England. Merope is a maid in a country house studying evacuated children in England in 1940. Mike is researching a common thread of heroism across history and is on his way to Dunkirk. Polly lives as a shopgirl during the Blitz, watching the behaviour of ordinary citizens under stress.

For all three, unknown corners of history explode as Hitler's bombs rain down on London. But when they try to return they find themselves unable to make their way back to the future. Have they broken the law of time travel and changed the narrative of history in some accidental way? A dreadful awareness comes over them all: far from witnessing the past, they may be on a journey into the utterly unknown. And the world they left in 2060 may no longer be there to save them.

Ratings and reviews

I can endure shallow characters and numbingly mundane detail for the sake of a good story, unfortunately "Blackout" offers the former without the latter. After all, a "story" requires a beginning, a middle and an end and "Blackout" has no end, but what some, rather generously, describe as a "cliff hanger." In fact, what "Blackout" consists of is a 500-page teaser for Willis's next book. "Blackout" is not a book, not a novel, not a story. It is a lengthy vamp of hackneyed time travel clichés dressed up with a bit of engaging narrative about London life during the The Blitz and made tolerable by manufactured page-turner chapter endings. I had the particular misfortune of reading this book electronically so that I had no physical indication of where I was in the total body of text. When a new character was introduced who promised--finally--to move the plot out of neutral, I found, on page 3 of his entrance this notice: "For the riveting conclusion to Blackout, be sure not to miss Connie Willis' All Clear, coming from Spectra in Fall 2010." I certainly will not be purchasing any future work by Ms. Willis. Indeed, I have already paid for a complete book and feel that the publisher should "make good" on the promise of the original by automatically sending me the remainder of this book when it is published. When I revisited the Amazon page, I noted that the hardback version of this book lists for $75 so that it sells for a whopping $45 per copy! Stunning audacity. Is it any wonder that book publishing is in trouble?

About the author

Connie Willis is a prodigiously gifted storyteller who manages to blend fantasy, science fiction, history and romance into her award-winning novels and short stories. She has won seven Nebula and eleven Hugo Awards (more than any other writer in the genre) and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for her first novel, Lincoln's Dreams. Doomsday Book, All Clear and Blackout have won both the Nebula and Hugo Awards for best novel. Her first short-story collection, Fire Watch, was a New York Times Notable Book. Connie is married to physicist Courtney Willis, and has one daughter, Cordelia. They live in Greeley, Colorado.