James Nicoll Reviews

2010’s Blackout and All Clear are parts one and two of Connie Willis’ Oxford Time Travel duology, one that won the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award and the Locus Award.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that academics in possession of a time machine must be in want of an appropriately risky moment in history to research. Having exhausted the dramatic potential of the Black Death, Oxford’s hard-working time travelling historians turn their eyes on World War Two.

What could possibly go wrong?¹

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Connie Willis’ 1987 Lincoln’s Dreams is a standalone contemporary speculative fiction novel.

Jeff Johnson works as a researcher for historical novelist Broun. His job is to run down answers to questions, some questions significant and some trivial. Broun is an enthusiastic over-thinker and compulsively tinkers with manuscripts already in galley form. Which means that the novelist keeps Jeff busy tracking down historical minutiae. It’s too bad that Jeff is really not all that informed about the history he is researching. This makes his job difficult and his hours long. He doesn’t need any distractions.

But he’s distracted by troubled Annie and her perplexing dreams.

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Connie Willis’ 1992 Doomsday Booktakes place in the same continuity as Firewatch (1982), To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998), and Blackout/All Clear (2010).

A time-travel apparatus provides mid-21^st century Oxford University scholars with access to the past, an unparalleled opportunity that the scholars use with all the acumen previously demonstrated by the R‑101, the de Havilland DH.106 Comet, and the UK’s rapid deployment of thalidomide.

In another novel, the combination of time travel with hapless nincompoopery could have led to zany hijinks. Unfortunately for aspiring historian Kivrin Engle, she is not a character in madcap comedy. She’s found herself in a tragedy.

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Connie Willis’ 2016 Crosstalk is a standalone near-future SF novel. I regret to inform my readers that this review may not be as enjoyably vitriolic as previous Willis reviews. (I may revisit that decision once Crosstalk gets its inevitable, inexplicable Hugo nomination.) As Willis novels go, I didn’t hate it all that much. 

In the exciting world of Tomorrow CE, couples are not limited to intrusive social media and ever-present electronic communications. Now there’s the option of the EED, a device that creates an empathic link between lovebirds. Or at least, it’s supposed to. 

Pressured into submitting to elective brain surgery by her loving fiancé Trent, Briddey Flannigan gets an EED. Alas! there is no sign of the empathic link that should have formed between Briddey and Trent. What Briddey got was… 

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