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The latest story in Connie Willis's Oxford Time Travel series spills over into two books, of which this is the first. Those who haven't enjoyed previous installments probably won't find any reason to love this one either, since Willis's meandering prose, goofy humor, and repetitive dialogue all make an appearance. But the setting of London during the WWII Blitz is richly rendered down to minute details, and the storyline - doled out at Willis's usual leisurely pace - stays interesting right up t...
Warning: This review will be lengthy due to pure hatred.Did I ever tell you that I’ve got a time machine? There was a freak accident where my laptop and my lawn mower got fused together following a lightning strike, and now I can use it to travel in time. It’s a long story. Anyhow, when I have a chance, I take the occasional trip through history. Recently, I popped into London in 1940 during the Blitz to take a look around. It’s a fascinating time with England hanging on by its fingernails durin...
Blackout/All Clear.The two books are really one novel (thanks, publishers, for getting me to pay double!) so there's no reason to talk about them separately.They're also part of Willis' time travel series, although they're not advertised as such. I really wouldn't recommend starting with these books; I feel that a lot of the questions and criticism of these books that I see in other reviews stems from the likelihood that readers haven't read the other books in the series: The Doomsday Book, To S...
Christmas 2010: I realised that I had got stuck in a rut. I was re-reading old favourites again and again, waiting for a few trusted authors to release new works. Something had to be done.On the spur of the moment I set myself a challenge, to read every book to have won the Locus Sci-Fi award. That’s 35 books, 6 of which I’d previously read, leaving 29 titles by 14 authors who were new to me.While working through this reading list I got married, went on my honeymoon, switched career and beca
I have a very short list of authors whose work I eagerly await. Connie Willis just stepped off that list with this turkey. This book cuts off abruptly with a promo for the second book, but if it had been decently edited the whole mess would have fit in one volume. Three incompetent characters are dropped into WW2 London by obviously incompetent staffers. Before they even left I was thinking that I wouldn't let these dingbats put me on a bus, much less a time machine. These folks are supposed t...
Oh, I'm such a liar. This wasn't three stars, it was two. While I love some of Connie's other works, this one doesn't work for me. Logically inept, grossly meandering and strongly in need of some editing. While I liked pieces of the storyline, as a whole it lacked enough coherence to be enjoyable.
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” -- L. P. Hartley“Say GRRRR: it helps soothe the pain.” --S. GatlandGRRRRRRR.I have to give Blackout a very mixed review. Wonderful as it was to read, it’s either supremely naïve or grandly arrogant to assume you don’t have to introduce PLOT to a “thriller” until page 254. It is true that I enjoyed reading the first 90,000 words or so (that’s a decent novel’s worth of words), I enjoyed the characters and the premise and all the li...
UGH i dunno guys. I know it won the Hugo but I'm ok to have a differing opinion, right? I will definitely give credit, the book is IMPECCABLY researched. So much time and detail into WWII England, just...bravo for the research ALONE it deserved an award. But I mean, bar none, this book does NOT feel like a stand-alone. From my investigations the publisher split the plot in two, and it's so clunky with the ending it shows. The book could TOTALLY have stood an edit pass that took out tomes of unne...
Sometimes, if it takes you 10 years to write a book, you just shouldn't. Willis has a writing tick that absolutely annoys me, but in the past, I've been able to mainly ignore it because the storylines have been good. But her annoying writing tick overwhelms any story that was to be had in this book. The tick I'm speaking of is her tendency to talk about every mundane humdrum thing and to catch up every personality-less character that walks in the room concerning these mundane humdrum things. In
A warning: This book has no proper ending. It was meant to be the first half of a book but the publisher divided it into two books and Blackout is the first half. All Clear is the second book/second half of the book. Definitely have All Clear on hand to read immediately after this book. I finished this book and started the next the same day and that’s the way to do it. I deliberately read this slowly so there wouldn’t be a gap before I could read the next book.I was completely enthralled! This b...
Blithering idiots.Read rage.That is all.
Connie Willis created a beautiful piece of time travel/historical fiction with 'Blackout.' Depending on how you want to look at this book it is either the first book in the All Clear series or the third installment of the Oxford Time Travel series. 'Blackout' includes characters from 'The Doomsday Book' with Colin Templar and Mr. Dunworthy. They are not the stars of this double-decker novel but they do play very important roles. 'Blackout' revolves around three historians from the future sent to...
I can't do it anymore. I made it to page 250, but I can't read another page. I just can't do it - I refuse to subject myself to its badness anymore. Why should I? Why should I torture myself?!This book is bad. That it won the Hugo and Nebula awards straight up blows my mind. KERPOWWWW my brains are mush. It'd be like if Transformers 3 had won the Oscar for Best Picture or if Kermit the Frog was elected president of the United States.You know all that mundane, boring stuff that never gets shown i...
Time travel is a sexy science-fiction trope. It's right up there with faster-than-light travel (the two are, in fact, inextricably related, and chances are you if you invent one then you'll have invented both) as something that, as far as our current understanding of the universe works, is impossible. There are some fascinating loopholes involving wormholes and general relativity, but in order to get it working you need metric shit-joules of energy and something called exotic matter, and it woul...
I've read a lot of negative reviews about this book and while I can understand the problems some readers have with this of Willis' works, they didn't affect me.Yes, it is a long, drawn out story; yes, it is completely chaotic, bordering on the ridiculuous at times; yes, the characters are often more "types" than real-life-persons - but I found myself fascinated by the very well researched description of the British civilian life during WWII, by the quiet bravery of the people, the little deeds o...
It feels a little strange to review a novel that is actually only the first half of a longer novel (Connie Willis’s publisher split it in half for publication purposes), since the story at the end of this is very much incomplete, moreso than how it would be in a traditional series. I’ve read a lot of Willis’s work, and I adore her amazing Doomsday Book (her first Oxford Time Travel novel), so I was prepared to be swept away once again by her assured, richly-detailed, easygoing skill, and I was,
I love Willis' novels, with time-travelling anthropologists getting into all kinds of mischief in their historical setting, complicated by love and feelings of responsibility, I'd have given it 5 stars if she hadn't forced me to wait six months for the second half of the story...
2016 July 14I love these books so much. Stories about women in wartime are catnip to me. But this book, in which the daily struggle to keep calm and carry on is so hard for Britons: it gives me all the feels, but also hope for humanity.2013 January 12010 March 14It was everything I could do not to start this so far ahead of its proper turn in the stack. Just saying.***My, what a big book. But such an enormous pleasure. Much of the time, after turning the last page on a 500 page book, and discove...
I’ll do a bigger, better review when I finish the sequel, All Clear.Some overall thoughts-Did Ms. Willis “do time travel right?”: Well, mostly. Physis currently says time travel is (mostly) impossible, so we’lll have to grant a waiver on hat part. Her engineering makes sense -- computers and calculations and a earth-fixed launch point that will be brought into alignment with the destination, then the historian steps behind the “net” and the machine is turned on. From a social perspective, “oh, h...
Colin is upset. It's 2060 and the lad skips class to search the Oxford campus desperately for Mr. Dunsworthy. The porter, Mr. Purdy, tells Colin that the professor is in research. The professor's secretary Eddritch is much more closed lipped, but when Colin tries the lab, the director Badri and the tech Linna are far too busy sending researchers through time. At least, they're supposed to be doing this. Schedules are being reshuffled at the last minute, you see. Michael has trained to be sent ba...