Blackout/All Clear
by Connie Willis
Summary
Historians at Oxford in 2060 travel to the past to observe. Three of them go to the Second World War: Michael to Dover for the Dunkirk evacuation, Merope to a country house as a maid receiving evacuated children from the East End, and Polly to Oxford Street as a shopgirl during the Blitz.
Then the drops stop opening. None of them can get home, none of them can find the others at first, and the retrieval team does not come. Worse, Polly has already worked in a later part of the war, which means she has a deadline: a historian cannot be in the same place twice, so she will die if she is still there when her own earlier self arrives.
The three of them survive the bombing while becoming increasingly certain that they have changed something they were not supposed to, and that the war may now be lost because of it.
Willis is a formidable researcher, and the raid by raid detail of London under bombardment, the shelters, the shop girls, the ambulance drivers, is the reason to read it. She is also fond of a particular comic engine in which people miss each other by minutes for hundreds of pages, which some readers find unbearable at this length.
The best material is the smallest. A shop girl learning where to sleep on a Tube platform, a troupe of amateur actors performing in a shelter, an unexploded bomb under St Paul's, and a set of evacuated children from Whitechapel who are the funniest and most alarming characters in either volume.
It is one novel in two volumes and well over a thousand pages together, and the pacing is genuinely uneven, with hundreds of pages of near misses before the resolution arrives and justifies far more of them than seems possible.
Read Blackout first, and treat them as one book with an intermission rather than a pair.
Best for readers with patience, an interest in the home front, and a tolerance for characters who fail to leave notes.
Historical Context & Significance
Blackout and All Clear were published separately in 2010 and judged as a single work, which together won the 2011 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the Nebula Award and the Locus Award.
Connie Willis has won eleven Hugo Awards as well as multiple Nebula Awards for individual works, more major awards than any other writer in the field, and she was named a Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master in 2011.
The books belong to her Oxford time travel sequence, which also contains Doomsday Book, about the Black Death, and the comedy To Say Nothing of the Dog. Doomsday Book itself shared the 1993 Hugo, in one of only three ties in the category's history.
Willis worked on the book for around eight years, drawing on British archives and wartime diaries, and the acknowledgements read like a research bibliography.