Hugo Nominee: Black Out and All Clear

[sierra_le_oli]

Question via e-mail. Does the 2011 Hugo Voters packet include both parts of Connie Willis's alternate history/SF novel? I hadn't thought about this at all! Sadly, the answer is no. _Blackout_ is included as a PDF but _All Clear_ isn't. Which is a pity because it turns out that _All Clear_ isn't a sequel, but volume 2 of the same novel

Comments

[bellinghwoman]

she still has the knack of passing on her love of history

Some would say that it's a shame her apparent love of history did not include researching her subject - there was a flurry of lj posts awhile ago castigating the book for its numerous errors (very jarring to some English readers, perhaps not noticable - or less disruptively so - to non-English readers). The only two I can remember were she had someone taking 3 hours to walk from (IIRC) Euston to Oxford Circus, and having the Jubilee Line in operation decades before it was actually built. To quote someone who obviously has strong feelings on the subject, they describe the books as '[...] the execrable waste of paper that is Blackout/All Clear -- the only thing clear about it to me is that it's the worst novel I've read by Connie Willis: there are occasional flashes of her sparkling wit, but they're mostly drowned in a dismal swamp that lacks direction, differentiation between characters, and purpose -- then compounds it by making historical errors about a time that's minutely documented and still within living memory.'

[sierra_le_oli]

I was aware that criticism of her history existed, so I was prepared for that and the couple of things I noticed, I just read over. But going by nwhyte's review, the things I would've actually noticed have been corrected in the ebook.

Differentiation between the main characters is definitely a problem - they're often all generic History Buff. And where the characters are differentiated, they (almost) descend into stereotype.

Apart from _The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms_, I haven't read any of the other Nebula nominees, but I'm astonished _Blackout_/_All Clear_ won. As fond as I've been of Willis's work in the past, I hope she doesn't win the Hugo for this.