Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis

Have you ever wanted to read sci-fi and historical fiction simultaneously and just can’t manage holding

two books at once? Your solution is here!

We start with the sci-fi. Oxford, England, in 2060 is the epicenter of historical research conducted through time traveling. Everyone is in complete chaos because Mr. Dunworthy, the don in charge of time travel, has changed everyone’s historical “drops” at the last minute and hared off to London to talk to some time-travel philosopher with some disturbing ideas about time travel.

Worried that he will decide her assignment is too dangerous, Polly Churchill hurries to get to her drop before he can return and prevent her. She’s also concerned that Colin, a high school boy who has been helping her research the Blitz might try to sneak through the drop before he’s old enough to be approved. Michael Davies is upset because he’s suddenly supposed to go to Dover to research Dunkirk instead of Pearl Harbor, and he’d gotten an American accent installed purely to fit in at Pearl Harbor. Merope O’Rielley is studying the evacuated children of London and needs to be signed off on driving lessons before she goes back.

All of them are swept into the chaos of rearranged schedules, avoiding people they don’t like, confusion about what Mr. Dunworthy is up to—and rush off to their assignments at the last minute, determined not to let any fussiness and anxiety on the part of Mr. Dunworthy stop them from traveling to the past.

I’ll pause to explain the two rules of time travel that the historians believe will prevent them from changing history: slippage, or not arriving exactly when in the past you planned to arrive, is caused by the chaotic system of history protecting itself. In vital areas where the outcome of events is especially key to history continuing as it originally happened, the slippage prevents historians from coming through and interfering in ways that could change the course of history—nobody can get a drop to open in a place that would allow them to kill Hitler. Secondly, an individual historian cannot go back to a time once they have been there—two of their own selves existing at once will result in immediate death for one version; the time continuum’s fix for an impossible situation. And now on with the story.

Mike, Eileen and Polly all get themselves sent back in time and reach their desired times and places—not quite as exactly when as they were hoping: the slippage seems immense. And then they plunge from the chaos of Oxford time travel into the chaos of wartime, each historian engaged in getting to their place of study and navigating the relationships and requirements of each area. All of them have difficulty managing to return to their drop sites to check in with Oxford and get supplies.

But it eventually becomes clear: the drops aren’t opening at all. They can’t get back to Oxford. Worse, their absolute confidence that the slippage would prevent them from changing time is waning. Are there discrepancies in the events of World War II? Have they inadvertently caused the Allies to lose the war against Hitler?

Because Mr. Dunworthy had rearranged all the drops, Mike and Eileen have no deadline approaching. But Polly, who had escaped Mr. Dunworthy’s notice, had been to World War II before and has a deadline coming. If she doesn’t get out of the past before she was already there, she will die. Eventually the three of them make their way to London and begin trying desperately to find a way home before Polly’s deadline approaches, and without further ruining the course of history.

By adding the element of time travel into World War II, Connie Willis recreates, better than any pure historical fiction could do, the sensation of the unknown. We read about World War II knowing the end; she recreates some of the feeling of what it must have been like to live in wartime England and genuinely not know whether Hitler would be invading or not. The historians are not sure at any point if what they are doing is helping them return home or dooming the entire world to fall to the Third Reich.

Not enough people have read Connie Willis, so I’m not giving away any spoilers, but a thought before I go: sometimes I have a guilty feeling that I ought to consume more Christian Living books or non-fiction, or biography—“real stuff.” (Which I do read a fair amount of, just to be clear, it’s just reading fiction is like breathing.)  Then I read books like this and I remember all over again that fiction has a place of equal importance in the life of the mind.

The reason Mike is going through is to study everyday heroes—regular citizens, like the fishermen near Dunkirk, who, when they heard the Allied soldiers needed rescued, jumped into their ships and sailed into the war to rescue them. As the historians invariably settle into life during the Blitz, all three of them learn something about heroism—history allows us to look back on cataclysmic events as a tidy story with heroes who are obviously doing something wonderful and brave with their lives. But in real time doing something heroic looks more like just “doing your bit”; being faithful to help those you love even when success looks impossible.

This is something that as a culture we have not retained from the grandparents and great grandparents who lived through World War II. Connie Willis joins the ranks of those who remind us of something that the Greatest Generation discovered for themselves: there is great satisfaction and happiness in sacrificing for those you love.