loud when I was in the eighth grade,
and it made me go to St. Paul’s,
where I found the fire watch and Oxford’s time-traveling historians
and my life’s work.
Above all, they taught me what it meant to be a writer.
“Storytellers make us remember what mankind would have been like had not fear, and the failing will, and the laws of nature tripped up its heels,” William Butler Yeats said.
And books—
Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Let me begin at the beginning.
I loved books from the moment I saw them, from before I could even read.
And as soon as I did learn,
I read everything I could get my grubby little hands on.
You couldn’t get a library card till you were eight years old when I was a kid
(These were dark, benighted times)
and you were only allowed to check out three at a time
(Really dark and benighted times).
So the day I got my library card,
I checked out three of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books.
Rita Mae Brown says, “When I got my library card, that’s when my life began.”
Mine, too.
I read all three Oz books that night
and took them back the next day
and checked out three more.
And then I checked out all the other Oz books
and all the Maida’s Little Shop books
and all the Elsie Dinsmore books—
possibly the worst books ever written—
and all the Betsy, Tacy, and Tib books
and the Blue, Green, Yellow, Red, and Violet fairy books.
No one else in my family liked to read,
and they were always telling me to “get my nose out of that book
and go outside to play,”
an order which had no apparent effect on me
because I went right ahead and read
all the Anne of Green Gables books
and all the Nancy Drew books
and all the Mushroom Planet books
and Alice in Wonderland
and A Little Princess
and Cress Delahanty
and The Water Babies.
When I was in sixth grade,
I read Little Women
and decided I wanted to be a writer like Jo March.
When I was in seventh grade,
I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
and decided to read my way straight through the library from A to Z
like Francie does in that book.
When I was in eighth grade,
my teacher Mrs. Werner read us
An Episode of Sparrows by Rumer Godden, a book about an orphan who plants a garden in the bombed-out rubble of a church, and I fell in love with the Blitz.
And then, when I was thirteen,
I read Have Space Suit, Will Travel,
and it was all over.
How it happened was this way.
I was thirteen
and shelving books in the junior high library,
and I picked up a yellow book—I can still see it—
with a guy in a space suit on the cover.
The title was Have Space Suit, Will Travel,
and I opened it and read:
“You see, I had this space suit.
How it happened was this way:
‘Dad,’ I said, ‘I want to go to the Moon.’
‘Certainly,’ he answered and looked back at his book. It was Jerome
K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, which he must know by heart.
I said, ‘Dad, please! I’m serious!’ ”
There’s a scene at the end of Star Wars.
The Death Star has cleared the planet
and Luke Skywalker is going in for one last run.
Princess Leia is back at command headquarters,
listening intently to the battle.
All the other fighter pilots are dead or out of action
and Darth Vader has Luke clearly in his sights.
And all of a sudden,
Han Solo comes zooming in from left field
to blast Darth Vader
and says,
“Yahoo! You’re all clear, kid. Now let’s blow this thing.”
Now, when he does this,
Princess Leia doesn’t look up from the battle map
or even change her expression,
but my daughter, who was eight years old at the time,
leaned over to me and said, “Oh, she’s hooked, Mother.”
And when I opened that yellow book
and read those first lines of Have Space Suit, Will Travel,
I was hooked.
I raced through Have Space Suit and then—
after a brief detour to read Three Men in a Boat—
I read Citizen of the Galaxy
and Time for the Stars
and The Star Beast
and Double Star
and Tunnel in the Sky
and The Door into Summer
and everything else Heinlein had ever written.
And then Asimov
and Clarke
and The Martian Chronicles
and A Canticle for Leibowitz
and then, oh my God,
I discovered the Year’s Best short story collections
and the world exploded into dazzling possibilities.
