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mburnamfink 's review for:
All Clear
by Connie Willis
To say that I was disappointed in All Clear would be to imply that I had any positive expectations about this book. Connie Willis puts words into sentences in a way that is not aesthetically awful, and that's the best that I can say.
All Clear picks up right after Blackout with Polly, Mike, and Eileen trying to figure out a way to get home. They race around London and England looking for other historians with working drops, only to find their way blocked at every turn. Mike nearly gets run over by Alan Turing, and then fakes his own death so he can leave the ladies and join Operation Fortitude, the deception plan for D-Day, where he spends his time as Ernest, inserting references to the lost time travelers into the Fortitude deception. We find out that another 1944 PoV is actually Polly, on a subjectively earlier trip back in time, and that she needs to get out because time travelers can't be in the same place at the same time. They run into Mr. Dunworthy, who's botched a rescue during the fire storm around St. Paul's Cathedral (or something around then), and Eileen decides to stay in the past and adopt the 'orrible Hodbin children. Everything works out in the end, as Colin Templar finally rescues the stranded travelers.
All of my critiques of Blackout and Willis' time travel apply, doubly so with the characters together. They withhold information from each other for no reason, panic about altering the flow of history even when the plot about passing messages forward through sidelong references in the Fortitude deception. Why doesn't the Time Travel department have an actual procedure for sending messages in a bottle forward through time? Doc Brown sends a telegram from 1885 to 1955 at the end of Back to the Future 2, surely the University of Oxford can hold a letter for 120 years. Dunworthy knows the drops are fallible--either paradoxes can occur, or they can't.
Jo Walton says that the Historians series is some kind of extended riff on free will and grace in Christian theology. Time travelers exist to make history turn out how it should. I'll buy that, because there's a lot of stuff that has to be taken on faith.
All Clear picks up right after Blackout with Polly, Mike, and Eileen trying to figure out a way to get home. They race around London and England looking for other historians with working drops, only to find their way blocked at every turn. Mike nearly gets run over by Alan Turing, and then fakes his own death so he can leave the ladies and join Operation Fortitude, the deception plan for D-Day, where he spends his time as Ernest, inserting references to the lost time travelers into the Fortitude deception. We find out that another 1944 PoV is actually Polly, on a subjectively earlier trip back in time, and that she needs to get out because time travelers can't be in the same place at the same time. They run into Mr. Dunworthy, who's botched a rescue during the fire storm around St. Paul's Cathedral (or something around then), and Eileen decides to stay in the past and adopt the 'orrible Hodbin children. Everything works out in the end, as Colin Templar finally rescues the stranded travelers.
All of my critiques of Blackout and Willis' time travel apply, doubly so with the characters together. They withhold information from each other for no reason, panic about altering the flow of history even when the plot about passing messages forward through sidelong references in the Fortitude deception. Why doesn't the Time Travel department have an actual procedure for sending messages in a bottle forward through time? Doc Brown sends a telegram from 1885 to 1955 at the end of Back to the Future 2, surely the University of Oxford can hold a letter for 120 years. Dunworthy knows the drops are fallible--either paradoxes can occur, or they can't.
Jo Walton says that the Historians series is some kind of extended riff on free will and grace in Christian theology. Time travelers exist to make history turn out how it should. I'll buy that, because there's a lot of stuff that has to be taken on faith.