Blackout

[drplokta]

So far, Blackout, Connie Willis's first novel in eight years, is rather irritating.

(There are probably some very minor spoilers in this.)

It's a direct sequel to her 1992 Hugo winner Doomsday Book, which I recall was also rather irritating.

The first problem is that while it's allegedly set in Oxford in 2060, it's actually set in the 1980s or thereabouts. All the characters are continually running round Oxford looking for each other, and/or receiving garbled messages, because no one has a mobile phone and no one has email (or at least, they don't use them). You could just about get away with this in a 1992 novel, but you certainly can't in a 2010 novel.

Second, she hasn't really done her research (again). Inability to use Victoria station wouldn't be much of an impediment to getting round London in 1940, when it was only on the District line and wasn't an interchange. There aren't any garter snakes in England. Nor is there any skunk cabbage. London is not laid out in blocks. Russell Square Tube station was involved in a terrorist incident in 2005, not 2006. No English person who's studied crosswords in the history of games could be unaware of the existence of cryptic crosswords, even in 2060. Charing Cross wasn't the right Tube station for Trafalgar Square in 1945, because it was what's now called Embankment. What's now called Charing Cross was two different stations called Trafalgar Square and Strand, and you'd have used one of those for Trafalgar Square.

Authors, if you're going to set a book in a country that you don't live in, try to get a native to read your book before it's published.

Comments

[martyn44.livejournal.com]

It didn't do Dan Brown any harm. In one six line paragraph he had Kent coppers agreeing to hold characters recently arrived from France until Gendarmerie arrived and an armed response unit as a couple of constables with Webley revolvers. Later in the chapter he had whatisname using a public telephone on the platform of Temple tube station.

[armb.livejournal.com]

Someone left a copy of Dan Brown's Digital Fortress in the kitchen at work. I'm not a cryptographer, but I work with people who are, and I know a bit about the subject. It was horrible, in a fascinating sort of way.
Imagine those policemen had "automatic revolver carbine pistols", and you have some idea of the wrongness.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, it was really, really horribly bad.

[timill]

I suppose I shouldn't ask about the main-line railways...

[deor.livejournal.com]

She does have a throw-away line explaining the lack of mobiles, when one of the characters is looking for a black skirt from Wardrobe and the only ones available are a miniskirt and an "i-com cargo kilt". The wardrobe person says that the cellphone in the kilt is only a replica and "not dangerous", but the character looking for a 1940s style skirt still rejects it. Why cellphones should be dangerous is not explained, but the line does let Willis keep some continuity with the original mobile-less future of the earlier books and this one.

The rest of it though - MAPS are your friends, authors! And even Wikipedia could tell you what the range of a garter snake is. Really!

[del-c.livejournal.com]

Also, skunk cabbage, the clue is in the name!

[ellarien]

Maybe the cell phones really turned out to cause brain cancer?

[elysdir.livejournal.com]

Interesting re the cell-phones-are-dangerous thing; I have a very vague notion that there may have been a similar line in one of the other works set in that universe (maybe To Say Nothing of the Dog?), but I may be making that up.

I would expect that if cell phones per se turn out to be dangerous, then some other less-dangerous technology will come along to replace them. But yeah, good point about keeping continuity.

...My general feeling about all the phone-message stuff is that Willis loves screwball comedies, especially comedies of misunderstanding. It's a genre that unfortunately doesn't update well to the cell phone era. There are certainly people in the modern world who don't have cell phones, don't answer them, and/or ignore messages left on them, and there's always batteries running out, and lost phones, and mistakenly swapped phones, and inconvenient loss of signal, and so on, but that all starts to feel more and more contrived to me as the cell phone becomes more and more integrated into daily life.

But screwball comedies were often pretty contrived. So although the phone-message stuff in Willis's work (it pops up in her non-time-travel work too) has always bugged me a little (I generally don't really enjoy comedy-of-misunderstanding regardless of setting), I've usually tended to think of it as a genre convention.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

London with blocks? Even ten seconds on Google maps would have fixed that one.

