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Contingency and Time Travel
Jan 2013
Blackout - Connie Willis - Gollancz, 2012
* * * *
Although her stories often involve time travel and keep winning Hugos and Nebulas, Connie Willis is not, I humbly submit, a true science fiction writer. Not that this matters of course. Her interest is primarily in the history of the period to which she sends her characters and less in the details of how they get there, which are normally kept sensibly vague. In this book, however, the mechanics form an important part of the story, which is perhaps unfortunate as her take on time travel doesn't really convince. But her depiction of the second world war is brilliant, and I probably wouldn't have read it without the science fiction trimmings. So I guess it works.
The set-up is the same as that of To Say Nothing of the Dog (a book I read many years ago but have almost entirely forgotten - I can't even recall what the Bishop's Bird Stump turned out to be. Which means I can read it again. Hurrah for middle-aged memory loss!). Time travel is invented in the 21st century, but has remained an academic tool because of the self-correcting nature of the "continuum" that means that any attempt to change (or presumably make money from) the past ends in failure. Naturally the University of Oxford is one of the leading centres for time travel-based historical research and its facilities, headed up by the mysterious Mr Dunwoody, are heavily in demand. Perhaps too much so - the three researchers who are the viewpoint characters, Polly Churchill, Michael Davis and Merope Ward, find that their scheduled drops to study various aspects of the Second World War are constantly being chopped and changed with very little explanation from the harrassed technicians. Nonetheless, they all go through to their respective tasks - Polly to study shopgirls in London during the Blitz, Michael to talk to soldiers returning from Dunkirk and Merope to live with evacuees in a stately home in the north of England. But then things start to go wrong. The drops back to Oxford won't open. Michael is inadvertantly taken to Dunkirk during the evacuation, a historical inflection point that no time traveller should be able to get near. Has something gone wrong with the laws of time? Is history being re-written?
Needless to say, we don't find out. The most annoying thing about the story is that it just stops in media res. To be fair, Willis has been quite open in saying that the book was intended to be a single volume and became too long, but the break point is artistically unsatisfying.
Fortunately the impeccable research into the day-to-day lives of wartime Britain makes up for this. There are lots of interesting little historical details (I particularly liked the inflatable tanks) and the depiction of the "contemps" is mostly convincing, if occasionally a little cutesy (Alf and Binnie, I'm looking at you). A believable wartime atmosphere is evoked with very few missteps, even for British readers. Willis and her editors have clearly been on the ball.
Willis' style has always been gyratory, relentlessly circling around her characters' obsessions and repeating themes with minor variations which only slowly advance the plot. Here it doesn't work quite as well as in some of her other books because the three main characters are all in essentially the same predicament and react in similar ways. Their stories are effectively intercut, with each chapter ending on a mini-cliffhanger that encourages you to keep reading. However, sometimes this works too well and being expected to pick up the threads of a relatively uninteresting character becomes annoying. Quite often I skipped ahead to find out how the cliffhanger resolved before going back to read the next chapter.
But my chief feeling of dissatisfaction was with the time travel set-up. A major repeated trope is missed meetings - characters are constantly late or delayed or distracted, and end up missing each other or avoiding, by pure chance, a fatal bombing strike. Clearly this is intended to show the horrible contingency and chanciness of war, but it has the unfortunate consequence of making a mockery of the self-correcting nature of the continuum. Which in any case is suspiciously convenient. Changes to important events are supposedly prevented by "slippage" in time or space when the historian goes through that prevents them from being present at a temporally important event, but how does the continuum know what is "important"? And if events are so contingent and chaotic, why couldn't a minor action by a historian elsewhere have a butterfly's wings effect resulting in major consequences that change the present? Just moving them to a different point in space or time won't prevent that.
[Side note: the brilliant Ray Bradbury short story that also explores this possibility, A Sound of Thunder, is available online. If you haven't done so, I strongly urge you to read it. It is, in my opinion, one of the greatest short stories ever written.]
To be fair, Michael in particular expresses just this concern, so it's possible that a significant revelation is lying in wait in part two. However the self-correcting aspect is so important to Willis' conception of time travel that I can't see a satisfactory resolution being achieved. I fear the inconsistencies in the science fiction underpinning will just have to be lived with. It's just as well that the main story is so strong.
