Authors: Connie Willis
Tags: #Fiction, #Fantasy, #General, #Science Fiction, #Retail, #Personal
All Clear
LAVISH PRAISE FOR THE BOOKS OF
CONNIE WILLIS
2010 RT Reviewer’s Choice Award Nominee for Career Achievement in Sci Fi/Fantasy
ALL CLEAR
Winner of the 2010 Nebula Award for Best Novel 2010
Locus
Recommended Reading List for Best Science Fiction Novel
“The delights of
Blackout
and
All Clear
—which are, despite appearances, one novel—are hard to describe in a small space. The revivified history is beautiful. Connie Willis has always loved England and especially London during the Blitz, and she delivers here as rich and wide a picture of the time as anything I’ve ever read. She doesn’t merely do research, she inhabits it.… Beyond that, Willis’s trademark approach, time travel, lets her stack all this together with a minimum of fill that conveys the emotional density of the event. Also, it allows her to pursue dazzling games with time. People die before they’re born, remember events before they happen; there’s an astonishing temporal knot at the end that resolves the story that only Willis could bring off.…
Blackout/All Clear
is as big a book as there’s been all year, encompassing one of the greatest events in history, paying homage to the human spirit, and demonstrating Connie Willis’s mastery in a fabulous read.”
—
The Historical Novels Review
“Willis can tell a story so packed with thrills, comedy, drama and a bit of red herring that the result is apt to satisfy the most discriminating, and hungry, reader.… Too much Connie Willis is like too much chocolate: Ain’t no such thing!”
—
The Denver Post
“This is Connie Willis’s masterpiece. A heart-wrenching, uplifting, amazing work of historical fiction as well as a heart-wrenching, uplifting, amazing work of science fiction … This is astonishing work. Read it now.”
—K
RISTINE
K
ATHRYN
R
USCH
BLACKOUT
2010 RT Reviewer’s Choice Award Nominee for Best Science Fiction Novel
2010
Locus
Recommended Reading List for Best Science Fiction Novel
“With her trademark understated, eloquent style, Willis expands the conceit of her Hugo and Nebula winning 1982 story ‘Fire Watch’ into a page-turning thriller, her first novel since 2001’s
Passage.…
Willis uses detail and period language exquisitely well, creating an engaging, exciting tale.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“On par with
Doomsday Book, Blackout
depicts the times and the spirit of the British people remarkably vividly, and bits of comic relief leaven any somberness. Characterizations of the historians and the Brits they become close to are multifaceted and believable, and the ending leaves us keenly primed for the sequel.”
—
Booklist
(starred review)
“
Blackout
is big, muscular, thoughtful and altogether terrific: a novel quite worthy of the eight-year wait for the latest words from the six-time Nebula and ten-time Hugo Award–winning author. [A] book with something for everyone that ends up working on every level. It is adventure. It is history. It is science. It is, indeed, thrilling. And it is unforgettable.”
—January Magazine
“Willis’ sense of the absurd builds on life’s uncertainties. It’s a mad world, with wit our sole defense against destiny’s outrageous bombs and rockets. [Willis has] researched
Blackout
so thoroughly, her readers may imagine she had access to the time machine her characters use.”
—
The Seattle Times
“As vivid an evocation of England during World War II as anyone has ever written … It’s hard to know what to praise more in
Blackout
.… Every detail rings true, with the kind of authority that only intense research can bring. Still, all of Willis’s knowledge is subsumed in her bravura storytelling:
Blackout
is, by turns, witty, suspenseful, harrowing and occasionally comic to the point of slapstick.… If you’re a science-fiction fan, you’ll want to read this book by one of the most honored writers in the field (ten Hugos, six Nebulas); if you’re interested in World War II, you should pick up
Blackout
for its you-are-there authenticity; and if you just like to read, you’ll find here a novelist who can plot like Agatha Christie and whose books possess a bounce and stylishness that Preston Sturges might envy.”
—
The Washington Post
“Not all science fiction looks like science fiction. Connie Willis has won more Hugo and Nebula awards than almost anyone in the field, but her books are often set in the past, while her style is more Dorothy Sayers than Neil Gaiman. Still, she belongs in genre more than in literature, because genre fiction—SF, YA, mystery—is the traditional home of narrative pleasure, and Willis can tell a story like no other.… Willis’s evocation of wartime London sometimes feels romanticized.… But by the time the three historians and Mr. Dunworthy have unraveled the mystery and arrived at the full-on, three-hanky finale, you’ll no longer be a disinterested observer. Drawn in by Willis’s skillful storytelling, you’ll be back in 1941, wondering what’s about to happen next.”
—
The Village Voice
“Heinlein’s heir has been writing widely published fiction since well before that great author’s demise: Her name is Connie Willis.…
Blackout
is a tour-de-force return to the novel form by a woman who is … one of America’s finest writers and who has more than earned her place among the greats of science fiction—Robert Heinlein included.”
—The Denver Post
“Willis is a consummate storyteller whose immersive style hooks readers from the start.”
—
Library Journal
(starred review)
“I loved this book. It is informative, subtle, full of great characters and has a wonderful plot. Just as I felt during the London Blitz—I can’t wait for
All Clear
. It’s bound to be as intriguing a page turner as
Blackout
. Brilliant. Willis at her finest.”
—M
ICHAEL
M
OORCOCK
“This compassionate and deeply imagined novel … gives the reader a strong you-were-there feeling.”
—
The Times-Picayune
All Clear
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
A Spectra Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2010 by Connie Willis
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
S
PECTRA
and the portrayal of a boxed “s”
are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Spectra, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2010.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Willis, Connie.
All clear / Connie Willis.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-52269-6
1. Time travel—Fiction. 2. Historians—Fiction.
3. World War, 1939–1945—England—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3573.I45652A79 2010
813′.54—dc22 2010030197
Cover design: FaceOut Studio, Charles Brock,
based on photographs © Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy (St. Paul’s Cathedral) and © Hulton Archive/Getty Images (spectators)
v3.1
You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true, and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her
.
—
WINSTON CHURCHILL
Well, he hasn’t come yet, sir, he’s more than a bit late tonight
.
—
LONDON PORTER TO ERNIE PYLE, REFERRING
TO THE GERMAN BOMBERS
—
26 October 1940
BY NOON MICHAEL AND MEROPE STILL HADN’T RETURNED
from Stepney, and Polly was beginning to get really worried. Stepney was less than an hour away by train. There was no way it could take Merope and Michael—correction,
Eileen
and
Mike
; she
had
to remember to call them by their cover names—no way it could take them six hours to go fetch Eileen’s belongings from Mrs. Willett’s and come back to Oxford Street. What if there’d been a raid and something had happened to them? The East End was the most dangerous part of London.
There weren’t any daytime raids on the twenty-sixth
, she thought. But there weren’t supposed to have been five fatalities at Padgett’s either. If Mike was right, and he
had
altered events by saving the soldier Hardy at Dunkirk, anything was possible. The space-time continuum was a chaotic system, in which even a minuscule action could have an enormous effect.
But two additional fatalities—and civilians, at that—could scarcely have changed the course of the war, even in a chaotic system. Thirty thousand civilians had been killed in the Blitz and nine thousand in the V-1 and V-2 attacks, and fifty million people had died in the war.
And you
know
he didn’t lose the war
, Polly thought.
And historians have been traveling to the past for more than forty years. If they’d been capable of altering events, they’d have done it long before this
. Mr. Dunworthy had been in the Blitz and the French Revolution and even the Black Death, and his historians had observed wars and coronations and coups all across
history, and there was no record of any of them even causing a discrepancy, let alone changing the course of history.
