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
To Say Nothing of the Dog
by Connie Willis · 1998 · Oxford Time Travel, book 2
What is To Say Nothing of the Dog about?
Time-lagged historian Ned Henry is prescribed two weeks' bed rest and instead smuggled to 1888, partly to escape the formidable Lady Schrapnell — who is rebuilding Coventry Cathedral and requires the whereabouts of an object called the bishop's bird stump — and partly to repair an incongruity a colleague caused by rescuing a cat. What follows is Three Men in a Boat conducted under chaos theory: jumble sales, séances, misassigned fiancés and a spreading pattern of coincidence that suggests the continuum is repairing itself through Victorian courtship rituals. The most purely pleasurable book in modern SF.
Why it matters
Hugo and Locus winner: the proof that a time-travel comedy of manners could stand beside the genre's tragedies — and the gateway through which countless non-SF readers entered the field.
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)
Read next
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
A cult classic twice adapted for television, and the bridge between comic SF and the holistic-detective strain of urban fantasy; its time-loop plotting is quietly among the genre's best.
Behold the Man
Nebula winner and the New Wave's most notorious provocation: time-travel paradox as theology, handled with a seriousness that outlasted the scandal.