To Say Nothing of the Dog
Connie Willis's novel To Say Nothing of the Dog returns to the same universe of time-traveling historians she explored in her Doomsday Book. The tone couldn't be more different, however. Doomsday Book was serious, even somber in places. To Say Nothing of the Dog is a cheerful comedy. In this book, Lady Schrapnell, a wealthy woman with a whim of iron - the character is not unlike the terrifying aunts who bedeviled poor Bertie Wooster in P. G. Wodehouse's comic stories - has decided to rebuild Coventry Cathedral exactly as it was when it was destroyed in the Nazi Blitz during World War II. By contributing a huge sum to the time travel project, she has essentially taken it over for her research on the cathedral and is happily working the staff to death in an effort to recover every last detail needed for historical accuracy. One key piece eludes her: a large piece of Victorian bric-a-brac called the Bishop's bird stump. It disappeared from the cathedral during the air raid, and for some reason time itself refuses to allow the historians to arrive when they could photograph and measure the thing.
The protagonist is a 20th century specialist searching for the Bishop's bird stump who has made so many jumps into the 1940s in a short time he has developed a form of disoriented exhaustion the project calls being "time-lagged". He returns to the 21st century seeking rest only to find an emergency in progress. A historian sent to the Victorian era has committed an extremely dangerous act that just might snowball into paradoxes capable of ending all time travel or even ripping time itself apart. The exhausted protagonist, who knows virtually nothing about the 19th century, is the only one available to hurry back to Queen Victoria's England with instructions to save the universe. Unfortunately, even after he gets some sleep and his head clears, he can't remember what the instructions were.
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