‘Willis’ fiction is one of the most intelligent delights of our genre’
Locus
‘A novelist who can plot like Agatha Christie and whose books possess a bounce and stylishness that Preston Sturges might envy’
Washington Post
To the public library
Time is the Fire
The Best of Connie Willis
CONNIE WILLIS
CONTENTS
Cover
Praise
Dedication
Title Page
Introduction By Lisa Tuttle
Introduction II By Connie Willis
A Letter from the Clearys
Afterword for ‘A Letter from the Clearys’
At the Rialto
Afterword for ‘At the Rialto’
Death on the Nile
Afterword for ‘Death on the Nile’
The Soul Selects Her Own Society
Afterword for ‘The Soul Selects Her Own Society’
Fire Watch
Afterword for ‘Fire Watch’
Inside Job
Afterword for ‘Inside Job’
Even the Queen
Afterword for ‘Even the Queen’
The Winds of Marble Arch
Afterword for ‘The Winds of Marble Arch’
All Seated on the Ground
Afterword for ‘All Seated on the Ground’
The Last of the Winnebagos
Afterword for ‘The Last of the Winnebagos’
Editor’s Note
2006 Worldcon Guest of Honor Speech
Grand Master Backup Speech (never delivered)
Grand Master Acceptance Speech
Original Publication Information
About the Author
Also By Connie Willis
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
By Lisa Tuttle
What do church choirs, alien visitors, the London Underground, time travel, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Agatha Christie, old Hollywood stars and quantum physics have in common?
Considering the context, you might guess these disparate things all feature in the stories collected here, and that is certainly true. But is there some deeper and more significant connection beyond their appearance in the work of Connie Willis?
The attempt to answer that question is just the sort of Quixotic quest that might be undertaken by one of Connie’s enormously sympathetic and believable characters: the couple in ‘All Seated on the Ground’ who try to listen to and consider the words of every Christmas carol in existence in a search for phrases that could conceivably be interpreted as commands or invitations; or the narrator of ‘The Winds of Marble Arch’ who visits one London tube station after another, trying to discover the origin of a peculiarly disturbing blast of air (that only he seems to notice). Others search for the clues that may exist in a long-lost letter (‘A Letter from the Clearys’) or in the frontispiece map of an Agatha Christie novel (‘Death on the Nile’), all the while worrying that they’ve misunderstood something important, and consumed by the certainty that there is little time left to get it right.
Sometimes these quirky quests are personal obsessions, but sometimes (because these are science fiction stories) the fate of the whole world may hinge on the timely discovery of the right clue by one bright yet basically powerless person. And because these are Connie Willis stories, whether failure might fracture a marriage or change the outcome of the Second World War, affect two people or millions, the suspense, and the reader’s investment, is just as great.
The characters are among the major delights of these stories. The Willis hero or heroine is not possessed of super-powers, but is someone ‘ordinary’ – a graduate student, a journalist, someone’s wife or husband or child. They are believable, and also extremely likeable: intelligent, funny, modest and kind. The bad guys are also ordinary, recognizable as the irritating, obstructive sorts we’ve all met – petty, self-important bureaucrats who just won’t listen.
Connie Willis has won a record-breaking number of awards – at last count, she had been awarded eleven Hugos and seven Nebula Awards for her novels and shorter fiction. The stories in this collection have all won at least one of those awards. In 2009 Connie was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, and in 2011 the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America presented her with their Grand Master Award in recognition of her lifetime achievement.
Although she has said that her favourite thing to write is ‘romantic comedy’, and is probably best known for her meticulously researched and convincing evocation of life in past times as depicted in her various Oxford Time Travel novels and short stories, Connie is first and foremost a science fiction writer. This is the genre, and the fandom, where the inimitable Willis blend of logic, whimsy, fantasy, realism, comedy, tragedy, suspense, crazy ideas and genuine human emotion has found the most appreciative audience.
‘The thing I have always liked best about science fiction is that it defies definition,’ Connie said when interviewed in 2001. Her interviewer, Nick Gevers, described the short fiction as being ‘characterised by a very distinctive frothy profundity’ – a somewhat surreal description, but appropriate. These clearly-written, engaging stories tend to be light and easy to swallow, but can take some time to digest. What appears to be simple on the surface is revealed to be something else, and far more complicated. They are full of surprises and hidden edges. They keep you guessing and, afterwards, keep you thinking. No wonder they keep turning up on ballots and in anthologies marking the best of the year. ‘Inside Job’ is one that made my head spin. A clever, funny story about debunkers, fraudulent spirit-mediums, the great American sceptic H.L. Mencken – and the channelled spirit of Mencken returning to debunk his channeller . . . huh?
‘Even the Queen’ is mind-expanding in another way. A classic, Heinleinesque story, it offers a glimpse of changes caused by a single scientific advance – utterly plausible, amusingly presented, subtly handled – a pure, entertaining science fiction thought-experiment of the sort John W. Campbell, Jr would have approved – only the unspeakable subject would leave him, and most of the Golden Age SF writers spinning in their graves.
