User:Djdaedalus/OTT

The Oxford Time Travel Stories, written by Connie Willis, consist of one short story and three published novels, with a fourth novel being published in the autumn of 2010. The stories are linked by common characters, history and technology, although there are significant discrepancies between the earliest story, published in 1988, and the novels, which themselves have minor discrepancies.

The idea behind all the stories is that, in the 21st century, time travel is developed in England. It is subject to many restrictions governed by "laws of time" which render it useless for any purpose except sending people into the past as observers. On the other hand, paradoxes are also prevented by the same laws. This sets the stage for the transformation of the profession of Historian. Instead of studying records and artifacts, historians can be sent into the past to record their observations, confident that they will not affect history in the process. Since, by 21st century standards, most of the past is dangerous, historians have to be able to handle risk as well as make meticulous observations.

Certain points in history are known to be "crisis points" or "points of divergence". One example is the Battle of Waterloo. Small changes in events at these points can alter history profoundly, but the laws of time make it impossible for historians to get there using the time machine. The usual result is "slippage", which is a change in time or location when an attempt is made to place someone at the crisis point. Depending on the severity of the crisis, "slippage" can involve thousands of miles of distance or years of time.

The stories
In order of publication the stories are:
 * "Fire Watch" (1982, short story) - To pass his final exam a historian must spend three months as a fire watch volunteer at St. Paul's Cathedral in 1940, when the Luftwaffe is constantly bombing London at night.
 * "Doomsday Book" (1992) - A young historian is sent back to 14th century Oxfordshire. While she is in the past, an epidemic breaks out in 21st century Oxford, and the result may be that she is trapped in the past.
 * "To Say Nothing of the Dog" (1997) - Time travel has fallen on hard times. Rich American heiress Lady Shrapnel will fund it if she can use it to realize her dream of reconstructing the original Coventry Cathedral in Oxford.  Historians are sent back to 1940, 1888, 1395 and many other times and places as part of this quest.  In the process they discover that some paradoxes may not be paradoxes at all.
 * "Blackout" (2010) - Historians are being sent to many times and places as a matter of routine. Three elect to study people in England in 1939 and 1940.  One inadvertently participates in the Dunkirk evacuation.  All three meet in London in October 1940 after they discover that their access to the net has failed.  They wonder if they are trapped.
 * "All-Clear" (2010)

The time machine
The time travel technology uses equipment which stays in the future, sending a historian and any artifacts into the past through a portal. The historians and scientists refer to it as "the net". Sending a person or object into the past is known as a "drop". When a historian is to be picked up from the past, the net "opens" and allows him or her to pass through it, back to the future. The only visible clue is a shimmering condensation in the air. If there is any possibility of a paradox, including the net being observed by an inhabitant of the past time, the net simply fails to open.

The net may be used to send people into the past at the same location as the equipment, known as "on-site" operation, or to any other location on Earth, known as "remote" operation. In To Say Nothing of the Dog there is only one net in operation and all drops are remote. In Doomsday Book there are mentions of several nets in operation, some of which are "on-site" in historically significant places, such as Rome. In Fire Watch it is implied that the time machine operates in the London borough of St. John's Wood and that there is a semi-permanent base of operations there in past times. However this undercuts the plot elements of the novel Blackout.

There seem to be two separate modes of operation of the time machine. In one, the drop is opened to a particular time and location, and the operators get a "fix" on the drop. From then on, time passes at the same rate on both sides of the connection. Thus in Doomsday Book, Kivrin is supposed to return to the drop site after spending a certain number of days in the 14th century, returning to 2054 exactly the same number of days after she left. Unfortunately the net was shut down in 2054 by error, and to rescue Kivrin, Dunworthy must use another machine to create a new drop.

In Blackout, Colin Templer talks of going to the past in "flash time", meaning that he will spend a long time in the past but return to the future a short time after he left. This indicates another mode of operation for the machine.

In To Say Nothing of the Dog, the machine seems to be operating at different levels at the same time. The operator is running a "ten minute intermittent" to 1888, meaning that the net opens every 10 minutes in 1888 in Muchings End, Surrey, where Verity Kindle and Ned Henry are trying to fix a paradox. At the same time, it is running drops to November 1940 attempting to send people to Coventry before the destruction of the cathedral.

In Blackout the mode of operation is once more "intermittent", linking to drops in 1939 and 1940 in locations such as Warwickshire, London and Kent. At some point these drops cease functioning, leading the time-travellers to believe they are trapped in the past.

Paradoxes
Paradoxes, also called parachronistic incongruities in these stories, are a feature of time-travel stories. Time travelers may change the course of events in history by their actions, or may remove objects from their own time, preventing them from having any effect on history. In these stories, the operators of the time machine rely on the "laws of time travel", which are similar to the Novikov self-consistency principle. Any actions by time travelers which would change the course of history, particularly in ways which affect the existence of time travel itself, are rendered impossible. Either the time traveler cannot arrive at the place and time where they could affect events, or other events arise to cancel out the actions of the time traveler.

