Blackout has everything that I’ve come to expect from a Connie Willis novel. A plot composed mostly of missed connections. British stereotypes. Characters being in comas, asleep, or delusional for critical action. Annoying/adorable children. Getting involved with a stranger’s domestic disputes substituting for character development. On some purely technical measures, this is a better book than her previous Hugo winners, with short suspenseful chapters and a few finely tuned sentences, but overall it remains a shambles masquerading as a novel.

This time around, three time traveling historians are sent to 1940 Britain to observe the “ordinary heroism of ordinary people.” Eileen is a maid taking care of evacuated children at a country manor. Polly is a shop girl observing life in the shelters during the heights of the Blitz. Mike is observing the Dunkirk evacuation from Dover. Of course nothing goes right, and when our three historians find themselves unable to make their drops for months, they realize that they’re stuck in the past, and that no one is coming. The novel ends with the trio standing under falling Nazi bombs, wondering how they’re going to survive. The story is told in triplicate, with three more or less identical characters coming to similar realizations.

If I may step back, Willis’ whole Historians series fails on two measures. First, time travel in fiction is a device that lets authors play around with causality and destiny. What does changing the past change in the future? Is history on rails or can it be changed? How does one event play out in different ways depending on the interference of time travelers? Did anything unusual happen behind the scenes to set up a perfect main timeline? (There’s a secondary use of time travel to go somewhere distant an unimaginable, a million years in the future rather than 100, but we’ll put that aside for now). Willis takes the most boring possible interpretation of time travel. Historians can’t do anything because the past is a chaotic and a single change might ramify throughout history and lead to say, the Nazis winning the war, but history also can’t change because the space-time continuum protects itself by slippage and weird coincidences. The results is a setting where characters have to walk on eggshells, but also can’t really do anything.

Second are the characters of the historians themselves. This is “Cops complaining about Law & Order” level griping, but I have a PhD in interdisciplinary social sciences. Real academics behave nothing like Willis’ historians. We have methods, we have data, we have a publican plan. At the very minimum, we have a research question. There is no way that a unique world-class facility like the Oxford Time Travel Lab would send three people back to 1940 to observe the “ordinary heroism of ordinary people.” There’s no question there, no data collection, no analysis, no history.

And as a personal insult, I still need to read All Clear, because for some reason (profits? Sheer physical size?) this book was split into two volumes. still have another 500+ pages of this crap to wade through before I can call it done. There is only one merit to this book, which are the well drawn depictions of Blitz Britain, but if you’re into that, a quick search reveals actual popular histories in Gardiner's The Blitz: The British Under Attack and Longmate's How We Lived Then: A History of Everyday Life During the Second World War.