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2020/029 and /030: Blackout & All Clear -- Connie Willis
Wednesday, April 1st, 2020 09:04 am2020/029: Blackout -- Connie Willis
and
2020/030: All Clear -- Connie Willis
The premise: time-travelling historians visit London and the Home Counties in the dark days of 1940, and can't get home, because their pick-up points stop working. And nobody has come to fetch them. World War II is always a difficult assignment, because there are so many divergence points where historians just can't 'land': these, according to theory, are the points at which the presence of a time traveller could change history itself. So Polly, Eileen, and Michael are trapped in (mostly) London in the Blitz. For fourteen hundred pages.
I hadn't read this long, two-volumed novel before -- I have to be in the right mood for Connie Willis -- but it suited my appetite for cosy catastrophes, so I dived in. And it was a very enjoyable read. ( no major spoilers )
and
2020/030: All Clear -- Connie Willis
‘Is it a comedy or a tragedy?’
He doesn’t mean the war, she thought. He’s talking about all of it – our lives and history and Shakespeare. And the continuum.
She smiled down at him. ‘A comedy, my lord.’ (All Clear, p. 734)
The premise: time-travelling historians visit London and the Home Counties in the dark days of 1940, and can't get home, because their pick-up points stop working. And nobody has come to fetch them. World War II is always a difficult assignment, because there are so many divergence points where historians just can't 'land': these, according to theory, are the points at which the presence of a time traveller could change history itself. So Polly, Eileen, and Michael are trapped in (mostly) London in the Blitz. For fourteen hundred pages.
I hadn't read this long, two-volumed novel before -- I have to be in the right mood for Connie Willis -- but it suited my appetite for cosy catastrophes, so I dived in. And it was a very enjoyable read. ( no major spoilers )
