I warned regular readers last fall that writing about a new mystery novel every week was taking all of the fun out of reading mysteries, so I decided to cut back a little. Since then I have tried to write about mysteries every other week, and allowed myself the chance to sample different genres. Most lately, Sci/Fi and Fantasy.
I don't remember who was the first to recommend Connie Willis' Oxford Time Travel series to me, or who was the second and third, but it seemed that everywhere I turned people were telling me that I just had to read this series. But, mysteries.
So once I got a few mysteries ahead, I dedicated myself to multiple journeys back in time to an England I would have no other way of experiencing. And I am glad I cut out a large enough block of time, because once I started the series, I found it addictive.
Connie Willis is an American writer, not that you can tell by the way she captures the Brits so well, but she was born in Denver and graduated from what is now the University of Northern Colorado. Married to a physics professor (Hmm, so is Sara Paretsky. Coincidence or good taste?) they have one daughter and live in Colorado.
The winner of 11 Hugos, 8 Nebulas, 11 Locus Awards, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award has to be considered a Science Fiction writer. But, based only on the time travel series, it is clear that she exceeds that label. Please join me below the fold as I explore that further.
I have often felt that the biggest problem with Jane Austen is that she is dead, leaving us with no one to capture the modern day interactions between men and women and the distinctions inherent in our class structure. But that was before I read any Connie Willis, who, although with an entirely different style, has that same eye, and that same sensibility that was such a pleasure in Austen's work. Even though manners and mores have changed so much over the centuries since Austen wrote, people remain human and the way we relate to each other really hasn't changed that much at all.
But lest I lead you to believe that Connie Willis is the second coming of Jane Austen, her sense of humor is closer to that of PG Wodehouse or the writers of the screwball romantic comedies of the 1930s, verging occasionally into the slapstick. One of my all time favorites is "Bringing up Baby," starring Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant and the leopard, Nissa, and this was the movie that I thought of while reading To Say Nothing of the Dog, which has as many elements of screwball romantic comedy as it does of a science fiction novel of time travel.
Speaking of which, the entire series is connected by the historians of temporal physics in a future Oxford, set in the 2050s, who travel back in time to study different eras.
Willis skillfully disposes of time travel paradoxes with restrictions in the "Net" (which device ships people back and forth through time) that prohibit an historian from going to a place and time wherein he/she could alter future events. Should an historian attempt to travel to the Battle of Waterloo, for example, the Net might send him to a different place or allow him to arrive a week after the battle's end, but in no way would he be allowed to actually find himself in the middle of battle. Or anywhere else where he could change the outcome. This is called "slippage," and can apply to either time, or place, or both. Nor will the Net allow an historian to return to the present day carrying anything from the past with him.
Another immutable rule of temporal physics is that an historian can never be in the same time as his earlier self. It is believed that such a convergence of past and present could do irreparable damage to the time continuum itself.
"Fire Watch"
Published by Bluejay Books
February 28th 1985
274 pages
A perfect introduction to the world of time travel is "Fire Watch," an award-winning short story that introduces us to the concept of time travel as an historian, Mr. Bartholomew, who has spent four years studying St Paul for a trip to the first century, when, due to a misplaced apostrophe, he is shipped off instead to the WWII blitz of London where he is to be part of the Fire Watch at St Paul's Cathedral, with only a few hours to prepare.
This short story not only introduces us to time travel, but also to the reality that history was made by very real people living very real lives. And often, they too, only have a few hours to prepare.
"Fire Watch" was first published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in Feb 1982. It won both the 1983 Hugo and the 1982 Nebula Award for Best Novelette, the short story can be found in Connie Willis' short-story collections Fire Watch (1984) and The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories
(2013).
Doomsday Book
Published by Spectra
June 1st 1992
445 pages
Doomsday Book, though written a decade later, takes place shortly before the events in "Fire Watch." Kivrin Engle, who was the enigmatic roommate of John Bartholomew, has managed to talk her Mediaeval era professor into allowing her to travel to the fourteenth century, long closed to historians due to its extreme danger. Her unofficial tutor, Professor James Dunworthy had warned her against the attempt.
“Life expectancy in 1300 was thirty-eight years,” he had told her when she first said she wanted to go to the Middle Ages, “and you only lived that long if you survived cholera and smallpox and blood poisoning, and if you didn’t eat rotten meat or drink polluted water or get trampled by a horse. Or get burned at the stake for witchcraft.”
