Doomsday Book
Hugo and Nebula winner, regularly cited among the greatest time-travel novels ever written; its pandemic chapters acquired a second life in 2020 for obvious reasons.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
Blackout / All Clear
by Connie Willis · 2010 · Oxford Time Travel, book 3
What is Blackout / All Clear about?
Three Oxford historians take assignments in 1940 — evacuated children in Warwickshire, a shopgirl in the Blitz, an American correspondent at Dunkirk by accident — and then the drops stop opening. Stranded, converging on London, and increasingly terrified that their presence is altering the war's outcome, they discover the continuum's true accounting only at the end of two volumes of air raids, missed rendezvous and quiet heroism from shelter wardens, shopgirls and Shakespearean actors. Willis's twenty-year research obsession with the Blitz pays off in texture: the heroism of queueing, fire-watching and simply not leaving.
Why it matters
The two-volume novel swept the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards (2011); the culminating statement of Willis's argument that history is held together by unrecorded decency.
Where does it sit in the series?
Willis's sequence of future Oxford historians field-tripping into the Black Death, the Blitz and Victorian England, where the past defends itself with chaos and coincidence.
In the Guide from Oxford Time Travel:
- Doomsday Book (1992)
- To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998)
- Blackout / All Clear (2010)
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