To Say Nothing of the Dog

To Say Nothing of the Dog is a comic science fiction novel by the American writer Connie Willis, published in 1997. It won the Hugo and Locus awards in 1999, was nominated for the Nebula, and takes its title from the subtitle of Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat.

The book shares its setting with Willis's other stories about the history department at Oxford in the middle of the twenty-first century, where students and staff travel into the past as observers. History is protected: the machinery refuses some trips outright, and a traveller who is sent anywhere tends to arrive at a time and a place slightly different from the one intended.

Ned Henry has been back and forth to 1940 too often and is suffering from time lag. Lady Schrapnell, an American who is paying to have Coventry Cathedral rebuilt exactly as it stood before the Blitz, has conscripted most of the department into the project, and Ned's part in it is to find out what became of the bishop's bird stump, an object on the cathedral's inventory that nobody can now locate. What he needs is rest, and what he is given is another errand.