Blackout [Hardcover]

Connie Willis (Author)

Book Description

Release date: February 2, 2010

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With her trademark understated, eloquent style, Willis expands the conceit of her Hugo and Nebula winning 1982 story Fire Watch into a page-turning thriller, her first novel since 2001's Passage. Three young historians travel from 2060 to early 1940s Britain for firsthand research. As Eileen handles a measles outbreak during the children's evacuation and Polly struggles to work as a London shopgirl, hints of trouble with the time-travel equipment barely register on their radar. Historians aren't supposed to be able to change the course of history, but Mike's actions at Dunkirk may disrupt both the past and the future. Willis uses detail and period language exquisitely well, creating an engaging, exciting tale that cuts off abruptly on the last page. Readers allergic to cliffhangers may want to wait until the second volume comes out in November 2010. (Feb.)
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From Bookmarks Magazine

Reviewers were delighted to see any new book by Connie Willis, but particularly one that returns to the time-travel premise she explored so deftly in classics such as Doomsday Book. Most critics felt that she expanded further on that premise here, balancing more interesting characters with a wealth of historical detail while also complicating the assumptions of the universe she creates. A few critics felt a little overwhelmed by the amount of information on World War II-era London yielded by the characters' (and Willis's) research. But the more common frustration was the way in which Willis split the story into two volumes: the next part, All Clear, will not be out until fall 2010.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: Spectra; First Edition edition (February 2, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553803190
• ISBN-13: 978-0553803198
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.6 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (293 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #430,657 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Connie Willis is an established author of many science fiction books, including THE DOOMSDAY BOOK, and winner of both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award for best sf novel.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

79 of 85 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing March 21, 2010

By Karen

Format:Hardcover

I should preface this by saying that I am a lifelong fan of time-travel stories. I *loved* THE DOOMSDAY BOOK, and so I was really predisposed to like this one, too.

However....BLACKOUT left me feeling underwhelmed. It is, as others have said, only the first half of the story, and I'm not sure I'm going to bother with the second part when it comes out later this year.

The opening pages set the tone for the whole book. Characters rushing around from one place to another, pages and pages of very tedious explanations of how person A just missed encountering person B, and maybe B's gone off to X, so person A goes chasing after them, only to discover they're actually at Y instead, but "Better hurry because the [wherever they're going] is about to close!" ....which sends A racing off again, in a fruitless and futile search for whoever it is he's trying to find. This sort of situation occurs over and over and over again throughout this book. It got very tiresome after a while.

The sections set in the year 2060 suffer from the same curiously low-tech communications system that was evident in DOOMSDAY BOOK. No cell phones, no answering machines, no Internet, no email. And this is supposed to be 50 years in *our* future? I didn't find it believable.

I liked many of the parts set in WWII-era England. The descriptions of what life was like during the Blitz, what the shelters were like, how people were warned that even lighting a match for a cigarette at night could be enough to draw an enemy bomber....I found all of that very interesting. Ditto the children being evacuated (I didn't know they had housed evacuee children in manor houses, for example). And the Dunkirk storyline was quite interesting, too.

I thought the time-travelers seemed to be far too dependent on their historical research, instead of using common sense. At one point, a character realizes that she needs to learn to drive. So instead of potentially embarrassing herself by not knowing how to open a 1940's car door (!), she goes back to the time portal (the "drop") and returns to the future to get instruction on how to drive a car. What's wrong with simply watching carefully and copying what other people from that time period are doing??

Several of these time-travelers seemed to lack common sense, being much more concerned with trivialities than with observing the people around them (which was, I thought, the point of the time-traveling in the first place). They seem unable to think quickly or cope with the unexpected...hardly desirable qualities in potential time-travelers! (Kivrin, the time-traveler from THE DOOMSDAY BOOK, seems by contrast both far more intelligent and far better prepared to cope with changing circumstances than any of the time-travelers in this book.)

And in the last part of the book, the incessant refrain, "But this was TIME TRAVEL!" became really annoying after a while. The idea was that their rescuers had (literally) "all the time in the world" to find a way to get to the time-travelers stuck in 1940, so why hadn't they come? I couldn't help asking a different question: If the time-travelers had all the time in the world to plan and prepare for their various journeys into the past, why were they in such an ungodly hurry in the beginning of the book, rushed into assignments without sufficient preparation, etc? It didn't make any sense to me, except as a way to set up the plot.

All in all, I have to say I was disappointed with this book. I really wanted to like it, but in the end, the negatives outweighed the positives. The book ended with a cliffhanger, but not one that's powerful or interesting enough to make me eager to read part 2 of the story.