‘The Last of the Winnebagos’, as an attempt to imagine the near future doesn’t hold up to hindsight, twenty-five years on, but few ‘predictive’ stories about the near future do. But ignore the unlikely technology and read it for the narrative, the emotion, and the characters, because it vies with ‘Fire Watch’ (her most famous story) as one of the most profoundly moving stories ever to come out of SF.
Anyone who has ever met Connie, or seen her on stage at a convention, knows how funny and sharp she is, and her gift for comedy is represented in the hilarious, heavily footnoted mockessay ‘The Soul Selects Her Own Society: Invasion and Repulsion: A Chronological Reinterpretation of Two of Emily Dickinson’s Poems: A Wellsian Perspective’ (surely one of the downright oddest stories ever to win the Hugo).
Emily Dickinson and H. G. Wells, London and Hollywood, airplanes and Winnebagos, the extinction of pet animals, the survival of love, science and art, life and death – they’re all here, all connected, in a collection that well deserves the description ‘the best’.
INTRODUCTION
By Connie Willis
Writing an author’s introduction to a “Best of” collection is kind of problematic. If you talk too much about the stories, you give away the plot, and if you focus on the “best of” part, it looks uncomfortably like bragging – and usually is.
Telling where you got the idea for each story is usually a terrible letdown and doesn’t really explain anything. I mean, I got the idea for “The Last of the Winnebagos” from being stuck behind an RV going fifteen miles an hour up the pas
s to Woodland Park, and the idea for “All Seated on the Ground” from sitting in the church choir singing some Christmas carol with truly awful lyrics, but that doesn’t explain how I got from there to the story, and if I explain all the steps in between (giving away half the surprises in the story in the process), you’ll feel as duped and annoyed as you do after a magician explains how he sawed the woman in half.
Besides, I don’t know all the steps. Writers don’t really understand where their ideas come from, or how they morph into the story on the page. And often what I thought I was doing turned out not to be what was really going on at all. While you’re writing one story, your subconscious is busily writing another. Which means that to really explain the stories, I’d have to go all autobiographical and get into my childhood and the traumas thereof, which I have no intention of doing here.
It’s too bad this isn’t a theme anthology. It’s easy to write an introduction for a theme anthology. If it’s about time travel or H. G. Wells– like invasions from outer space or dragons, then you natter on about Will dragons – or invasions, or time travel – for a few pages, and you’re good. But only one of the stories in this collection is about a Wells-like invasion. (There’s another invasion from outer space, but the aliens don’t try to kill anybody. They don’t do anything. In fact, that’s the problem. They just stand there and look disapproving.)
There are also a couple of time-travel stories here (though only one’s about time travel in the traditional sense), there aren’t any dragon stories, and the other stories are about psychics, RVs, the Pyramids, the post office, Annette Funicello, mystery novels, Kool-Aid, tomato plants, and the footprints out in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.
It’s kind of hard to detect a common theme in all that, and the settings don’t provide one, either. The stories take place in Phoenix; Egypt; the London Tube; Amherst, Massachusetts; and a mall at Christmastime – and in the past, future, afterlife, and end of the world.
About the only thing the stories have in common is that I wrote them, and even that’s apparently a bit uncertain. There was a conspiracy theory making the rounds of the Internet a while back that there were actually two Connie Willises, one who wrote the “funny stuff” and one who wrote the “sad stuff,” which I don’t understand at all.
I mean, Shakespeare wrote both comedies and tragedies (to say nothing of historical fiction, fantasy, and some pretty darn good poems) and nobody ever said his stuff was written by two different people. Although, come to think of it, they did accuse him of being someone else altogether, including Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, and Queen Elizabeth. (And a committee, which I guess counts as two different people.) No one has claimed a committee wrote my stories yet, so that’s good.
And it is true that there’s more than one kind of story in this collection. But in writing them, I wasn’t so much following in Shakespeare’s footsteps (though the world would definitely be a better place if everybody tried to write like Shakespeare – or at least read him) as in the footsteps of some of my favorite science-fiction writers.
They didn’t stick to just one kind of story, either. Shirley Jackson wrote both chilling studies in human behavior (“The Lottery”) and hilarious ones (“One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts”). So did William Tenn, penning the savage “The Liberation of Earth,” the bleak “Down Among the Dead Men,” and the uproarious “Bernie the Faust.”
And Kit Reed wrote – and is still writing – all across the spectrum, from the terrifying (“The Wait”) to the creepy (“The Fat Farm”) to the sweet and funny (“Songs of War”).
I was first exposed to all these writers and to many more – Fredric Brown, Mildred Clingerman, Theodore Sturgeon, Zenna Henderson, James Blish, Ray Bradbury – in the Year’s Best collections edited by Judith Merril, Robert P. Mills, and Anthony Boucher, and they had an even more profound effect on me than Robert A. Heinlein, whose work I found at the same time.
To quote Mr. Heinlein, “How it happened was this way.” In one of those serendipitous moments that make you ponder how much of the course of your life depends on the vagaries of chance, I happened to see a copy of Heinlein’s Have Space Suit, Will Travel, thought it had a funny title (for you young’uns, there was a TV show in those days called Have Gun, Will Travel – and yes, we had TV back then!), and checked it out. And fell in love with the very first line: “You see, I had this space suit.”
