Posts Tagged ‘Dunkirk’
Blackout by Connie Willis
Posted on: June 30, 2019
Blackout by Connie Willis
published in 2010*
where I got it: purchased used
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I finished reading Connie Willis’s Blackout shortly after blogging about how much of a Lobster this book is. When I wrote that blog post, I was about half way through the book, I am pretty sure I read the 2nd half in a non-stop reading marathon.
That post, and this post has minor plot spoilers for Blackout.
I’m a sucker for time travel thrillers, and I especially love it when the premise of the thriller is “what could possibly go wrong?” and the author has correctly answered that question is “everything!”, thus the thrilling storyline.
Willis’s Doomsday Book is one of my favorite time travel novels, and I’d heard the sequel was To Say Nothing of the Dog. I recently bought a copy of TSNofD, and don’t tell anyone I said this, but i DNF’d that book about 50 pages in. I wasn’t getting any of the Three Men in a Boat jokes (yes, I am a midwestern heathen with no education. More on that in a bit, actually), I wasn’t connecting with any of the characters. So back on the bookshelf that book went. But I still wanted my Connie Willis fix? So I picked up Blackout.
Blackout takes place about 5 years after the events of Doomsday Book, and who were the first two characters I met? Dunworthy and Colin!! This was the sequel to Doomsday Book I’d been looking for!! Colin is nearly college age, and as adorable and puppy-like as always, Badri knows not to let Colin anywhere near the net, and Dunworthy is his usually curmudgeonly and rushing all about self. Dunworthy cares deeply for his time traveling students, he’s just real good at showing it. And he keeps rescheduling everyone’s drops and driving the net techs crazy.
Just joining us for Connie Willis time travel? Here’s some context: It’s the year 2060, time travel exists (but somehow smartphones, e-mail, and pages do not**), and Oxford University sends historians back in time for weeks or months, so the historian can embed themselves in the time and location they are studying. The language and accent you need will be imported into your implant, you’ll receive tons of training on how to act and dress, and when your drop date arrives, you go to the Net with your props, and the net techs send you through. To avoid anyone being able to change history, the net simply won’t open to let you go through to a moment in the past where you’d have any ability to muck things up. To return home, you got to the “drop” site at specific pre-arranged times when the net will open for you. Pretty cool, right?
Minor spoiler: Dunworthy and Colin are not major characters in Blackout. I think I cried with joy to get to see them again, and even 20 pages with them was enough for me to be OK with not seeing them for another who knows how many pages. The novel follows four time travelers/historians who I hadn’t met before, and they have all gone back to different areas of England at different points during World War II. They each have an assignment to observe different places. The good news is that while some things do go wrong, this book is nowhere near as brutal as what all went wrong in The Doomsday Book.
the Little Red Reviewer 
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