"Fire Watch" is a science fiction novelette by American writer Connie Willis. The story, first published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in February 1982,^[1] involves a time-traveling historian who goes back to the Blitz in London, to participate in the fire lookout at St. Paul's Cathedral.

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.^[2]

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).^[3]

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 (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 awards

References

External links

• Text of the story at Infinity Plus
• Fire Watch title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database