I also fell in love with its seventeen-year-old hero (I was thirteen), his ten-year-old-girl sidekick Peewee, and the Mother Thing. And in love with the humor and the adventure and the science and the literary references. Kip’s dad is reading Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat in the first chapter, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest figures heavily in saving the planet. (I told you the world would be a better place if everybody read Shakespeare.)
I immediately devoured the rest of the Heinleins my library had – Time for the Stars, Tunnel in the Sky, The Star Beast, The Door into Summer, Double Star, Space Cadet – and then set out to find other stuff like them.
There was no science-fiction section in the library back in those days (they were days of dark oppression), so this was harder than it might seem. But I’d noticed that the Heinleins all had this symbol of a spaceship and an atom on the back, so I scoured the library for other books with the symbol. I found, I remember, Pebble in the Sky and The Space Merchants and Revolt on Alpha C. And the Year’s Best collections – a whole row of them.
They were a revelation to me. Here, cheek by jowl, were stories by John Collier and C. M. Kornbluth and Ray Bradbury and C. L. Moore, a kaleidoscope of stories and styles and themes, from the funny (Fredric Brown’s “Puppet Show”) to the frighteningly dystopic (E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops”) to the achingly sad (“Flowers for Algernon”).
A realistic story about a man walking across the moon on foot stood between a lyrical remembrance of things past and a night-marish take on the “good life,” and there were tales of tidal fl ats and amusement parks and department stores and spots in the Arizona desert where it was possible to see “a miracle of rare device.”
Stories about robots and time-travelers and aliens, and stories about the cold equations of the physical universe and the hidden costs of technological advance, about the endless difficulty of determining what a human is – and how to be one. Science fiction in all her infinite variety, spread out like a feast in front of me.
And the stories were good. These were, after all, short stories and novelettes and novellas being written by authors at the height of their powers. Nowadays, science-fiction writers tend to think of the short story only as a way to get their foot in the publishing door or as a practice run for the three-volume trilogy they really want to write, and after they sell that first novel, they tend not to write any more short stories.
But back then very few science-fiction novels were being published (they were really days of dark oppression), and everybody, from the talented beginner to old hands like Jack Williamson and Frederik Pohl, was writing for the magazines. Including Heinlein, who I was thrilled to find was also in the collections, with gems like “They” and “All You Zombies” – and my favorite, “The Menace from Earth.”
These were people who really knew how to write, and I reaped the benefit, reading classics like “Evening Primrose” and “Nightfall” and “Vintage Season” and “Ararat.”
Even in this exalted company, some stories stood out as exceptional. One of them was “Lot,” by Ward Moore, which starts out seeming to be a simple tale about a dad packing the family car for a trip and turns into a horrific (and all-too-possible) nuclear nightmare, a story that managed to embody not only the loss of civilization but the loss of our humanity, and one that has reverberated in my mind ever since I read it.
A second standout was Philip K. Dick’s “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon,” a story about a man in cold sleep traveling to a far distant planet who keeps dreaming his arrival. It deals with an entirely different kind of nightmare, one in whic
h we can no longer tell what’s reality and what’s a dream.
But my favorite had to be Bob Shaw’s “The Light of Other Days,” a simple little tale about a couple driving out to the country on a summer afternoon to buy a piece of window glass for their apartment. It somehow managed to dissect marriage, loss, grief, and the bitter knowledge that technology can be a two-edged sword, all in the space of a few thousand words.
I had had no idea stories could do stuff like this.
I’ve always considered myself incredibly lucky (the “chance” thing again) that I discovered those collections when I did. Heinlein was great, but novels devoted to blasting through space and discovering planets infested with multieyed monsters didn’t have all that much to say to me, and that was what most of the science-fiction novels in my library were about. And the movies were even worse. (We were still years away from Star Wars.)
With only Daring Rangers of the Sky to read and Attack from Venus to watch, my infatuation with science fiction might have proved shortlived. But through the brilliance of Bob Shaw and Philip K. Dick and all those other writers, I’d glimpsed what science fiction could be. So I kept reading, discovering Samuel R. Delany and J. G. Ballard and James Tiptree, Jr., and Howard Waldrop and a host of other brilliant writers, and falling more and more in love with the field. And I started writing stories of my own.
Well, maybe not entirely my own. When I look back at “A Letter from the Clearys,” I can see how much it owes to Ward Moore’s “Lot.” When I reread “Fire Watch,” I see the impact of Heinlein and his hapless heroes on me, and in “Even the Queen” and “At the Rialto” the infl uence of his breezy style and bantering characters.
But it’s not just those two authors. They all influenced me. They taught me all sorts of techniques I could use in my stories – the onionlike layered revelations of Daniel Keyes, the understated ironies of Kit Reed, the multiple meanings Shirley Jackson could cram into a single line of dialogue. More important, they showed me that a story didn’t have to be all fl ash and pyrotechnics (though they taught me how to do that, too). They showed me that stories could be told simply and straightforwardly – and have hidden depths.
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