The Gentle Journey Through War in Blackout They start to experience major glitches with their time-travelling equipment, and fear the worst: changing the past is possible. However, the protagonists are witnessing an increasingly disturbing chaos, one pointing to history itself spiraling out of control. There is one belief all Oxford time-travelling historians hold, and it goes as follows: the past cannot be changed, no matter what. The consequences are quickly veer into the unexpected. Not without its risks, the time period still draws many courageous historians willing to dive into a hell they know a little too well, and our protagonists among them are Eileen, Polly and Mike.Įileen is tasked with handling a measles outbreak during a children’s evacuation, Polly has to make a report on what life was like for a regular London girl working at a shop, and Mike is about to disrupt just about everything he possibly can with his actions at Dunkirk. World War II still holds plenty of secrets waiting to be discovered, making a central point of interest for time-travel studies. Naturally, what better use of such technology than not only shining the light of truth on the past, but to allow one to experience it for themselves? The first book in the All Clear series begins by taking us into the extremely distant future of 2060, where time travel has become a bit of a routine occupation, at least for the historians at Oxford.

In Blackout by Connie Willis, a trio of protagonists is forced to re-evaluate this axiom. The past is perhaps one of the few things we feel is set in stone no matter what we think or know about it, the reality of what happened cannot be changed. From the economy to the smaller details in our lives, it feels like everything is subject to change at the snap of fate’s fingers, especially in modern times when our scientific discoveries grow exponentially faster than our collective wisdom.

Very few things, in our modern human world at least, can be described as stable.

Connie willis time travel books