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From SCIFIPEDIA
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To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis's 1997 science fiction comedy is set in the same universe as two other award-winning pieces of fiction: the novelette "Fire Watch" and the novel Doomsday Book. In To Say Nothing of the Dog, Willis puts her recurring cast of Oxford historians at the mercy of the terrifying Lady Schrapnell, a wealthy contributor to their time travel program. Schrapnell, in essence, hires the university's time travel department to research and rebuild Coventry Cathedral . . . and she wants it to be perfect in every detail.
"Fire Watch" and Doomsday Book are serious, even tragic, in tone, but To Say Nothing of the Dog is one of Willis's forays into the "screwball comedy" genre (her earlier works in this vein include "Blued Moon" and "Spice Program" as well as short novels Remake and Bellwether.)
Plot
The story centers around Ned Henry, a historian who has been working non-stop on Lady Schrapnell's Coventry restoration project. As he searches for items destroyed along with the Cathedral during World War Two, Ned travels into the past too many times, and begins to exhibit the disorientating effects of time-lag. Two weeks of rest are duly prescribed, but there is nowhere the addled historian can safely recover--Lady Schrapnell is determined to send him back to work.
Ned's collapse occurs just as a serious time anomaly develops. His instructor, Professor James Dunworthy, comes up with a plan that will solve both problems at once. Dunworthy decides to hide Ned in the Victorian era, asking him to fix the breach before it can tear apart the time-space continuum. Era-appropriate clothes and money are procured for the nearly-delirious Ned, who is given a covered basket, told that he can recuperate in the nineteenth century--just as soon as he's saved the universe--and sent on his way. Unfortunately, Ned's condition is so severe that he never quite manages to learn what it is he's supposed to be doing on this latest time jump.
Willis has frequently stated that all time travel novels contain a degree of sadness which is derived from the reader's knowledge that the long-ago worlds and characters visited by time traveling characters are long gone. Though To Say Nothing of the Dog is witty and romantic in tone, repeated references in the narrative to the destruction of Coventry Cathedral and the inability of the historians to fully recreate what was lost during the Nazi bombing of Coventry serve as dark, though subtle, undercurrents in the tale.
Published in 1997, To Say Nothing of the Dog won the Hugo Award for best novel. The book's title refers to Jerome K. Jerome's 1889 novel Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) and Ned Henry encounters Jerome's three men, in their boat, during his visit to the past.
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