Blackout
Hugo Award 2011, Nebula Award 2010, Locus Award for Best SF Novel 2011.
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 who
shape history. In the hands of this acclaimed storyteller, the past and
future collide — and the result is at once intriguing, elusive, and
frightening.
Oxford in 2060 is a chaotic place. Scores of
time-traveling historians are being sent into the past, to destinations
including the American Civil War and the attack on the World Trade
Center. Michael Davies is prepping to go to Pearl Harbor. Merope Ward
is coping with a bunch of bratty 1940 evacuees and trying to talk her
thesis adviser, Mr. Dunworthy, into letting her go to VE Day. Polly
Churchill’s next assignment will be as a shopgirl in the middle of
London’s Blitz. And seventeen-year-old Colin Templer, who has a major
crush on Polly, is determined to go to the Crusades so that he can
“catch up” to her in age.
But now the time-travel lab is
suddenly canceling assignments for no apparent reason and switching
around everyone’s schedules. And when Michael, Merope, and Polly
finally get to World War II, things just get worse. For there they face
air raids, blackouts, unexploded bombs, dive-bombing Stukas, rationing,
shrapnel, V-1s, and two of the most incorrigible children in all of
history — to say nothing of a growing feeling that not only their
assignments but the war and history itself are spiraling out of
control. Because suddenly the once-reliable mechanisms of time travel
are showing significant glitches, and our heroes are beginning to
question their most firmly held belief: that no historian can possibly
change the past.
From the people sheltering in the tube stations
of London to the retired sailors who set off across the Channel to
rescue the stranded British Army from Dunkirk, from shopgirls to
ambulance drivers, from spies to hospital nurses to Shakespearean
actors, Blackout reveals a side of World War II seldom seen
before: a dangerous, desperate world in which there are no civilians
and in which everybody — from the Queen down to the lowliest barmaid — is
determined to do their bit to help a beleaguered nation survive.
Connie Willis
Constance Elaine Trimmer Willis (born 1945) is an American science fiction writer. Willis is one of the most honored science fiction writers of the 1980s and 1990s: she has won nine Hugo Awards and six Nebula Awards. Photo: Ellen Levy Finch. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Blackout
Blackout consists of two books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.