Blackout - Connie Willis - Gollancz, 2012
* * * *
Although her stories often involve time travel and keep winning Hugos and Nebulas, Connie Willis is not, I humbly submit, a true science fiction writer. Not that this matters of course. Her interest is primarily in the history of the period to which she sends her characters and less in the details of how they get there, which are normally kept sensibly vague. In this book, however, the mechanics form an important part of the story, which is perhaps unfortunate as her take on time travel doesn't really convince. But her depiction of the second world war is brilliant, and I probably wouldn't have read it without the science fiction trimmings. So I guess it works.
The set-up is the same as that of To Say Nothing of the Dog (a book I read many years ago but have almost entirely forgotten - I can't even recall what the Bishop's Bird Stump turned out to be. Which means I can read it again. Hurrah for middle-aged memory loss!). Time travel is invented in the 21st century, but has remained an academic tool because of the self-correcting nature of the "continuum" that means that any attempt to change (or presumably make money from) the past ends in failure. Naturally the University of Oxford is one of the leading centres for time travel-based historical research and its facilities, headed up by the mysterious Mr Dunwoody, are heavily in demand. Perhaps too much so - the three researchers who are the viewpoint characters, Polly Churchill, Michael Davis and Merope Ward, find that their scheduled drops to study various aspects of the Second World War are constantly being chopped and changed with very little explanation from the harrassed technicians. Nonetheless, they all go through to their respective tasks - Polly to study shopgirls in London during the Blitz, Michael to talk to soldiers returning from Dunkirk and Merope to live with evacuees in a stately home in the north of England. But then things start to go wrong. The drops back to Oxford won't open. Michael is inadvertantly taken to Dunkirk during the evacuation, a historical inflection point that no time traveller should be able to get near. Has something gone wrong with the laws of time? Is history being re-written?
Needless to say, we don't find out. The most annoying thing about the story is that it just stops in media res. To be fair, Willis has been quite open in saying that the book was intended to be a single volume and became too long, but the break point is artistically unsatisfying.
Fortunately the impeccable research into the day-to-day lives of wartime Britain makes up for this. There are lots of interesting little historical details (I particularly liked the inflatable tanks) and the depiction of the "contemps" is mostly convincing, if occasionally a little cutesy (Alf and Binnie, I'm looking at you). A believable wartime atmosphere is evoked with very few missteps, even for British readers. Willis and her editors have clearly been on the ball.
Willis' style has always been gyratory, relentlessly circling around her characters' obsessions and repeating themes with minor variations which only slowly advance the plot. Here it doesn't work quite as well as in some of her other books because the three main characters are all in essentially the same predicament and react in similar ways. Their stories are effectively intercut, with each chapter ending on a mini-cliffhanger that encourages you to keep reading. However, sometimes this works too well and being expected to pick up the threads of a relatively uninteresting character becomes annoying. Quite often I skipped ahead to find out how the cliffhanger resolved before going back to read the next chapter.
But my chief feeling of dissatisfaction was with the time travel set-up. A major repeated trope is missed meetings - characters are constantly late or delayed or distracted, and end up missing each other or avoiding, by pure chance, a fatal bombing strike. Clearly this is intended to show the horrible contingency and chanciness of war, but it has the unfortunate consequence of making a mockery of the self-correcting nature of the continuum. Which in any case is suspiciously convenient. Changes to important events are supposedly prevented by "slippage" in time or space when the historian goes through that prevents them from being present at a temporally important event, but how does the continuum know what is "important"? And if events are so contingent and chaotic, why couldn't a minor action by a historian elsewhere have a butterfly's wings effect resulting in major consequences that change the present? Just moving them to a different point in space or time won't prevent that.
[Side note: the brilliant Ray Bradbury short story that also explores this possibility, A Sound of Thunder, is available online. If you haven't done so, I strongly urge you to read it. It is, in my opinion, one of the greatest short stories ever written.]
To be fair, Michael in particular expresses just this concern, so it's possible that a significant revelation is lying in wait in part two. However the self-correcting aspect is so important to Willis' conception of time travel that I can't see a satisfactory resolution being achieved. I fear the inconsistencies in the science fiction underpinning will just have to be lived with. It's just as well that the main story is so strong.