"Fire Watch" is a
science fiction novelette
Novelette may also refer to:
* ''Novelette'' (ballet), a solo modern dance work choreographed by Martha Graham
* Novelette (music), a short piece of lyrical music
* Novelette (literature), a work of narrative prose fiction that is longer than a ...
by American writer
Connie Willis. The story, first published in ''
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine'' in February 1982, involves a time-traveling historian who goes back to
the Blitz in London, to participate in the
fire lookout at
St. Paul's Cathedral
St Paul's Cathedral is an Anglican cathedral in London and is the seat of the Bishop of London. The cathedral serves as the mother church of the Diocese of London. It is on Ludgate Hill at the highest point of the City of London and is a Gr ...
.
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'' (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'' (1992), ''
To Say Nothing of the Dog
''To Say Nothing of the Dog'': ''or, How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump at Last'' is a 1997 comic science fiction novel by Connie Willis. It used the same setting, including time-traveling historians, which Willis explored in '' Fire Watch'' ...
'' (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
The Black Death (also known as the Pestilence, the Great Mortality or the Plague) was a bubonic plague pandemic occurring in Western Eurasia and North Africa from 1346 to 1353. It is the most fatal pandemic recorded in human history, causi ...
while time-traveling in the 14th century.
See also
*
List of joint winners of the Hugo and Nebula awards
References
External links
Text of the storyat
Infinity Plus
*
Science fiction short stories
Hugo Award for Best Novelette winning works
Nebula Award for Best Novelette-winning works
1982 short stories
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