In this case it seems a little odd that the narrator claims to have spent four years preparing for the wrong mission, and I was thrown by his reference to the time he'd wasted learning Latin - surely Greek would have been more appropriate? - but most readers are prepared to go with the flow.Īnother Willis theme that one can track from 'Fire Watch' through most of her later work is death horrible, unfair, untimely death. This failure to communicate vital information is a recurring theme in Willis' work think of the incapacitated computer technician in Doomsday Book, the appalling interdepartmental assistant in Bellwether, the messages which may or may not be from the dead in Lincoln's Dreams, To Say Nothing of the Dog and Passage. The narrator of 'Fire Watch' is sent to guard St Paul's in 1940 during the Blitz, rather than to accompany St Paul as he had anticipated.

It was the first of the three to be written, and indeed the first story by Willis to win either Hugo or Nebula, back in the days when one might have reasonably doubted that anyone would ever surpass Poul Anderson's seven Hugos or Delany and Silverberg's four Nebulas each (though this year alone brought Willis halfway there). 'Fire Watch' is set in almost the same universe as Willis' later novels Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog a future Oxford whence students are sent back in time for research purposes. 'Fire Watch' by Connie Willis won the Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novelette presented in 1983 it also won the SF Chronicle Award.

Firewatch story