I mentioned here that I had Connie Willis's All Clear and couldn't wait to read it. Well, I have. I re-read Blackout, the first half of the two-volume story, just to get up to speed before starting All Clear, so I didn't finish it until 2:00am Monday morning.
If you're interested in the perils of life in London during The Blitz, the nine-month period between September 1940 and May 1941 when the Nazis bombed the capital (and other cities) trying to soften up England for invasion, these are your books. The principal point of view is that of three time-traveling historians from Oxford in 2060 whose drops or pickup sites have mysteriously closed so they can't get back to their own time. They live in desperate fear of doing something which will change history and cause Britain to lose the war, and one of them has an additional reason to want to get out: she's been back to World War II once already and doesn't know what might happen if she's there and overlaps her previous visit.
Willis writes so evocatively of the war and so fondly of her characters that the reader is swept into the story and is really pulling hard for them to figure out what the hell happened to keep them there and how to correct it. The time travel is always present as something the characters worry over, but it doesn't overwhelm the real story, that of people in desperate situations trying to overcome them.
I really enjoyed these books. It's easy to see why Willis has won as many sci-fi awards as she has (ten Hugos, six Nebulas) and was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2009.
Posted by Linkmeister at November 24, 2010 12:01 AM | TrackBack