犬は勘定に入れません…あるいは、消えたヴィクトリア朝花瓶の謎 [単行本]

From Connie Willis, winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards, comes a comedic romp through an unpredictable world of mystery, love, and time travel...

Ned Henry is badly in need of a rest.  He's been shuttling between the 21st century and the 1940s searching for a Victorian atrocity called the bishop's bird stump.  It's part of a project to restore the famed Coventry Cathedral, destroyed in a Nazi air raid over a hundred years earlier.  

But then Verity Kindle, a fellow time traveler, inadvertently brings back something from the past.  Now Ned must jump back to the Victorian era to help Verity put things right--not only to save the project but to prevent altering history itself.   --このテキストは、 マスマーケット 版に関連付けられています。

オックスフォード大学史学部の学生ネッド・ヘンリーは、第二次大戦中のロンドン大空襲で焼失したコヴェントリー大聖堂の再建計画の資料集めの毎日を送っていた。だが、計画の責任者レイディ・シュラプネルの命令で、20世紀と21世紀を時間旅行で行ったり来たりさせられたネッドは、疲労困憊、ついには過労で倒れてしまった。シュラプネルから、大聖堂にあったはずの「主教の鳥株」という花瓶をぜひとも探し出せと言われていたのだ。二週間の絶対安静を言い渡されたものの、シュラプネルのいる現代にいては、ゆっくり休めるはずもない。史学部のダンワージー教授は、ネッドをのんびりできるにちがいない、19世紀のヴィクトリア朝へ派遣する。ところが、時間旅行ぼけでぼんやりしていたせいで、まさか自分が時空連続体の存亡を賭けた重要な任務をさずかっているとは夢にも思っていなかった…。ジェローム・K・ジェロームのユーモア小説『ボートの三人男』にオマージュをささげつつ、SFと本格ミステリを絶妙に融合させ、ヒューゴー賞・ローカス賞のほか、クルト・ラスヴィッツ賞を受賞したタイムトラベル・ユーモア小説。

謎の花瓶を求めて、21世紀と19世紀のあいだを行ったり来たり、タイムトラベルで歴史を縦横に駆けめぐる史学生ネッドとヴェリティの活躍をユーモアたっぷりに描く冒険譚。ヒューゴー賞・ローカス賞等受賞作。

To Say Nothing of the Dog is a science-fiction fantasy in the guise of an old-fashioned Victorian novel, complete with epigraphs, brief outlines, and a rather ugly boxer in three-quarters profile at the start of each chapter. Or is it a Victorian novel in the guise of a time-traveling tale, or a highly comic romp, or a great, allusive literary game, complete with spry references to Dorothy L. Sayers, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Conan Doyle? Its title is the subtitle of Jerome K. Jerome's singular, and hilarious, Three Men in a Boat. In one scene the hero, Ned Henry, and his friends come upon Jerome, two men, and the dog Montmorency in--you guessed it--a boat. Jerome will later immortalize Ned's fumbling. (Or, more accurately, Jerome will earlier immortalize Ned's fumbling, because Ned is from the 21st century and Jerome from the 19th.)

What Connie Willis soon makes clear is that genre can go to the dogs. To Say Nothing of the Dog is a fine, and fun, romance--an amused examination of conceptions and misconceptions about other eras, other people. When we first meet Ned, in 1940, he and five other time jumpers are searching bombed-out Coventry Cathedral for the bishop's bird stump, an object about which neither he nor the reader will be clear for hundreds of pages. All he knows is that if they don't find it, the powerful Lady Schrapnell will keep sending them back in time, again and again and again. Once he's been whisked through the rather quaint Net back to the Oxford future, Ned is in a state of super time-lag. (Willis is happily unconcerned with futuristic vraisemblance, though Ned makes some obligatory references to "vids," "interactives," and "headrigs.") The only way Ned can get the necessary two weeks' R and R is to perform one more drop and recuperate in the past, away from Lady Schrapnell. Once he returns something to someone (he's too exhausted to understand what or to whom) on June 7, 1888, he's free.

Willis is concerned, however, as is her confused character, with getting Victoriana right, and Ned makes a good amateur anthropologist--entering one crowded room, he realizes that "the reason Victorian society was so restricted and repressed was that it was impossible to move without knocking something over." Though he's still not sure what he's supposed to bring back, various of his confederates keep popping back to set him to rights. To Say Nothing of the Dog is a shaggy-dog tale complete with a preternaturally quiet, time-traveling cat, Princess Arjumand, who might well be the cause of some serious temporal incongruities--for even a mouser might change the course of European history. In the end, readers might well be more interested in Ned's romance with a fellow historian than in the bishop's bird stump, and who will not rejoice in their first Net kiss, which lasts 169 years!
--このテキストは、 マスマーケット 版に関連付けられています。

From Connie Willis, winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards, comes a comedic romp through an unpredictable world of mystery, love, and time travel...

