20 works of upbeat science fiction to brighten your day

To Say Nothing of the Dog (Cover image via Bantam Books)

3. To Say Nothing of the Dog

Time travel is fairly rich ground for both science fiction and comedy. After all, there’s no such thing as time travel in our current world. Until further notice, that means it’s restricted to the world of make-believe only. However, that doesn’t mean it can’t be compelling, uplifting and even funny when deployed in fiction.

Take Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog. Willis has made her writing reputation on fictional time travel. In her world, this technology is used mostly by historians conducting research. That doesn’t mean her tales are all dry and boring, however. Willis has created moving, heartbreaking work focused on this concept, like the medieval-focused Doomsday Book. But she has also mined levity from the same fields.

In To Say Nothing of the Dog, Willis establishes the rules of her time travel universe. No one is able to bring significant materials back and forth in time. Neither can travelers interfere with important events. This means that historians are often directed away from some of the more dramatic occurrences in history, thanks to the self-correcting nature of the time stream.

All of these rules seem pretty well set in stone, until someone brings back a cat. That definitely shouldn’t happen, as all cats have become extinct thanks to a feline distemper epidemic.

Complicating matters is one Lady Schrapnell, a wealthy American who wants to rebuilt Coventry Cathedral (in this timeline, it was destroyed during the Blitz bombings of the early 1940s). She is fairly obsessed with getting all of the details right, down to a bishop’s “bird stump,” an elaborate kind of vase. A team of historians is sent to the Coventry cathedral to verify whether or not said bird stump vase was there.

Ned Henry, one of those protagonists, must look for both that vase and solve the mystery of the time-traveling cat. Has this feline caused an actual rift in the timeline? Ned ends up in 1888 London, trying to fix things while dodging strange Victorian characters and trying to remember everything he can about the era. It’s definitely tense in places, but humorous throughout.