Here, side by side, were the most astonishing short stories
and novelettes
and novellas
and poems
“Vintage Season”
and “Lot”
and “The Man Who Lost the Sea”
and “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”
and “Flowers for Algernon”
and “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?”
stories by Kit Reed
and William Tenn
and James Blish
and Fredric Brown
and Zenna Henderson
and Philip K. Dick,
all in one book
nightmarish futures
and high-tech futures
marvelous Shangri-Las
and strange distant planets
aliens
and time travel
and robots
and unicorns
and monsters
tragedies
and adventures
and fantasies
and romances
and comedies
and horrors
“Surface Tension”
“Evening Primrose”
“Day Million”
“Continued on Next Rock”
“When We Went to See the End of the World”
“I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon”
and “One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts,”
stories that in only a few pages,
a few thousand words,
could turn reality upside down and inside out
and make you look at the world,
at the universe,
a whole new way,
could make you laugh,
make you think,
break your heart.
I was beyond hooked.
I was stunned.
I was speechless with wonder,
like Kip and Peewee looking at their own Milky Way from the Magellanic Clouds,
like the two hobos in Ray Bradbury’s “A Miracle of Rare Device,” gazing at the beautiful city in the air.
And I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life reading.
And writing.
I stopped reading my way through the library from A to Z
and started reading all the books I could find
with the little atom and rocketship symbol on their spines.
I had only gotten as far as the Ds on my plan to read my way
through the alphabet when I stopped,
but, as it turned out,
it was a good thing I’d gotten that far.
Because when I was twelve,
my mother died suddenly and shatteringly,
and my world fell apart,
and I had nobody to turn to but books.
They saved my life.
I know what you’re thinking,
that books provided an escape for me.
And it’s certainly true books can offer refuge from worries and despair—
As Leigh Hunt says, “I entrench myself in books equally against sorrow and the weather.”
I remember particularly
a night in the hospital at my five-year-old daughter’s bedside
waiting for tests to show if she had appendicitis
or something worse,
clinging to James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small
like it was a life raft.
During the Blitz,
in the makeshift libraries set up in the tube shelters,
the most popular books were Agatha Christie’s mysteries,
in which the murderer’s always caught and punished,
justice always triumphs,
and the world makes sense.
And when I’m anxious about things, I reread Agatha Christie, too.
And Mary Stewart.
And Lenora Mattingly Weber’s Beany Malone books.
Books can help you get through
long nights and long trips
the wait for the phone call
and the judge’s verdict
and the doctor’s diagnosis
can switch off your squirrel-caging mind,
can make you forget your own troubles in the troubles of
Kip and Peewee
and Frodo
and Viola
and Harry
and Charlie
and Huck.
But it wasn’t escape I needed when my mother died.
It was the truth.
And I couldn’t get anyone to tell it to me.
Instead, they said things like:
“There’s a reason this happened,”
and “You’ll get over this,”
and “God never sends us more than we can bear.”
Lies, all lies.
I remember an aunt saying sagely, “The good die young”—
not exactly a motivation to behave yourself—
and more than one person telling me, “It’s all part of God’s plan.”
I remember thinking, even at age twelve,
What kind of moron is God?
I could come up with a better plan than this.
And the worst lie of all, “It’s for the best.”
Everybody lied—relatives, clergymen, friends.
So it was a good thing I’d reached the Ds because I had
Margery Allingham
and James Agee’s A Death in the Family
and Peter Beagle’s A Fine and Private Place
and Peter De Vries’s The Blood of the Lamb to tell me the truth.
“Time heals nothing,” Peter De Vries said.
And Margery Allingham said, “Mourning is not forgetting. It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied, and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the knot.”
And when I discovered science fiction a year later,
Robert Sheckley said,
“Never try to explain to yourselves why some things happen and why other things don’t happen. Don’t ask and don’t imagine that an explanation exists. Get it?”
And Bob Shaw’s “The Light of Other Days”
and John Crowley’s “Snow”
and Tom Godwin
taught me everything there is to know about death
and memory
and the cold equations.
But there were also hopeful messages in those books.
“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead,” Thornton Wilder said, “and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
And Dorothy, in The Patchwork Girl of Oz, said, “Never give up.… No one ever knows what’s going to happen next.”
“If you look for truth,” C. S. Lewis wrote, “you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort, you will not get either comfort or truth, only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with, and in the end, despair.”
