Connie Williams Part 2

To Say Nothing of the Dog: How We Found the Bishop’s Bird Stump

This is by far the most lighthearted of Connie Willis’ time travel stories.  It is based on Jerome K. Jerome’s semi autobiographic and comic novel “Three Men in a Boat, to Say Nothing of the Dog” about three men and a dog who go on a boating vacation on the Thames.  In Willis’ story, the historians have been recruited by a rich benefactor to recreate Coventry Cathedral, which was destroyed in the Blitz.  Ned Henry, a time traveler who is a 20^th century specialist, is sent to return items back to the late 19^th century because he is the only one available to fix a possible problem in continuity, but he is effected by time lag.  He meets up with two contemporaries and they go on a leisurely trip up the Thames along with a dog and the same time Jerome did in real life.  Eventually he meets another historian Verity Kimble and they have to solve the mystery of what happened to the Bishop’s bird stump, an item that was in the cathedral at some point, but which may have been destroyed in the blitz.

The book is a mix of comedy, romance, and mystery.  Ned gets dragged into repeated complicated misadventures involving pets and social demands.  There is a mystery full of clues as to what happened to the Bishop’s Bird stump, a very ugly iron vase that was donated to the church and which vanished for seemingly no obvious reason.  And several characters fall in love over the course of the story.  The main science fiction themes are the problems of determinism vs free will which crop up some in her other time travel stories along with thoughts on the space-time continuum.  Besides the time travel there is not that much other science fiction apart from a plague that killed all cats in the future, but this actually has relevance since historians take a cat into the future, which isn't supposed to be allowed by the laws of time travel.

All in all this is a novel appropriate for all ages and is a good choice for comedy, mystery or romance fans.

Connie Williams Part 1

Connie Williams best known stories focus on Time Travelling historians from the late 21st century in her novels and short stories.  While she has written other works, mostly her stories are soft science fiction that all follow a group of late Oxford historians who travel back in time to England disguised as contemporary people.

She has a simple set of rules in place that govern her universe. Deadlines: You can't be alive at the same time twice.  No altering past events: her time machine won't even send you back if you will alter major events or else it will send you back hours or days later.  This is called slippage and also works to send you to a slightly different time if someone could see you arrive.  You can't go to "divergent points" such as triggers for wars or other decisive events in history, where even a small action could have major consequences that history couldn't correct.  You can't take things or people back with you, especially if that would alter history.  You have to travel through "drop sites", which are certain specific locations where you can time travel and no one will notice you coming or going.

She is one of my favorite current writers and she tends to focus a lot more on plot, dialog, characters, and setting than most other science fiction writers.  She does a lot of detailed historical research before writing these stories and the science fiction details are mainly there to advance the usually fairly complex plot.  For the most part her books are fairly cheerful and fun (except for the end of Doomsday Book) even when she focuses on fairly serious matters like World War II.

Doomsday Book

This is the darkest and most depressing of her four historian novels, though the first two thirds are not particularly dark.  A historian named Kivrin travels back to oxford in 1320, but unknowingly arrives several decades after that.  There are two parallel plots involving disease, one a modern deadly strain of influenza that has infected both Kivrin and the technician who sent her back in time and another one with an outbreak of the plague in the 14th century that happens towards the end of the book. Kivrin becomes delusional from the influenza when she arrives in the past and can't remember her drop site, while the local contemporaries think she is a runaway nun since she can do things like read and write.  She becomes stranded in the past since the future time influenza outbreak means no one can come and rescue her for fear of spreading the disease.  Soon after becoming stranded the black death arrives in her village and wipes out the local population while she can do nothing to stop it.

Doomsday Book won both the Nebula and Hugo awards for best novel and was nominated for other awards.  It is fairly dramatic and presents a interesting description of 14th century English life.  It has several memorable characters and the disease story lines in particular are extremely tense.  Like some of her other work she includes some religious symbolism in her work, particularly when dealing with the priest of the local church.

For the most part its very appropriate for teenage and above audience and will appeal to people interested in the middle ages and history.  The only possibly disturbing parts of the book are the vivid descriptions of the plagues the infect the various characters.

H.G. Wells Part 1

Considered one of the fathers of science fiction, Wells wrote dozens of novels starting in the late 19th century as well as dozens more non-fiction books that often dealt with science, history, and socialism.  The novels sometimes come of as a bit dated today and the actual science is fairly week.  Even though Wells was fairly educated on scientific matters the science fiction is usually just an excuse to advance the plot, which was often a morality tale.  But they are still entertaining quick reads for the most part and are extremely influential with many films and other books based around the themes he first wrote about.  They popularized ideas like alien invasions and time travel, which have become staples of science fiction over the last century.

Time Machine 

His first novel is probably the weakest of the four I mention in these posts as far as plot goes, but it is a decent read and popularized the idea of time travel.  The basic plot is a man invents a time machine and travels over 800,000 thousand years into the future.   Mankind has been transformed into two races the lazy and peaceful Eloi and the brutal workers known as Morlocks.  The time traveler rescues an Eloi named Weena and they have to escape an attack from the Morlocks.  The time traveler escapes even further into the future and sees the earth as a dying planet rules by crab creatures.  He returns to the present to recount his adventure to his contemporaries and then goes further into the future never to return.

People are still using a lot of the themes from this book, but the book itself reads more like a simple socialist morality tale than a really interesting story.  The themes of a people losing their humanity because they are either idle or worked to hard is a bit heavy handed and is still being recycled in current movies like Elysium.  Most other time travel stories afterwards have dealt with more interesting themes like people going to try to change or observe the past or being fish out of waters in the future.  Its not a bad book, but it feels mostly dated and the point is the morality tale not the time travel.

Its appropriate for early teen readers and older, though they may find parts of it a bit boring.

Island of Dr Moreau

This was his third novel and of the four novels I have read by him I think this is easily the most interesting one.  The plot revolves around an English shipwreck victim named Prendick who arrives on a Pacific island run by Dr. Moreau.  Moreau it turns out has been performing painful experiments on animals like pumas and the result is an island filled with bizarre hybrids like human/pig, hyena/pig, and a bear/dog/horse named M'ling.  Moreau has been attempting to turn animals into humans, but they always revert back into the beastly natures despite the restrictions such as no walking on four legs that Moreau imposes on them.  Eventually Prendick becomes more used the creations over time, but Moreau is killed by one of his creations.  Prendick has to escape the island by raft after the supplies and boats are destroyed.  It has a wonderful ending where he arrives back in England and sees the people there reverting back to what he sees as their animal nature and is forced to leave civilization.

This is the most interesting of these novels since the plot is complex and original, there are several detailed characters instead of the bland ones he usually uses, the setting is memorable, and it has interesting moral issues that integrate into the whole story well.  He tackles themes of the morality of vivisection and animal experiments, what separates man from animals, how societies attempt to control behavior, and the morality of inflicting cruelty and pain on others in the goal of advancement of science and knowledge.  He didn't have any knowledge of modern genetic engineering, but this is an obvious source for future stories about that issue as well as the basic plot is a mad scientist manipulating the nature of living creatures to advance his ideas.

This novel is appropriate for teens though their is a good bit of violence and things like torture are mentioned frequently.  It will be interesting to most readers.

The next post will have reviews of Wells' The Invisible Man and War of the Worlds.