http://www.nicholaswhyte.info/sf/fw.htm

"Fire Watch" by Connie Willis won the Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novelette presented in 1983; it also won the SF Chronicle Award. "Fire Watch" is set in almost the same universe as Willis' later novels Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog; a future Oxford whence students are sent back in time for research purposes. It was the first of the three to be written, and indeed the first story by Willis to win either Hugo or Nebula, back in the days when one might have reasonably doubted that anyone would ever surpass Poul Anderson's seven Hugos or Delany and Silverberg's four Nebulas each (though this year alone brought Willis halfway there).

The narrator of "Fire Watch" is sent to guard St Paul's in 1940 during the Blitz, rather than to accompany St Paul as he had anticipated. This failure to communicate vital information is a recurring theme in Willis' work; think of the incapacitated computer technician in Doomsday Book, the appalling interdepartmental assistant in Bellwether, the messages which may or may not be from the dead in Lincoln's Dreams, To Say Nothing of the Dog and Passage. In this case it seems a little odd that the narrator claims to have spent four years preparing for the wrong mission, and I was thrown by his reference to the time he'd wasted learning Latin - surely Greek would have been more appropriate? - but most readers are prepared to go with the flow.

Another Willis theme that one can track from "Fire Watch" through most of her later work is death; horrible, unfair, untimely death. Death is a major player in all the above-mentioned books except the comedic To Say Nothing of the Dog and Bellwether. Death and the imminent threat of death are ever present in the London of the Blitz; every relationship the narrator forms is coloured by the knowledge that death is quite possibly just around the corner. The narrator knows, as the citizens of London do not, that St Paul's Cathedral will survive the Blitz but be destroyed in a surprise terrorist attack by Communists in 2007. (In 1982, Communist attacks on Western cities were plausible, even if the idea that major buildings could be utterly destroyed in single acts of terrorism still seemed far-fetched.)

For me, however, no matter how convincing Willis' portrayal of the Blitz or how moving her sense of the impermanence of it all, the entire story is completely ruined by the implausibility of 21st century Oxford. The narrator, who is a final year undergraduate, has a room-mate called Kivrin, a woman graduate student. In our world, Oxbridge student accommodation practices are completely different; individual accommodation rather than room sharing is prevalent; it is rare to get an opposite-sex couple sharing accommodation unless they are sexual partners (which does not seem to be the case here); it is almost unheard-of for graduate students to share with undergraduates (because their fees are different, their expected time of residence in the college is different, and they basically don't want to). On top of that, the narrator refers to himself as a "history major"; I don't know any UK or Irish university which uses the term "major" in that sense, and I confidently predict that even if it becomes fashionable in the future Oxford will be among the last to adopt it.

The result was that I spent most of the story picking up on the deliberate hints about the fate of St Paul's and at the same time wondering what the author was trying to hint about the fate of Oxford. This sort of thing happens all the time including in some of my favourite writing - in Mary Gentle's Ash, A Secret History, the historically inappropriate Gregorian calendar is used, for instance; or indeed Shakespeare has striking clocks in Julius Caesar, followed by Cleopatra playing billiards and wearing a corset - but in this case I just couldn't overlook it. By making her 21st Oxford so similar to yer standard 20th century US campus, Willis no doubt intended to propel her readers from a familiar environment into an alien war-torn city, and it probably succeeds for most of them. For this Oxbridge graduate who grew up in Belfast, it just didn't work that way.

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3788625.html

This time around, I was even more infuriated by the academic setting. The idea that someone would spend four years preparing for (and being prepared for) the wrong mission is simply ridiculous; the investment of resources for a time trip is surely significant enough to make certain that the person sent back in time is fully prepared for their environment. On top of that, it's not even very clear what the mission is in the first place; can the narrator change the course of time, or not? If not, what's the point? It's a story where Willis has written a heart-wrenchingly sentimental account of a confected history, and it worked for Hugo and Nebula voters, but not for me in 2002 or on rereading in 2021. ( )

Well written short story ( )

Connie Willis’ Fire Watch begins her Oxford Time Travel series by focusing on a time traveling historian who visits St. Paul’s Cathedral during the Blitz after a computer error changes his assignment from visiting St. Paul to visiting the cathedral named after him. The story includes characters that appear in other stories, such as Mr. Dunworthy and Kivrin Engle, with Kivrin preparing for the assignment she undertook in the subsequent novel, Doomsday Book (pg. 74). As much as the historian muses on the nature of time travel, he also admits “there are no guidelines for historians, and no restrictions either” (pg. 28). Willis explains how the Oxford History Department of the future encodes information using endorphins (pg. 18) while describing the destruction of St. Paul’s Cathedral in 2007 (pg. 74) as the result of disgruntled communists after the fall of the Soviet Union (pg. 50). As Willis originally published this story in 1982, the events are somewhat dated, but that doesn’t affect the emotional weight of them based on the quality of her character-building. Those who enjoy the other books in the Oxford Time Travel series will enjoy seeing how it all began—and enjoy the connections to later novels Blackout and All Clear—while fans of historical fiction or sci-fi will like Willis’ world-building. ( )

[b:Fire Watch|24986|Fire Watch|Connie Willis|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1339503624s/24986.jpg|2324159] did an excellent job of establishing the Oxford Time Travel series. It did an even better job of bringing home just how terrifying WWII England was, and how largely damaged and broken London was by the experience. [a:Connie Willis|14032|Connie Willis|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1199238234p2/14032.jpg] does a beautiful job of bringing morality and feeling back into history, and breathing life into the experiences and statistics so commonly touted about.

It's chilling and heartbreaking, and makes the rest of the series that much more moving to read. ( )

This novelette which won the both Hugo and Nebula, serves as a good primer to [a:Connie Willis|14032|Connie Willis|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1199238234p2/14032.jpg]'s works.

I just read [b:To Say Nothing of the Dog|77773|To Say Nothing of the Dog (Oxford Time Travel, #2)|Connie Willis|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327943222s/77773.jpg|696] a few days ago, so I thought it would be good to read this novelette before reading [b:Doomsday Book|24983|Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1)|Connie Willis|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1332036910s/24983.jpg|2439628].

But my advice to anyone interested in her books would be to start directly with [b:To Say Nothing of the Dog|77773|To Say Nothing of the Dog (Oxford Time Travel, #2)|Connie Willis|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327943222s/77773.jpg|696] or [b:Doomsday Book|24983|Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1)|Connie Willis|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1332036910s/24983.jpg|2439628]. Arguably, these two books could be considered to be her best efforts. ( )