Blackout

I'm about 40 pages in, and all we've got so far is a bunch of bureaucracy and characters running to and fro. Some folks call it “fast paced”–for me it's just frustratingly frantic. This is my second attempt to read it, and I'm going to stop a second time.

I am severely disappointed by this book. I loved the previous oxford time travel books, and this one seems to have much lower quality. Rather than the focus on one or two characters, this book juggles 6 characters at 6 different events, not giving nearly enough time to any of them. It still has one of the best time travel mechanics in fiction, so I'll probably keep reading just to see where we go with that, and Willis is still a competent writer, but she used to be excellent.

EDIT: Having read All Clear, I'm willing to give this book more credit, as it's massive amount of characters actually had some meaning rather than just cluttering the narrative.

A story with a lot of potential is burried under unending descriptions of everyday mundanity and countless repetitions of the same thoughts in the characters' heads (they all seem to share one brain, both in how much they use of it and in the way they all think and behave exactly the same). The time travel setting doesn't actually make any sense, Oxford in 2060 seems to be on the technological level of the early 90s, and the way the characters stumble into their problems is so convoluted that it becomes impossible to keep up suspension of disbelief.

A great mix of science fiction and historical fiction. I couldn't wait for the next chapter and just kept reading.

This book is bad. So bad it ignited a Read Rage so bright, it could have illuminated the entire area of London:

- It opens with an entitled high schooler, demanding a meeting with a faculty. Later we learn that he had a crush on one of the university students, and he wished for her to time-travel in flash time that will allow him to catch up with her in age and surely then she'll want to date him. Interspersed liberally with adolescent lovesick woes of you-are-not-seeing-someone-else-aren't-you-what-does-the-uncultured-american-have-over-me-whose-love-for-you-is-pure.

- People running around in Oxford 2060 trying to catch a person or another for some signatures that they need for forms that they need to file. Haven't they got emails? instant messages? sms? cell phones? So much for being in the future.

- I worked in a research center, and the work could be frantic at times when we need to prepare arrangements to go to the field in some rural villages: booking flights, reserving lodgings, packing clothes. It was necessary, but writing the minutiae of preparation would make for a dull read. Blackout is a dull read.

- The fieldwork is thoroughly unscientific. The historians, clearly ill-trained, would have produced zero primary materials. I imagine the best that they would produce are secondary materials in the form of recollections and commentaries, but no one could check if the inferences and conclusions that they draw (say, on commonpeople's heroism) were intellectually sound because these historians generate no primary source that other researchers can independently verify. This is something they could have done with further iteration of something like a Google glass/Snap glass that records audio and video for later review. But this leads us to..

- Shoddy ethics. The people that they interacted with (“contemps”/contemporaries) had no idea they were being observed as part of a study. There was no way they could consent to the inclusion, and the I can't imagine the deception can be ethically justified.

- The historians are so condescendingly full of themselves just because they came from the future and knew when and where certain events will happen. Even worse, it makes for a really infuriating reading because:

contemps [normal conversation]: XYZ will happen on date XXYY. I believe in the actions of people involved with XYZ.
historian [internal monologue]: poor contemps not knowing what will happen. XYZ will not happen until date XXYY+ZZ. I read it in my preparation research from newspaper article.
contemps [normal conversation, continue to patter on XYZ]
historian [internal monologue continues].

It reads as if the contemps were conversing with a mute that can only think internally. I could tolerate it if this were some Mexican/Indonesian soap opera—but was I wrong to expect something that garners such high praises (Nebula and Hugo) to be a little better than the novelization of soap operas?

And don't get me started about the clueless ambling and endless fretting for the retrieval team. The characters had no initiative and things just happen to them—such empty characters. It does not help that the main conflict of the book (will they be able to go back to the future?) did not really begin until page 200.

It was this that made me knock off one star—I could have given it two stars if this book were a shorter, or that there was some resolution at the end of the first book. I suffered through Blackout and I sure as hell would rather claw my eyes out than having to go through another 500-pages or so of All Clear just to find out what happens to the characters. Who cares if these historians perish in 1940s? Not me.

There's clearly a pattern to these books. Historians in danger of getting stuck in the past, experiencing a lack of modern medicine, and chaos back home in Oxford. Overall, the department seems to be very poorly run.
This is the first book of several set in WW2, and despite the aforementioned repetition, I'm going to read the second part to find out how it ends.

Set in World War II, this book of the series shows the characters reacting to the uncertainty of life in wartime England. I'm not fond of war stories, but even if that weren't the case, I'd get a little tired of the repetitious nature of their struggles with food, travel, bomb shelters, and sleep deprivation.

I've listened to this to and from work for the past couple of weeks and picked it up to read when I was too tired for anything else (whisper sync rocks sometimes) because it demands very little of of its readers. It's way to shaggy, the suspense structure drove me crazy, and its rife with British cliches (Alf & Binnie!) but I enjoyed it and will, with a short break, continue on to All Clear.