And not checking native plants and animals is a mistake no professional should ever make. (Heck, I'd slam a fan writers for that, let alone a pro)

[owlfish]

I talk about distance in blocks in London all the time. It's not gridded, but I do find it a useful approximate distance measure even without a grid. (But then I'm not a native.)

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Blocks a measure of distance can have its uses, though in London I'm never quite sure whether to count small side roads as breaking up a 'block'.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

I gave up on The Domesday Book two chapters in because of the awful research.

[nwhyte]

I do not recommend her Hugo and Nebula-winning short story "Fire Watch", set in the same universe!

[elysdir.livejournal.com]

Fwiw, "Fire Watch" is one of my favorite Connie Willis stories.

From your linked review, it sounds like what ruined it for you is the depiction of Oxford; that's fair, and I definitely agree that authors should do research on their chosen locales, but in this particular instance, I suspect I would've liked the story a lot even if I'd been aware of the Oxford issues.

I also suspect that two of your concerns about her depiction are things that it's reasonable to imagine could change over the course of seventy years (as of the time she wrote the story), even at a place with as much tradition as Oxford: I can easily imagine it becoming more common for two people of different genders to share housing, and I can less-easily imagine that various pressures might result in more room sharing.

But your criticisms about graduates sharing rooms with undergrads, and about use of the term "major," seem more reasonable to me.

Still, you referred to "making her 21st Oxford so similar to yer standard 20th century US campus"--but I think that opposite-sex room sharing and grad/undergrad room sharing are both quite rare in US universities as well, so I don't think that's the reason for her having made those choices.

[crumpetsfortea.livejournal.com]

Connie Willis seems particularly awful at characterizing locales. As a native Coloradoan, you'd think that she'd have a handle on one of the state's major cities, but her depiction of Boulder in Bellwether is laughably bad. Given that the lady apparently can't make a one-hour drive to do research for a book, it's not all that surprising that her future London is so awful.

[missfairchild.livejournal.com]

Authors, if you're going to set a book in a country that you don't live in, try to get a native to read your book before it's published.

Reminds me of a conversation I had with a British actor who was in a Hollywood film set in the UK. He had argued with the writer and director at length over inaccuracies in the script - the most glaring of which involved the characters taking an hour to travel between Northumbria and London on foot - and was told that Brits made up too small a percentage of the global audience to pander to and that "nobody else will give a fuck".

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe Stephen King's Cell took place between the two.

It's very usual for old science fiction to be unable to keep up. (Slide rules on starships). It's a growing tendency for futuristic novels by older sf writers to be actually less technologically advanced than the present.

There are things that are difficult to get right in different places and times - which is why there's no excuse for the failure of the easy stuff. The tube map and the A to Z are readily available. It's not as if London's layout has changed that much. The streets have been the same for hundreds of years for the most part.

V-1

[(Anonymous)]

Another mild irritation in _Blackout_: she keeps referring to the V-1 as a "rocket." It was, of course, a cruise missile with a jet engine (actually a form of pulse jet). And no, the references are from the uptime characters, not the contemps who might not have known better.

[intertext.livejournal.com]

Well my parents (contemps) always referred to them as "rockets" when describing them to me.

But a nurse wouldn't have used the centigrade scale when taking a temperature, nor could one buy grapes for someone in the hospital. (sent by coth

Blackout, C. Willis - more errors?

[(Anonymous)]

Dr. P, what do you think of the following?

Page 141 - ......but it's for local calls only. Five p.". This is decimal coinage which did not happen until approx 1972. Even in 1954 the cost of a local call was only 4 pennies (written as 4d). The same with the cost of the rent; should have been written as 25/- (twenty-five shillings or one pound 5 shillings - not one pound five). It is also quite unlikely that a home in a poorer part of London would have a private telephone at that time.

