Hugo & Nebula Awards: Best Novels discussion

The series shows up on Goodreads as two series, two novels each.

First two, "Oxford Time Travel"
Doomsday Book
To Say Nothing of the Dog

The other two, "All Clear"
Blackout
All Clear

Could somebody clarify what the deal is, should we make a complete 4-book series of it or can the two be read separately? Four books would make more sense, as far as I am concerned, but 2/2 would be way easier to handle even as monthly nominations, without being limited to challenges.

I've read only the 1st one. From what I know, they all are linked by a shared world, where time travel was discovered. The main characters are different in first series but the same in the second.

I mostly remember "To Say Nothing of the Dog," (one of my faves), though I had previously read the Doomsday Book. According to my admittedly spotty recollection, they're so different from each other that I'm not sure they even need to be read together

So I tried a little research

Fantastic Fiction and Goodreads were not really helpful, and Wikipedia didn't really say, and someone writing an article for Tor about where to start reading Willis has no mention of "Blackout"/"All Clear"

But here, I think . . . http://azsf.net/cwblog/?page_id=49 . . . a good explanation (Fire Watch, BTW, is a novellette that won the Hugo and you can read it here: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories... )

So, I agree there are two groups. I say you can even separate Dog and Doomsday, though they are both in the Oxford Time Travel group. But for the two books of All Clear, according to my research, have to be read together

We could tell folks about Fire Time because it introduces the main character in Doomsday. They could read it or not.

So here's the order I think is right, but chronologically I'm not sure.

Fire Watch (1985)
Doomsday Book (1992)

To Say Nothing of the Dog (1997)

Blackout/All Clear (2010)

I have read all of them. Doomsday and To Say Nothing of the Dog can definitely be stand alone, but there is a strong link between all of them. Blackout/All Clear ties everything together and really puts a finale on the earlier books.

I would put Fire Watch (the short story) before Blackout/All Clear. They involve the same time period and subject matter.

I loved all of these books, but they are not for the faint of heart as they are long!

I listened to Doomsday Book on audio, one of the first I "read" in that manner. Not s good way to read it, I thought it would never end. Overall, I liked the story but I really wanted her to move it along. Is "Passage" not a part of this series?

The Passage is about a psychologist and a neurologist studying near death experiences to the point that the create a drug to put you at that point.

I read Doomsday Book by audio as well, but my experience is a bit different. I thoroughly enjoyed it and quickly bought the rest of the series!

Don't get me wrong, I liked it a lot and liked the way it brought a very personal viewpoint to the Black Death. You knew that was coming but it didn't matter. It got slow and drawn out when the epidemic was happening in present time, but once you were through that, it moved at a better pace.

Allan wrote: "Don't get me wrong, I liked it a lot and liked the way it brought a very personal viewpoint to the Black Death. You knew that was coming but it didn't matter. It got slow and drawn out when the epi..."

I fully agree - the past was good (in reading sense), but the present was so soap opera-ish that it annoyed me to no end

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, today only $1.99 Kindle edition

https://www.amazon.com/Doomsday-Book-...

Sorry wrong place leaving it here for now