The Best of Connie Willis

by Connie Willis

  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