Some strange slippage in the Net sent her to 1348 instead of the planned 1320, and Kivrin immediately falls ill when she arrives. Meanwhile, back at the Oxford she just left, people were falling ill of an unknown, but highly contagious virus, resulting in the quarantine of the entire University.
The novel switches back and forth between the two settings as Kivrin slowly realizes that the reason her translator isn't working is that the English she learned isn't used in the year that she discovers is actually 1348 instead of 1320. As she picks up the altered language, helped by her ability to communicate with the local priest in Latin, she also realizes that her illness has left her unable to locate the "drop" for her return to present day Oxford.
We explore with her, through entries into her personal recorder, hidden in her wrist so that it looks like she is praying while she is dictating, and through her actual experiences, what life was like for those who lived through the plague year. And her desperate search for the drop site.
A desperate search is also going on in Oxford to find the source of the mysterious ailment that matches no known virus. As long as the illness is unidentified, the Net has been closed down. The quarantine has captured in its net some interesting characters that are used to provide the comic relief which is sorely needed by the reader after spending time in medieval England.
It also sets up interesting parallels between the two times. The sense of isolation in a near future city, under quarantine and reliant on landlines for communication, is not terribly different from the isolation of the small village that Kivrin finds herself in. Rumors multiply when the public lives in ignorance; fear breeds a desire to find anything to believe in, no matter how outlandish. People really haven't changed much in over seven hundred years, according to Willis.
I was struck by the contrast between the silence and slow pace of 1348 and the frenetic energy of 2054. And even more by the sense of isolation in an era before the printing press when only the religious gatekeepers and a few scribes were literate and news was slowly transferred by word of mouth. It felt almost claustrophobic. But mostly it felt real.
Doomsday Book won the Hugo (1993), the Nebula (1992) and the Locus (1993) Awards for Best Novel.
To Say Nothing of the Dog
Or How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump at Last
Published by Bantam Spectra
January 1998
434 pages
If I had to choose, this might be my favorite Connie Willis time travel novel. But only because comedy is so very hard to write well. Most comedy is a visual, aural art. We see the gestures and hear the vocal inflection that point us towards the punch lines. Those cues are missing when the comedy is on the page, so the writer must use greater skill to invisibly and silently direct us to the humor.
Connie Willis does that as well as any writer I have read. Her touch can be either subtle or carry the weight of a sledgehammer, depending upon the needs of the scene. In To Say Nothing of the Dog, the variety keeps the humor moving the story forward.
The story is ... complicated. Ned Henry is the Oxford historian in this novel, exhausted from repeat trips into the 1940s in an attempt to located every detail that will make possible the building of an exact replica of Coventry Cathedral, which was bombed by the Nazis during World War II. Diagnosed with time lag, he has been ordered to rest by the University infirmary.
But, Professor James Dunworthy has a problem on his hands that he feels Ned can solve for him while still resting in the slower paced days of Victorian England. It seems that someone has done what was believed to have been the impossible and brought back an item from the past. Mr. Dunworthy needs a courier to return the item to its proper time and place.
So, with minimal preparation, and that done while heavily time-lagged, Ned is sent off to Victorian England where he is to meet his contact and turn over the item (a cat, long extinct in the twenty-first century due to a massive cat pandemic) to his contact. After that, he can relax and recover in the pastoral peace of nineteenth century England.
Of course, it doesn't quite work out that way. In order to complete the Cathedral, it must be determined if a missing Bird Stump that belonged to the Bishop was in the Cathedral when it was bombed. And, a certain Victorian miss, an ancestor of the woman who wants the cathedral re-built, must be prevented from marrying the young man whom Ned meets and accompanies on a river trip on the Thames.
As I said, it is all very complicated. Explaining it is somewhat akin to explaining how an archeologist's search for an intercostal clavicle can lead to an encounter with a leopard and a stay in a Connecticut jail. But it does. And if two or more people fall in love along the way, and a dog barks in the right/wrong places, that works too.
The title is taken from the subtitle of Jerome K. Jerome's travelog, Three Men in a Boat: to Say Nothing of the Dog. I haven't read it, although I tried, but there are a couple of references to it (like passing three men in a boat) in the book that are self evident and don't really require reading Jerome's book. There are other literary references scattered along the way that just add to the luscious feel of what is an otherwise satisfying romantic comedy, slapstick, science fiction, time travel, mystery novel.
To Say Nothing of the Dog won the 1999 Hugo and Locus Awards for best novel. (Sadly, it wasn't even nominated for any of the mystery awards.)
The final two novels in the series are set in World War II, and must be read in sequence as they are actually two parts of the same story. I will take those on in a future diary.
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