Fire Watch (short story)

The narrator is a student historian from a future where historians use time-travel to study history directly. He had prepared himself to visit St. Paul in the first century but instead gets sent to St. Paul's Cathedral in 1940. He develops a deep emotional attachment to the cathedral and is highly devoted to his role in defending it – especially due to his bitter knowledge that St. Paul's would survive the World War II bombings but would be obliterated in a terrorist attack nearer to the protagonist's own time.

The story won both a Hugo Award for Best Novelette and a Nebula Award for Best Novelette.[2]

"Fire Watch" (1982) was included in Willis' short-story collections Fire Watch (1984) and The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories (2013).[3]

The idea of a time-traveling history department at Oxford University, introduced in this novelette, was also used in her later novels Doomsday Book (1992), To Say Nothing of the Dog (1997), and Blackout/All Clear (2010), as was the character of Professor James Dunworthy.

Although Willis' writing of "Fire Watch" predates the production of Doomsday Book by about a decade, Kivrin Engle, the main character of Doomsday Book, also appears as a minor character in "Fire Watch". The novelette references Engle's experience with the Black Plague while time-traveling in the 14th century.

• List of joint winners of the Hugo and Nebula awards

• Text of the story at Infinity Plus
• Fire Watch title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database