<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Fire Watch, the title story in Connie Willis's 1984 collection of short fiction, creates a universe the author later uses in two novels: Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog.

Set at a near-future Oxford University whose history department sends graduate students back in time to do field research, it is the story of Bartholomew, a historian who has spent the past several years preparing for a practicum in the era of Saint Paul. On the eve of the trip, however, a computer error reassigns him to Saint Paul's Cathedral. Bartholomew learns he will become part of the fire watch tasked with keeping the Cathedral from being burned down by incendiary bombs during the 1940 London Blitz.

With only two days to prepare for this unexpected and radical change of plan, Bartholomew resorts to memory assistance drugs to assimilate all of the twentieth-century history he suddenly needs for the drop. There is a significant downside to the drugs . . . the information goes directly into his long-term memory, but is difficult to retrieve. Once he reaches 1940 and is dodging Nazi air raids, problems with retrieval mount, because Bartholomew becomes progressively more shell-shocked and sleep-deprived. In time, he even comes to believe a German spy may have infiltrated the fire watch. His distress over the possibility of losing Saint Paul's—even though, as a person from the future, he already knows its eventual fate—drives him to the edge of a breakdown.

Other characters in "Fire Watch" include Professor James Dunworthy, who appears in all of Willis's Oxford time travel pieces, and Kivrin Engle, the young protagonist of Doomsday Book. Kivrin is Bartholomew's roommate, and it is she who suggests he uses the memory assistance drugs.

Communications and bureaucratic errors of the sort that send Bartholomew to Saint Paul's are a recurring theme in Willis's work, as is the specter of widespread death in war (in this case, the Blitz) or in other tragedies. Her first novel, Lincoln's Dreams, is about the U.S. Civil War. Doomsday Book is about Kivrin's visit to Oxford during a 1348 outbreak of bubonic plague, and Passage explores near-death experiences and the Titanic disaster.

"Fire Watch" won Willis her first Hugo Award and her first Nebula Award (for best novelette) in 1983 as well as an SF Chronicle Award.

Another story in the Fire Watch collection, "A Letter from the Clearys," won the Nebula Award for best short story in 1982. The other stories in Fire Watch are: "All My Darling Daughters," "The Sidon in the Mirror," "Samaritan," "Service for the Burial of the Dead," "Mail Order Clone," "Daisy, in the Sun," "And Come from Miles Around," "Blued Moon," "Lost and Found," and "The Father of the Bride."