Ned Henry is badly in need of a rest. He's been shuttling between the 21st century and the 1940s searching for a Victorian atrocity called the bishop's bird stump. It's part of a project to restore the famed Coventry Cathedral, destroyed in a Nazi air raid over a hundred years earlier.

But then Verity Kindle, a fellow time traveler, inadvertently brings back something from the past. Now Ned must jump back to the Victorian era to help Verity put things right--not only to save the project but to prevent altering history itself.
--このテキストは、 マスマーケット 版に関連付けられています。

Praise for Connie Willis's Hugo and Nebula Award-Winning Doomsday Book:

"A tour de force."
--The New York Times Book Review

"... stunning...the best work yet from one of science fiction's best writers."
--The Denver Post

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1997:
"Displaying the skills that have won her more major SF awards than any other writer of the decade, Willis juggles comedy of manners, hard science theory and a host of literary references in this sophisticated dazzlement."
--Publishers Weekly

"An utter delight. Ms. Willis's unique, engaging voice will carry you off to a place where chaos theory makes perfect sense, time-travel is a reasonable mode of transport and safeguarding the fate of humanity is a respectable day job. Her wonderfully intelligent writing enchants and enthralls. Enjoy!"
Amanda Quick

"I have long thought that Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men and a Boat is one of the highest points of Inimitable British Humor. I chuckle; I gurgle; I know those three men, to say nothing of the dog. And now I am convinced that there was a woman concealed in that boat, too: Connie Willis."
--Laurie R. King
--このテキストは、 マスマーケット 版に関連付けられています。

"The most hilarious book of its kind since John Irving's The Water-Method Man and A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole."
--Des Moines Sunday Register

"An utter delight. Ms. Willis's unique, engaging voice will carry you off to a place where chaos theory makes perfect sense, time travel is a REASONABLE mode of transport, and safeguarding the fate of humanity is a respectable day job."
--Amanda Quick

"Willis effortlessly juggles comedy of manners, chaos theory and a wide range of literary allusions [with a] near flawlessness of plot, character and prose."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"I have long thought that Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men In A Boat is one of the highest points of Inimitable British Humor. I chuckle; I gurgle; I know those three men--to say nothing of the dog. And now I am convinced there was a woman concealed in that boat, too: Connie Willis."
--Laurie R. King
--このテキストは、 マスマーケット 版に関連付けられています。

Connie Willis has won six Nebula and Six Hugo Awards (more than any other science fiction writer) and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for her first novel, Lincoln's Dreams.  Her novel Doomsday Book won both the Nebula and Hugo Awards, and her first short-story collection, Fire Watch, was a New York Times Notable Book.  Her other works include Bellwether, Impossible Things, Remake, and Uncharted Territory.  Ms.  Willis lives in Greeley, Colorado, with her family. --このテキストは、 マスマーケット 版に関連付けられています。

ウィリス,コニー
1945年、コロラド州デンヴァーで生まれる。1967年、北コロラド大学を卒業したのち、教師をつとめるかたわら小説を発表しはじめた。短篇集『わが愛しき娘たちよ』収録の「見張り」でヒューゴー賞・ネビュラ賞・SFクロニクル賞、「クリアリー家からの手紙」でネビュラ賞を受賞し、1987年に発表した初の単独長篇『リンカーンの夢』でジョン・W・キャンベル記念賞を受賞。さらに、前人未踏の14世紀に時間旅行した史学部の女子学生キヴリンの波乱万丈の運命を描く、1992年発表の『ドゥームズデイ・ブック』で、ヒューゴー賞・ネビュラ賞・ローカス賞を受賞した。また、1994年発表の『リメイク』では、近未来のハリウッドを舞台に恋とダンスと映画への愛に満ちた物語を描き、ローカス賞を受賞している。2001年発表のローカス賞受賞作『航路』は日本でも大きな話題を呼び、『SFが読みたい!2003年版』の「ベストSF2002」第一位に輝いた。『犬は勘定に入れません―あるいは、消えたヴィクトリア朝花瓶の謎』は、数々の受賞に輝いた『ドゥームズデイ・ブック』の姉妹篇であり、ヒューゴー賞・ローカス賞を受賞している

大森 望
1961年生、1983年京都大学文学部文学科卒、英米文学研究家・翻訳家(本データはこの書籍が刊行された当時に掲載されていたものです)