Plot
The narrator is a student historian from a future where historians use time-travel to study history directly. He had prepared himself to visit St. Paul in the first century but instead gets sent to St. Paul's Cathedral in 1940. He develops a deep emotional attachment to the cathedral and is highly devoted to his role in defending it – especially due to his bitter knowledge that St. Paul's would survive the World War II bombings but would be obliterated in a terrorist attack nearer to the protagonist's own time.Reception
The story won both a Hugo Award for Best Novelette and a Nebula Award for Best Novelette.Relationships to other Willis works
"Fire Watch" (1982) was included in Willis' short-story collections ''Fire Watch (book), Fire Watch'' (1984) and ''The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories'' (2013). The idea of a time-traveling history department at Oxford University, introduced in this novelette, was also used in her later novels Doomsday Book (novel), ''Doomsday Book'' (1992), ''To Say Nothing of the Dog'' (1997), and ''Blackout/All Clear'' (2010), as was the character of Professor James Dunworthy. Although Willis' writing of "Fire Watch" predates the production of ''Doomsday Book'' by about a decade, Kivrin Engle, the main character of ''Doomsday Book'', also appears as a minor character in "Fire Watch". The novelette references Engle's experience with the Black Plague while time-traveling in the 14th century.See also
* List of joint winners of the Hugo and Nebula awardsReferences
External links