Blackout by Connie Willis came out in 2010, the first of two books that are really one book, so it ends on a cliffhanger and continues in my next month’s book, All Clear. Does it fit the theme? Oh, yes, it does.
The book opens in Oxford, England, in 2060. For the past forty years, historians have been traveling into the past to observe events; from experience, they have figured out a few rules, such as you can’t be in two places at once, so if you’ve been to a time period, and you go there again, it’s a “deadline” and you die. There are also certain major events that no one is able to visit, which seems to be a sort of natural phenomenon of the timeline. Here, Willis takes the time travel conceit and begins to explore it in depth, because what if the “rules” are not truly rules? What happens when all the time travel does begin to affect the timeline and time travel? And how do they figure it out?
This book and its second half are both very long and very tense. At first, Willis’ trademark rapid banter obscures (deliberately) the seriousness of what’s about to happen. The head of the program, Mr. Dunworthy, has begun to change the dates and times of when historians leave the lab and where they’re going, which throws their preparations into chaos without much explanation. For the most part, the point of view characters are three historians who travel to different points in World War II England. They are supposed to report back frequently, and return at a set time through their “drop,” a set point that gets them back to 2060 Oxford. Instead of progressing smoothly, their difficulties mount and their solutions don’t work out. This happens again, and again, and again, while they become more and more emotionally entangled with the “contemps,” or people who are native to the time and place.
Fair warning: if you read this, have both volumes on hand. They are both very long, but you don’t want to be dangling while you wait for the second volume to show up.
For me, this book was like an anxiety dream. It was stressful and frustrating, at times feeling like an impossible task. But I couldn’t stop reading, which says something to me about Willis’ skill at creating relatable characters I cared about.