Dr. James Dunworthy
Dunworthy is introduced in Fire Watch and appears in all the stories. He is somewhat old in all appearances except one. His age is not stated explicitly, but in To Say Nothing of the Dog the character Ned Henry finds himself in the Oxford time travel laboratory in 2018, secretly watching a young (and clearly besotted) Dunworthy talk to the beautiful Lizzie Bittner, newly married to the Bishop of Coventry. This suggests that Dunworthy was in his twenties at the time, and is therefore over sixty years old in 2057.

In all the stories Dunworthy is in charge of time travel at some level. In Fire Watch he seems to be simply the leader of the organization, while in Doomsday Book he heads the Twentieth Century History group and is also responsible for the day to day running of Balliol College. His rival Gilchrist runs Medieval History from Brasenose College. Both work for the Head of History, who is on holiday throughout the crisis.

Dunworthy wears spectacles in a time when most eye defects are taken care of with treatment or contact lenses. In Fire Watch, John Bartholomew remarks sarcastically that the spectacles are "historically accurate". In Doomsday Book the spectacles are constantly fogging up when Dunworthy steps indoors.

In Fire Watch, the character Kivrin says of Dunworthy that he "wrote the book" on St. Paul's Cathedral. He is old enough to have seen the cathedral before its destruction. In Blackout the character Colin Templer teases Dunworthy about going back to rescue the treasures of the cathedral, in the same way that Lizzie Bittner rescued the treasures of Coventry Cathedral in To Say Nothing of the Dog.

Kivrin Engle
Kivrin is one of the two main characters in Doomsday Book. She is sent to the 14th century to study the ways of people living on a manor near Oxford. The intent is to send her to 1320, but the technician Badri Chaudhuri accidentally changes the drop co-ordinates, sending her to 1348, the year in which the Black Death arrived in England. She herself is immune to all diseases of the time, but has to watch while everyone around her dies in agony.

In Fire Watch, Kivrin appears as John Bartholomew's room-mate and possibly his lover. According to Bartholomew she had already been to the Middle Ages for her practicum, a field project undertaken as part of final examinations.

The two versions of Kivrin are not entirely congruent. In Fire Watch Bartholomew describes her as tall, whereas in Doomsday Book Dunworthy describes her as "a meter and a half tall" (about 5 feet) and looking "barely old enough to cross the street by herself". Her experience in Doomsday Book is extremely harrowing, but in Fire Watch she seems quite casual about it.

Colin Templer
Colin is the great-nephew of Dr. Mary Ahrens, a close friend of Dunworthy's in Doomsday Book. In 2054 he is 12 years old, extremely adventurous and apt to break any rules he does not particularly like. Despite being outside Oxford when the quarantine is imposed he slips past the checkpoints (pointing out that they are meant to keep people in, not out) and winds up helping Dunworthy resolve the problems caused by Badri Chaudhuri's illness.

In the novels Blackout and All-Clear he is 17 years old. He is pursuing Polly Churchill, an older member of the history team who tries to resist him because of the age difference, although she finds it useful that he will do almost anything she asks. For his part, Colin points out that he is determined to be a historian, and because of the effects of time-travel historians ought to marry each other. He dismisses the age difference by declaring that he will spend a few years in some other time, catch up with Polly and then return to the 2060's with little time passed for her.

At the end of Blackout a time-traveler appears in London in 1940, presenting a possible way out for others already there who believe that they are trapped. It is likely that this is Colin, breaking rules once more.

Badri Chaudhuri
Badri Chaudhuri is Dunworthy's best time-travel technician. In Doomsday Book he is loaned to Brasenose College to carry out Kivrin's drop to 1320. However he is already ill with a virulent form of influenza and accidentally sends Kivrin to 1348. Because almost all bacterial and viral diseases are preventable in 2054, he has no idea what it feels like to be ill and carries on working to the point where he can no longer think clearly.

In To Say Nothing of the Dog and Blackout Badri is mentioned, but he takes no part in the plot of either book.

Finch
Finch is Dunworthy's administrative assistant in Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog. He is very detail-oriented and, in To Say Nothing of the Dog, also somewhat prissy. In Doomsday Book he constantly updates Dunworthy on the commodities they are short of, from toilet tissue to marmalade, because of the number of quarantine detainees the college is having to accommodate. In To Say Nothing of the Dog he complains about the dirt and soot that Ned Henry is bringing in to Dunworthy's office after returning from the ruins of Coventry Cathedral.

Later in To Say Nothing of the Dog he is sent to 1888 on a secret mission for Dunworthy. He becomes the butler at one of the local mansions and remarks that he may have found his calling in life. His actual mission is to rescue kittens that are being drowned by local farmers and bringing them forward to 2057. It turns out that objects from the past can be brought to the future if they were no longer significant in their time, such as kittens about to die at the bottom of a pond, or indeed artifacts in a cathedral about to be destroyed.

Langby
Langby first appears in Fire Watch as the Captain of the fire watch volunteers. He is responsible for setting the duty rota and maintaining the equipment. John Bartholomew, the historian from the future, begins to suspect that Langby would like to see St. Paul's destroyed, and Langby has the same suspicion about Bartholomew because of an incident in the whispering gallery. Bartholomew believes that Langby is a Communist, a cousin to those responsible for destroying St. Paul's in the 21st century, because he sees him with a copy of the socialist newspaper the Daily Worker. Langby believes that Bartholomew is a Nazi spy.

