The Road to Roswell, by Connie Willis

This is a rom-com, a nice relaxing read. I think Connie Willis could have put more into it than that, but in the end it's pretty much a better grade of Hallmark movie (maybe a low-stakes romantic comedy with some big name actors between projects). The special effects would not be very difficult at all, and there's a lot you could do with an animated, very fast tumbleweed that would be fun to watch. A nice break from post-apocalyptic stories I guess, since reality has a way of catching up to those and that will never happen with alien stories. I think it's better than a 3 but it's not a 4.

My Goodreads Review

Schwarzchild Radius, by Connie Willis

I am back to reading from the Secret History of Science Fiction, this time the story Schwarzchild Radius by Connie Willis.  I have read several of Willis' works about the past, including Blackout/All Clear.  They go pretty light on the speculation, mostly focusing on the characters in the past, possibly with some time travel thrown in.  Schwarzchild Radius is pretty much a straight short story, an aging professor having a flashback to the trenches of WWI while being interviewed by an amateur historian.  Many of the stories about the Great War have that surreal quality--it was the most intense war ever fought, after which we stepped back from the brink with the Geneva Convention for awhile.  I thought the story was OK, but Willis is kind of verbose for me sometimes, and this is one of those times.  2 stars from me.

All Clear, by Connie Willis

All Clear is the second half of the Hugo-nominated Blackout/All Clear two-volume novel by Connie Willis.  I reviewed Blackout even though it was only half the novel, but now I've gotten through both.  And for the most part, it's pretty much like the first part--the four protagonists, historians from the future, are still trying to get out.  They continue to scramble, with less hope. 

But toward the end, the novel finally pays off.  The various theories about time travel and the continuum are woven together, with all the complexities of knowing how things came out faced fully.  It's hard keeping it all straight, but done well.  And I have grown more appreciative of endings since reading Infinite Jest (see earlier post).  This one is very well executed, with all hard work paying off as well as it could.  Was it worth 900 pages to get to that ending?  It's really hard to say.  In her forward she says the book grew on its own, but I do think the action got pretty repetitive--a Reader's Digest condensed version would probably actually work (do they still do those?).  In any case I'll give it 3 stars and say I liked it.

Blackout, by Connie Wills

Blackout is the first volume of a two-volume set nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards.  It is followed by All Clear.  The story is from her time traveler environment, set in 2060 Oxford.  Historians have discovered time travel and use it to investigate the past, but they can't get close to the big stories--"laws of time travel" prevent them from changing big events, they think.  I am going to go ahead and review Blackout, though I've started on All Clear, just to stay in touch.

The book jacket promises some big-picture time travel ideas, but the story so far is pretty deeply enmeshed in day to day events.  There's a vast amount of words and space spent on conveying the utter confusion and scrambling involved in getting historians to the past.  One would think they wouldn't have to rush around so, after all it is time travel and they can appear when they want to.  But assignments change and instructions are given at the last minute, and the chaos persists into their past assigments.  Such is the setup for our three heroes' investigations into WWII.  They get shifted in time and stranded, continuing their frantic scramble into survival in war.  It's picking up and possibly I will like it better as events come together, but I dunno, the relentless urgency just doesn't seem to fit the depicted events so well.  We shall see.

Fire Watch, by Connie Willis

Award judges at times like to reward a story that relies mostly on its emotional strength rather than the speculative imagination, and that would be where they went with Fire Watch. It's a time travel story, but there's only a smattering of talk of grandfather paradoxes or whatever. It's mostly the struggles of a history student sent back in time to experience the saving of St. Paul's Cathedral during the Blitz. It's post Cold-War-Turned-Hot, which makes it feel dated, but that's OK. For me, it never quite got a grip. It depended a lot on the reader's independent feelings about the cathedral, and I can't say I'm familiar with it. But if you want to read it, do it soon, as Infinity Plus has been dormant for awhile.