Blackout

This book is bad. So bad it ignited a Read Rage so bright, it could have illuminated the entire area of London:

- It opens with an entitled high schooler, demanding a meeting with a faculty. Later we learn that he had a crush on one of the university students, and he wished for her to time-travel in flash time that will allow him to catch up with her in age and surely then she'll want to date him. Interspersed liberally with adolescent lovesick woes of you-are-not-seeing-someone-else-aren't-you-what-does-the-uncultured-american-have-over-me-whose-love-for-you-is-pure.

- People running around in Oxford 2060 trying to catch a person or another for some signatures that they need for forms that they need to file. Haven't they got emails? instant messages? sms? cell phones? So much for being in the future.

- I worked in a research center, and the work could be frantic at times when we need to prepare arrangements to go to the field in some rural villages: booking flights, reserving lodgings, packing clothes. It was necessary, but writing the minutiae of preparation would make for a dull read. Blackout is a dull read.

- The fieldwork is thoroughly unscientific. The historians, clearly ill-trained, would have produced zero primary materials. I imagine the best that they would produce are secondary materials in the form of recollections and commentaries, but no one could check if the inferences and conclusions that they draw (say, on commonpeople's heroism) were intellectually sound because these historians generate no primary source that other researchers can independently verify. This is something they could have done with further iteration of something like a Google glass/Snap glass that records audio and video for later review. But this leads us to..

- Shoddy ethics. The people that they interacted with (“contemps”/contemporaries) had no idea they were being observed as part of a study. There was no way they could consent to the inclusion, and the I can't imagine the deception can be ethically justified.

- The historians are so condescendingly full of themselves just because they came from the future and knew when and where certain events will happen. Even worse, it makes for a really infuriating reading because:

contemps [normal conversation]: XYZ will happen on date XXYY. I believe in the actions of people involved with XYZ.
historian [internal monologue]: poor contemps not knowing what will happen. XYZ will not happen until date XXYY+ZZ. I read it in my preparation research from newspaper article.
contemps [normal conversation, continue to patter on XYZ]
historian [internal monologue continues].

It reads as if the contemps were conversing with a mute that can only think internally. I could tolerate it if this were some Mexican/Indonesian soap opera—but was I wrong to expect something that garners such high praises (Nebula and Hugo) to be a little better than the novelization of soap operas?

And don't get me started about the clueless ambling and endless fretting for the retrieval team. The characters had no initiative and things just happen to them—such empty characters. It does not help that the main conflict of the book (will they be able to go back to the future?) did not really begin until page 200.

It was this that made me knock off one star—I could have given it two stars if this book were a shorter, or that there was some resolution at the end of the first book. I suffered through Blackout and I sure as hell would rather claw my eyes out than having to go through another 500-pages or so of All Clear just to find out what happens to the characters. Who cares if these historians perish in 1940s? Not me.