Page 141 - Glaring error - .... "trunk call, there's a pillar box on Lampden Road" - A pillar box is used for posting letters! Should have read ....."telephone box on Lampden Road".

Page 272 - Patients did not wear hospital gowns in 1940 - they wore pyjamas (usually their own, brought in by relatives) or provided by the hospital.

Page 272 - ...... Temperature - "it was thirty-nine this morning." This is a celcius (centigrade) thermometer reading which was not used in the UK until the 1970's. Temperatures would have been in fahrenheit readings.

Page 401 - ..... The Picadilly, Northern, and Jubilee Lines weren't running." - The Jubilee did not exist then and was not built until June 1977!

Page 459 - Regarding the couple in the underground station: I am guessing from the set up and the language they use (poor grammar) that they are a middle-aged, lower-class couple. No way would a man in his late-forties, early fifties, from his kind of background be called Virgil! This is a very un-English name! Such a man would have a name like Bert, Fred, Alf, Jim, Bill, etc.

Page 463 - ....."followed by Mike with cartons of tea." Paper was in short supply and there were public collections of paper taking place throughout the war. Paper would not have been used for something as trivial as drinking cartons and lids! Look at any war photograph of the Women's Voluntary Service (WVS) providing tea for people in shelters, underground stations. etc. and you will notice stacks of thick, white, china cups and saucers! This is London, England in the 1940 Blitz! not Starbucks!

Page 487 - "Fedora" is an American term - the hat was known as a "Trilby" in 1940's England

The dustjacket itself has two errors: On the inside of the back cover, credit for the illustrations is based on photographs. The "bombers" are presumably supposed to be German, dropping bombs on London during the Blitz. The Germans did not have 4-engined bombers until 1944 with quite a different tail-plane to the ones in the "photograph". These particular planes look like American B29's dropping incendaries ( note the small size) during the bombing of Tokyo in 1945!

The second error is quite unforgivable! Credit on the back cover is "St. Patrick's Cathedral! This should be ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL!!!

Re: Blackout, C. Willis - more errors?

[hagsrus.livejournal.com]

Not to mention the 2 cent stamp!

Re: Blackout, C. Willis - more errors?

[(Anonymous)]

"Page 487 - "Fedora" is an American term - the hat was known as a "Trilby" in 1940's England"

Actually, a trilby has a narrower brim than a fedora, thus making it a different hat altogether.

Re: Blackout, C. Willis - more errors?

[gillo]

Patients did not wear hospital gowns in 1940 - they wore pyjamas (usually their own, brought in by relatives) or provided by the hospital.

Still do, unless they've been brought in unconscious and unidentifiable, or are about to go for surgery.

You're so right about other stuff.

2006 Bombing

[magnoire.livejournal.com]

Willis' mentioning of the 2006 Bombing of London was first referred to in her story Fire Watch which was written in the early 80's and mentioned again in her other books that were written in the 1990's. Obviously, long before 7/7.
Apparently, she had incredible foresight and was just a year off.

Re: 2006 Bombing

[tavella.livejournal.com]

That was a bombing in St. Paul's, though, not Russell Street Station (if that was specifically referred to.)

[gillo]

Here because I Googled the book to try to find a review which did not gush about her perfect recreation of wartime Britain. (And then found several of my LJ friends had already commented.)

The factual errors are annoying, but the language really pisses me off, and I blame the editor as much as Ms Willis. A character comments of the use of "June sixth" or whatever, for dates, and she is then totally random with usage.

What the heck is a "candy butcher"? Selling chocolate on a train in 1940? No way.

Polly is obsessed with the black skirt, but clothing rations had come in by then - no reference to them at all in the shop scenes.

I like the story, but she desperately needed a reasonably knowledgeable Brit to do a beta-read on it. It spoils my enjoyment. A lot. (Just as "muffler" wrecked Doomsday.)