266 of 306 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Willis' formula is getting tired -- and it's only 1/2 a book February 27, 2010

By J. Fuchs TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book reminds me of that wonderful joke from Leo Rosten's "The Joys of Yiddish" with which Rosten explained the meaning of "chaloshes" ("something disgusting") -- "The food was a chaloshes - and such small portions!"

I don't know how this book would appear to someone who has never read Connie Willis before. But to someone who has read all of Willis' solo writing, both novels and short stories, and some of her partnered books, it just appears tired. Willis covered the Blitz so movingly in her short stories "Fire Watch" and "Jack," and is capable of creating books that can make you cry ("Doomsday Book") or laugh ("To Say of the Dog" and "Bellwether"), but here manages to be neither moving nor amusing. There is such a host of characters at the beginning, that it's hard to keep them straight. Eventually, we figure out that we are getting the viewpoints of three main characters, historians Polly, Elaine and Mike, all time traveling to WWII England for first person experiences: Polly as a shop clerk in London during the Blitz, Elaine as a maid in the N. of England to observe child evacuees from London, and Mike to Dover to observe ships returning from the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk. But the characters are poorly drawn, and we never get a feel for them. They are just people who know what's going to happen next, and worry incessantly about whether what they've done has changed history. It's hard to illustrate how tiresome this gets without writing spoilers -- suffice it to say that manic thoughts about "but if they'd done X, then that means that they would have missed Y, and then Z couldn't have happened..." etc. etc. from all three characters gets first boring, then downright annoying.

Then there's also Willis' blind spot about telecommunications technology, which has plagued her writing from the beginning, but without which characters would have no excuse for running frantically from one place to another just missing each other and unable to get messages to and from one another. The introductory action is supposed to take place in the year 2060, but not only do people have to run around looking for each other, at one point a character has to put down the receiver to see if another character can come to the phone. A RECEIVER?!?!? In 2060? At least in WWII England, the inability to connect makes some sense, but there's still this sense of everything being oddly frenetic and the characters acting illogically all the time. Not what you'd expect from historians, especially ones approved to go to such a dangerous place and time.

This book is also a major disappointment in how little we care for the "contemps". In "Doomsday Book," when bad things happened to the non-time travelling characters, it was heart-wrenching. Here, it's like "oh... the little girls you thought died in the bombing last night are okay? That's nice." The book is just too emotionally shallow for anything that happens to people to resonate.

And finally, there's the fact that other reviewers have noted, that this and the book's "continuation," "All Clear," which will be published in the fall, were written as one book, but the publisher decided to divide them into two books. So the book just ends, awkwardly, and with no sense of any kind of resolution. There's no cliff-hanger, no closing of one chapter and tantalizing beginning of another... it just ends.

I normally love Connie Willis, and this subject matter is clearly near and dear to her heart, so I was expecting so much more. It's entertaining, and a little bit informative, but it could have and should have been hugely moving and the publisher should have made Willis take out the filler and keep it as one book. As it is, I doubt too many people will come back for part 2.

54 of 59 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Things to Know About Blackout/All Clear January 7, 2011

By El in ATL

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Here are a few things worth knowing about Blackout (and the second half, All Clear) before reading:

1. Blackout and All Clear are one book, split in two. Buy both, read Blackout first, and then immediately start in on All Clear.

2. It helps to be familiar with Connie Willis's style and especially her time travel theory before jumping into this 1000 page book. Start with The Doomsday Book and then read To Say Nothing of the Dog.

3. Don't think too hard about the time travel theory. Like every time travel theory, it falls apart under scrutiny. But her theory is quite entertaining and plausible on the surface.

4. In spite of the first chapter of Blackout and the cover flap, this is not a book about Colin Templar. He's in maybe 10% of the book, tops. You'll like the other characters, but not if you're mad that Colin disappears for 800 pages after chapter two.

5. If you're familiar with Connie Willis, you know you just have to roll with the craziness (for a long time with this book, alas) until it gels. This doesn't happen, honestly, until about 250 pages into Blackout. You start with one main character, then jump to another time/place with another main character, then another, and then back to the first, and then to a seemingly-random side story, and then back to the second character, and so on. It's frustrating for a while but it works out and you'll figure out what's going on.

6. The details of this book are the point. You'll learn more than you ever wanted to know about the Blitz. Is it fill? Other than a few (interminable) scenes involving theater rehearsals, it's all pretty interesting.

7. The pacing is a little iffy, especially in the last few chapters, but by then you'll be tearing through it to get the payoff and you probably won't care.

8. The payoff is pretty good. I was up way too late finishing the last 100 pages of this book.

I enjoyed it, just like I've enjoyed Connie Willis's other books (except Passage, ugh). If you're a Connie Willis fan, this is compulsory reading.