I found what I was looking for,
what I needed,
what I wanted,
what I loved
in books
when I couldn’t find it anywhere else.
Francie and the public library and books saved my life.
And taught me the most important lesson books have to teach.
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” James Baldwin says, “but then you read. It was[books that] taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.”
And the narrator in the movie Matilda says it even better:
“Matilda read all kinds of books and was nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships onto the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: ‘You are not alone.’ ”
I told you about falling in love with books
that day I got my library card,
that day I opened Have Space Suit and read that first page,
that day I discovered the Year’s Best collections,
but it wasn’t just that I fell in love with books,
with science fiction.
It wasn’t just that they were there when I needed them.
It was that when I found them,
I also found,
like one of Zenna Henderson’s People,
or the Ugly Duckling
or Anne of Green Gables
or Harry Potter,
my true family,
my “kindred spirits,” as Anne calls them,
my own kind.
And, finding them,
for the first time I knew,
like Ozma released from the witch’s spell,
like Deckard in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
like Bethie and Jemmy and Valancy,
who I really was.
I had escaped,
but it was not from the real world.
It was from exile.
I had come home.
Just like in a story.
And I lived happily ever after.
Books are an amazing thing.
Anyone who thinks of them as an escape from reality
or as something you should get your nose out of and go outside
and play
as merely a distraction
or an amusement
or a waste of time
is dead wrong.
Books are the most important
the most powerful
the most beautiful thing
humans have ever created.
When Kip and Peewee find themselves on trial for earth
and trying to defend it against the charge
that it’s a danger which should be destroyed, Kip says,
“Have you heard our poetry?”
And what better defense of us could you come up with?
Books can reach out across space
and time
and language
and culture
and customs,
gender
and age
and even death
and speak to someone they never met,
to someone who wasn’t even born when they were written
and give them help
and advice
and companionship
and consolation.
In the words of Clarence Day, Jr.,
“The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man.
Nothing else that he builds ever lasts.
Monuments fall;
nations perish;
civilizations grow old and die out;
and, after an era of darkness,
new races build others.
But in the world of books
are volumes that have seen this happen again and again
and yet live on,
still young,
still as fresh as the day they were written
still telling men’s hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead.”
They are a miracle of rare device.
I never met Louisa May Alcott
or Robert Heinlein
or Rumer Godden or L. Frank Baum or Philip K. Dick
or Thornton Wilder or Dean Matthews of St. Paul’s,
but they reached out to me
across time,
across space,
and spoke to me
encouraged me
inspired me
taught me everything I know.
Saved my life.
And filled it with wonder.
And I just wanted to say thank you.
Being the sort of obsessive neurotic I am, I wasn’t sure exactly what would be required of me when I was given the Grand Master Nebula Award, so I wrote a couple of speeches, “just in cases” as Aurelia says in Love Actually.
I only ended up having to give one speech, but here, for your delectation, is the other.
GRAND MASTER BACKUP SPEECH (never delivered)
People keep asking me how I feel now that I’m a Grand Master,
and there are a lot of answers to that.
I feel incredibly honored
and humbled
and awestruck to find myself in such exalted company
as Robert Heinlein
and Joe Haldeman
and Bob Silverberg
and my dear friend Jack Williamson.
(My first thought when I found out about the Grand Master Award was, “He would be so proud of me.”)
I feel all of those things,
plus dismayed to find myself old enough to be made
a Grand Master
and delighted to have been named
and worried that I’ll wake up any moment now
and find that it was all a dream.
In short, I feel like Frodo
and Kip Russell
and Alice.
But mostly,
I feel like Beatrix Potter.
In the middle of World War II,
a reporter interviewed Beatrix Potter.
She was a very old lady by that time—
she would have been eighty-four, I think—
and she was living on a farm in the Lake District,
raising sheep for the army to turn into wool for uniforms,
and dealing with rationing
and food shortages
and fuel shortages.
At that particular moment,
she was dealing with a German plane
The Best of Connie Willis Page 46
