In addition to the science fiction time travel, romantic comedy, and classic detective novel traditions, To Say Nothing of the Dog is important within Willis's oeuvre.

The most obvious connections to other Willis works are her award-winning Doomsday Book and "Fire Watch," both of which also feature Mr. Dunworthy as the professor in charge of Balliol College's time travel at Oxford University. In To Say Nothing of the Dog Willis continues to explore not only the physics of time travel, working out the "laws" and limitations, but a little more on the psychology of the historians doing the time travel. However, this novel is, in comparison, not so much driven by character as by the plot and solving the mystery of what happened to the bishop's bird stump; Doomsday Book and "Fire Watch" both focus to a much greater extent on the historian's adjusting to the...