Blackout:

BLACKOUT, by Connie Willis. Ballantine Books (www.ballantinebooks.com), 2010, 491 pp., $26.00. ISBN 978-0-553-80319-8

In May 2008, BLACKOUT author Connie Willis was Guest of Honor at the annual Balticon Science Fiction Convention in Hunt Valley, Maryland, talking about her six-year project: the extended novel BLACKOUT that would be split into two books, including the title story and the final book, ALL CLEAR.

When I spoke to Willis at Balticon, she made her thoughts about the novel very clear in TRUE REVIEW 70: “I hate its guts at this point,” she said. In fact, she was so fed up with the characters in her six-year novel in progress that she wishes she could “kill all of them in a bus wreck.”

She certainly put many of them in harm’s way.

The book details the story of time-traveling historians (bringing up many of the same characters from DOOMSDAY BOOK). In April 2060, time traveling historians from Balliol College in Oxford are waiting to arrive through the net at their “drops” or destinations in the past: Mike Davies, who wants to visit Pearl Harbor in the attack in December 1941, but instead is sent to the evacuation at Dunkirk; Polly Churchill, to visit London’s Blitz in 1940; Merope Ward, also to London; and Colin Templer, on to the Crusades.

But for each of these travelers, what happens when the “drop” is no longer there? In one case, the drop is blocked by artillery (regarding the traveler Davies). Davies ends up joining a family who rescues enough soldiers retreating from the crumbling battlegrounds that he may end up altering all of history or the location of the drop site in England, blown up in a German rocket attack (it’s what happens to the women stranded in London).

And where is Mr. Dunworthy, the time-traveling project mastermind? Why hasn’t he sent help?

Willis draws on a LOT of characters in this epic, placing the historians in the hands of ordinary citizens, relying only on the knowledge of bomb sites to keep from being in the wrong buildings during the Blitz at the wrong times. As for Davies, fortune is not so good. While attempting to free a boat propeller to evacuate wounded soldiers, Davies himself is wounded and flung far away from the drop zone, or the women in London, trying to find their rescue teams when none are coming as the bombing worsens.

(In BLACKOUT, there is no sign of Kivrin Engle, the time-traveling historian during the Black Plague from DOOMSDAY BOOK, but Mr. Dunworthy is still present in 2060, managing his time-traveling historians.)

I was beginning to wonder: where are the rescue contingency plans? If something were to go wrong, didn’t Mr. Dunworthy have an alternate exit plan, a drop site that wouldn’t be encumbered for a retrieval team? And while the tenet of the book – that historians, by the nature of their travels, could NOT affect history – is awfully cute, you would be hard-pressed not to understand how history COULDN’T be changed by these visits in countless ways.

It isn’t until the end of part one of this two-part series that the possibility exists that a retrieval team member made it through – but will he be able to stave off his own destruction?

BLACKOUT presents some potent cliffhangers – making you, of course, more impatient for ALL CLEAR, which is supposed to arrive in bookstores in the fall.