Blackout by Connie WillisSpectra (Random House), 2010

The premise of this book is excellent: it’s 2060 and we’ve figured out time travel, so historians, instead of just spending their time in libraries and archives and museums, head back to the past to witness history first-hand. Of course, there’s the usual time travel question: can they influence events, and what’s to stop them from doing so? Well, it seems like there are “divergence points”: moments where the course of history could have changed so much if things had gone differently, moments in history that are too volatile, moments that won’t let a time traveler in. If you try to get to one of these places, there’ll be slippage: you’ll end up in a different time, or a different place, which most historians think is a good thing: a feature rather than a bug, as it were. But at least one theorist thinks that slippage is a symptom of a problem, a sign that something big is wrong and that time travelers are messing with things they shouldn’t be messing with.

Meanwhile, historians keep on traveling to the past, and there’s lots of great detail around this. Oxford, in this book, has a whole time travel lab plus several supporting departments: props and wardrobe teams to get historians the money and papers and clothes they’ll need to be, say, an American reporter covering Dunkirk, or a shopgirl in London during the blitz; a whole fleet of antique vehicles so you can learn to drive a 1940s Bentley or pilot a boat. There are even “implants” and “tablets” for languages, accents, and historical knowledge— not that there isn’t also an awful lot of good old-fashioned book-based research involved. And then there’s the great detail of the scenes set in the past: those parts of the book feel like solid historical fiction, smart historical fiction, concerned with detail and scene-setting and history, but with enough characterization and plot to make for a really satisfying read.

So: this is the story of several different time travelers who are doing their research on WWII-era Britain. There’s Merope, who wants to see VE day but ends up working as a maid in Warwickshire, looking after evacuated children; there’s Polly, who ends up in London during the Blitz; there’s Michael, who wants to study ordinary people who become heroes, including the fishermen who helped with the evacuation at Dunkirk. They all get to 1940s England, but once they’re there, things don’t always go according to plan. The perspective of the book shifts from chapter to chapter—which feels a bit manipulative (you want to keep reading ’cause you want to get back to that other plot thread!) but is also exciting; chapters often end with cliffhangers—as, indeed, does the whole book, which is actually the first part of a two-book work. I fear I might have to re-read it in the fall when the second part comes out, but that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, since I pretty much entirely enjoyed this book.