I give up. I love Connie Willis, but this book is not where it's at. Generations have come and gone since I started this book. I'd read two pages, get bored, play sporcle. Read two more pages wherein the three identical main characters blather about what? Navy colored skirts and not finding an automobile? Then my child would wake up from a nap and Blackout would sit forgotten until I ‘d fire up iBooks again and groan inwardly.

I gave her the benefit of the doubt for 400 pages because I dearly love her, but no more.

The two stars I give this book are for the description of inflatable tanks used by the British army as a decoy for German planes. I'd never heard of that and found that totally awesome.

2019 I did a second read of this one - not as charming as the first time. The story is frustratingly slow with a great deal of repetition that could have been trimmed. Am now partially into the companion book All Clear. These two books could have been one book.

For instance:

a. Mike's obsessing for the 50th time about his having changed the timeline: me wondering how in the hell someone could be a participant in this time travel program without an iota of knowledge as to how it works. I seriously want to hit Mike right now. Mike has an over-abundance of stupid for someone working in field-research and writing.
b. Polly works in a department store, but can't seem to get her hands on a black skirt. Me wondering why her boss doesn't bring her a couple to choose from and tell her they'll take the cost of the skirt from her next two paychecks. Your business has a dress code, your business therefore has a plan to ensure your employees adhere to it. After all, there's a war on, right? Eyeroll.
c. The endless speculation as to why the gates won't open and the other endless ‘what if's.
d. Not remembering the name of the stupid airfield (mostly an issue in Book #2) - we remember you can't remember, just please stop endlessly ruminating about it.

I'm ‘re-reading' via audiobook. And have now resorted to hitting the ‘bump it forward 10 seconds' button when the ruminating begins.

What works - the historical bits. Those are fun- and made me want to go find out more when I was done with the book.

Oh, Ms. Willis! I cannot believe you did this to me! A cliffhanger? After 512 many pages? And I hung in there SO long in the beginning, when the book was so slow to get going! Seriously–during all that nattering about over changed schedules and finding drop sites I nearly screamed to just get on with it already! So it is absolutely ridiculous to find that after more than 500 pages, I am not a nice resolution to any of the various plot lines, but rather am referred to the next boook, [b:All Clear 7519231 All Clear (All Clear, #2) Connie Willis http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1267552735s/7519231.jpg 9735628]!It's a bloody good thing that I 1) really, really like Ms. Willis' work; and 2) already have All Clear on hand and ready to go, or I would have been sorely tempted, sorely, I say, to throw the book across the room. That isn't nearly so satisfying with ebooks, and tends to do absolutely nothing but damage one's hardware, so I imagine I would have refrained.But I absolutely would not suggest this work to a first-time Willis reader. [b:To Say Nothing of the Dog 77773 To Say Nothing of the Dog Connie Willis http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1298434745s/77773.jpg 696], certainly. [b:Bellwether 24985 Bellwether Connie Willis http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167544946s/24985.jpg 1194887], even more so. But not this one, and not [b:Doomsday Book 24983 Doomsday Book Connie Willis http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1287032661s/24983.jpg 2439628] or [b:Lincoln's Dreams 24980 Lincoln's Dreams Connie Willis http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167544943s/24980.jpg 25743] or, honestly, even [b:Fire Watch 10301442 Fire Watch Connie Willis http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51JNKi8g3aL.SL75.jpg 2324159] (the story on which the All Clear duology is based). Willis doesn't write simplistic stories, or I probably wouldn't enjoy her work so much, but she has a way of making the complex clear that's beautiful. It's just that these require a bit more desire to get there on the part of the reader, to my way of thinking, than the other two. And once one is seduced by those, it is clear that the effort is wholly worthwhile.In any case, there's no doubt but that I'm going right on ahead to read [b:All Clear 7519231 All Clear (All Clear, #2) Connie Willis http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1267552735s/7519231.jpg 9735628]. I'm just a bit put out with the author at the moment–and very, very glad, considering the heft of these tomes, that I've switched to ebooks!I still think that readers deserve some small reward for the sheer aggravation meted out thus far. Surely resolving some small plot issues would not have caused trouble? For instance, authors who are accustomed to working with multi-book series regularly wrap up some issues in each book, while leaving other, larger plot threads to carry over into future volumes to provide continuity.

I was really excited about Blackout: a new Connie Willis novel set in the Doomsday Book/To Say Nothing of the Dog world, focused on Willis' favorite period in history: the Blitz.

And Blackout is good. It focuses on the stories of three main historians as they travel to different parts of England during 1940 and encounter time travel hitches. Along the way, there are typical Willis flares – cute, yet annoying children; lovable & brave young women with lots of pluck; comedies of errors and confused details; despair redeemed only by having friends to cling to. Her characters are lovable, her comedy is gold, her prose is affecting. It is pure Willis.

And yet. It feels sacrilegious, and maybe I'll go back and revise the three stars once All Clear comes out, but I just didn't love Blackout. The pacing felt a little slow, like I was reading the same day in the life over and over. I resent having to buy two books to get one story and Blackout ended just as it was getting to the point in the plot that I wanted to read. The whole thing feels like a historical set up for a great scifi story, rather than the story itself.