Review: Blackout

Blackout by Connie Willis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Review encompasses both this and All Clear, as they do not in any way stand alone; this is basically one novel cut arbitrarily in half.

It's fine I guess? Willis as usual writes interesting characters in well-crafted prose. But this felt enormously stretched out to make two books out of it. The plot is basically "Time travelers get stranded and then eventually get rescued through no fault of their own." The whole conflict hangs heavily on the details of how time travel works, which do not seem to be particularly consistent. On the one hand, these are trained professionals who regularly state that it is a hard-and-fast law that they cannot change the past, and on the other hand those same professionals spend roughly 50% of the text of the books panicking that they might have changed things, and refusing to share information with each other for fear of panicking each other about having changed things. Which they all supposedly know is impossible. And since it is never said _why_ they think it's impossible, we have no reason to doubt it and no basis to disbelieve it. So it ends up a bit like watching some interesting characters in the carefully-researched London Blitz run around like the Keystone Cops, failing at everything they try through coincidence after coincidence. It doesn't really matter that those coincidences are all part of Timey-Wimey Reasons; as the reader it's still just sort of vaguely comicly sad.

I still enjoy her prose, and the detailed picture of life in the Blitz; I just wish there was a story here to wrap it around.

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