To Say Nothing of the Dog

Connie Willis is hilarious.

To Say Nothing of the Dog is a time travel comedy about bumbling "historians," who travel back and forth in time through a "net," which is supposed to keep objects from the past from being brought into the future. Except that sometimes it doesn't. Agent Verity Kindle has just returned from the past — with a cat.

Historians also aren't supposed to take too many trips in a row back and forth through time, because they can get time lag, an ailment whose symptoms resemble drunkenness to great comic effect. ("One of the first symptoms of time lag is maudlin sentimentality, like an Irishman in his cups or a Victorian poet cold-sober.") But wealthy Lady Schrapnell is used to getting her way, and she wants to find out what happened to a hideous Victorian artifact known as the bishop's bird stump, in time for the consecration of the re-booted Coventry Cathedral.

So narrator Ned Henry travels back and forth, back and forth, until his time lag is so bad that he has to be secretly sent on vacation — and there his path crosses with that of Verity, and the cat.

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