Langby also appears in Blackout, where he enters the cathedral while Polly Churchill, a historian from 2060, is getting a conducted tour from the Verger. In calendar time this takes place a few days before John Bartholomew arrives in Fire Watch, on Sept. 20th, 1940.

Common history and events
There are several significant historical points, both real and fictional, mentioned in the stories.

The Blitz
The bombing of London and other cities, by the Luftwaffe in 1940, is important in all the stories except Doomsday Book. In Fire Watch it is a cathartic experience for the protagonist, who works to save St. Paul's knowing it will be destroyed in a later, fictional, event. In To Say Nothing of the Dog the bombing of Coventry Cathedral is a crisis point, because the Allies were forewarned by their code-breakers at Bletchley Park but had to avoid alerting their own defenses to preserve the secret that they had broken the German military codes. In the last two novels the Blitz and other events, such as the German V-1 attacks of 1944, form the background for the plot.

Real incidents from the Blitz feature in the stories. Both Fire Watch and Blackout mention the excavation and removal of an unexploded bomb from St. Paul's by members of the Royal Engineers under the command of Temporary Lieutenant Robert Davies in September 1940, and also the bombing of the Underground station at Marble Arch in the same month. Fire Watch reaches its climax during the raid on December 29th, 1940, the night on which Edward R. Murrow made his famous broadcast stating, wrongly, that St. Paul's was burning down.

Terrorism and "pinpoint" bombs
The sub-text of Fire Watch is that a man from the future works to prevent St. Paul's from burning down, knowing that it will be destroyed in a terrorist attack in the early 21st century. Ironically the only feature to survive is the commemorative stone laid to pay tribute to the fire watch volunteers. The cathedral is destroyed by a "pinpoint bomb", which is evidently a small device that can be easily carried by a single person, but is powerful enough to destroy everything in a radius of a quarter of a mile. In Fire Watch the terrorists are communists dispossessed by the collapse of the Soviet Union, although when the story was written the Soviet Union was still in existence. Similar explosions destroy other buildings, including the state capitol building in Denver, Colorado. In Fire Watch the destruction is said to take place in 2007, but in To Say Nothing of the Dog it is said to happen in 2013.

These events inform the character of Dr. James Dunworthy, who appears in all the stories. It is hinted that he may wish to somehow rescue the artifacts in the cathedral using time travel. The other historians relish the chance to see the inside of the cathedral as it was. One artifact that is mentioned several times is the painting "The Light of the World".

The Pandemic
This was first mentioned in Doomsday Book and appears to have been a plot device conjured up to make possible the imposition of an instant quarantine on the city of Oxford, after a breakout of a potentially lethal form of influenza. The Pandemic itself, as the name implies, appears to have been a worldwide epidemic of a deadly viral disease occurring in about 2014. In Doomsday Book Dr. Mary Ahrens mentions that she and a friend had been traveling in Egypt during the Pandemic forty years previously. The novel is set in 2054.

Extinction of cats
In Fire Watch, the protagonist, John Bartholomew, is amazed to encounter a cat in the cathedral, as if they are rare or unknown in his time. It is possible that this originally was meant only to imply that his future time was post-apocalyptic to some degree, but in To Say Nothing of the Dog the domestic cat is quite extinct in 2057. In the first chapter the nameless "new recruit", seeing a cat in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral in 1940, remarks that they have been extinct for "nearly forty years" in 2057.

A major plot point is that one historian, Verity Kindle, has somehow managed to bring a cat forward in time from 1888, which is supposed to be impossible. Another historian, Ned Henry, is sent back to 1888 to recover from time-lag and also return the cat to its own time and place.

Technology
Biotechnology is very advanced in all the stories. With the help of drugs and special equipment, the historians can absorb large amounts of information about their intended destinations. Medicine has eliminated many common diseases and is used to make sure the historians do not fall ill in the past, by boosting their immune systems. The success of medicine is such that one character in Doomsday Book, having never experienced so much as a mild cold, is unaware that he is ill until he collapses over the time travel control console.

Everyday technology, such as the telephone, is extrapolated from the time each story was written. In Doomsday Book, published in 1992, video phones are commonplace but people do not use mobile phones to any degree. In To Say Nothing of the Dog, there are "handhelds" which combine the features of computers and telephones. However in Blackout, published in 2010 and set in 2060, there are no mobile phones of any kind. Indeed, "phone tag" and its frustrations are major elements of the early parts of the plot, as the various historians try to contact Dunworthy or the laboratory technicians to find out what has happened to their scheduled missions.

A notable feature of all the stories is the extension of the London Underground subway system to Oxford and possibly beyond. Journeys to and from London are thus routine. Personal automobiles seem to have disappeared, and the main menace to pedestrians is the bicycle. Commercial traffic still uses trucks and vans, some of which are solar powered. At the end of To Say Nothing of the Dog, the lost treasures of Coventry Cathedral are carried in the only available vehicle - a hearse.