to say nothing of the dog by connie willis

Once he returns something to someone (he's too exhausted to understand what or to whom) on June 7, 1888, he's free.

(Willis is happily unconcerned with futuristic vraisemblance, though Ned makes some obligatory references to 'vids,' 'interactives,' and 'headrigs.') The only way Ned can get the necessary two weeks' R and R is to perform one more drop and recuperate in the past, away from Lady Schrapnell. Once he's been whisked through the rather quaint Net back to the Oxford future, Ned is in a state of super time-lag.

All he knows is that if they don't find it, the powerful Lady Schrapnell will keep sending them back in time, again and again and again. When we first meet Ned, in 1940, he and five other time jumpers are searching bombed-out Coventry Cathedral for the bishop's bird stump, an object about which neither he nor the reader will be clear for hundreds of pages. To Say Nothing of the Dog is a fine, and fun, romance-an amused examination of conceptions and misconceptions about other eras, other people. What Connie Willis soon makes clear is that genre can go to the dogs. (Or, more accurately, Jerome will earlier immortalize Ned's fumbling, because Ned is from the 21st century and Jerome from the 19th.) Jerome will later immortalize Ned's fumbling. In one scene the hero, Ned Henry, and his friends come upon Jerome, two men, and the dog Montmorency in-you guessed it-a boat. Jerome's singular, and hilarious, Three Men in a Boat. Sayers, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Conan Doyle? Its title is the subtitle of Jerome K. Or is it a Victorian novel in the guise of a time-traveling tale, or a highly comic romp, or a great, allusive literary game, complete with spry references to Dorothy L. Ned Henry is badly in need of a rest.He's been shuttling between the 21st century and the 1940s searching for a Victorian atrocity called the bishop's bird stump.It's part of a project to restore the famed Coventry Cathedral, destroyed in a Nazi air raid over a hundred years earlier.īut then Verity Kindle, a fellow time traveler, inadvertently brings back something from the past.Now Ned must jump back to the Victorian era to help Verity put things right-not only to save the project but to prevent altering history itself.Ī ReviewTo Say Nothing of the Dog is a science-fiction fantasy in the guise of an old-fashioned Victorian novel, complete with epigraphs, brief outlines, and a rather ugly boxer in three-quarters profile at the start of each chapter. “From Connie Willis, winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards, comes a comedic romp through an unpredictable world of mystery, love, and time travel.

To say nothing of the dog by connie willis