Weird & Wonderful- To Say Nothing of the Dog

For the last 2016 meeting of City Lit Books' Weird & Wonderful club, we discussed To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis's 1997 Hugo-winning comic time travel novel.

Set in the same world as the more serious "Fire Watch", The Doomsday Book, and others, To Say Nothing of the Dog follows a group of Oxford-based "historians"--time travelers--who study different periods. In this story, the mechanisms (and mechanics) of time travel have been pressed into service for a seemingly-trivial task by a wealthy philanthropist: tracking down decorative pieces of Coventry Cathedral through time, so that they can be either recovered or recreated in the time travelers' "present". Unlike Willis's other time-traveling stories, however, this one is predominantly comic (despite the possibility of collapsing the space-time continuum), reveling in wordplay, slapstick, and overt allusion and homage to its comic British inspirations, including P.G. Wodehouse and Jerome K. Jerome.

We quite liked the novel, and had a good, brief, and discursive discussion. Notes, possible spoilers, and spatiotemporal musings below:

Classic Sci-Fi: Doomsday Book

I was fortunate enough to acquire
this absolutely hideous version
of the cover. The back features
a dayglo skyline, floating
organic chemistry equations, and,
for some reason, tiny blue
space shuttles.

For November's meeting of the Classic Science Fiction Meetup, we read Connie Willis's 1992 novel "Doomsday Book". Part of her loose time travel series, "Doomsday Book" follows two storylines: that of a time-traveling historian in 14th-century England as the Black Death hits, and her mentor and other figures at Oxford in the 2050s as they, too, are hit with a dangerous pandemic.

The novel won both the Hugo & the Nebula (Willis is one of the most-awarded of SF authors), perhaps because of (or in spite of) its departure from genre standards. Domesticity and inter-personal relations are forefronted, while the technological side is quite subdued. Kivrin's travel thus reads as fairly straight historical fiction, while Dunworthy's near-future tale is more of a bureaucratic-satire-cum-pandemic-thiller.

We very much liked the novel, with one major critique: half as long would have been twice as good. Particularly in the first two-thirds or so, there's a lot of, well, not a lot, and then the pace and tone change radically around page 400 or so. I definitely wouldn't have made it to that shift were it not for book club--which would have been a shame.

Possible spoilers below!

Chicago Nerds: To Say Nothing of the Dog

This last Monday the Chicago Nerd Social Club met to discuss "To Say Nothing of the Dog" (1997), a comedic time travel story (and Hugo Winner) by Connie Willis. While the novel takes place within a fictional universe Willis has created, centered around time travel, with significant chunks of it touching on World War II, "To Say Nothing of the Dog" can very much be read as a stand-alone novel.

We had a surprisingly low completion rate for the novel, but those who did finish it all seemed to enjoy it. There may be SPOILERS BELOW: