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The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories
This new collection of stories from the multi-award-winning author of Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog contains:
A Letter from the Clearys
At the Rialto
Death on the Nile
The Soul Selects Her own Society
Fire Watch
Inside Job
Even the Queen
The Winds of Marble Arch
All Seated on the Ground
Last of the Winnebagos
Ten stories - which have all won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award or both - are compulsory reading for the serious science fiction fan.
A Letter from the Clearys
At the Rialto
Death on the Nile
The Soul Selects Her own Society
Fire Watch
Inside Job
Even the Queen
The Winds of Marble Arch
All Seated on the Ground
Last of the Winnebagos
Ten stories - which have all won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award or both - are compulsory reading for the serious science fiction fan.
473 pages, Hardcover
First published July 9, 1993
About the author
Connie Willis
261 books4,463 followersConstance Elaine Trimmer Willis is an American science fiction writer. She is one of the most honored science fiction writers of the 1980s and 1990s.
She has won, among other awards, ten Hugo Awards and six Nebula Awards. Willis most recently won a Hugo Award for All Seated on the Ground (August 2008). She was the 2011 recipient of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA).
She lives in Greeley, Colorado with her husband Courtney Willis, a professor of physics at the University of Northern Colorado. She also has one daughter, Cordelia.
Willis is known for her accessible prose and likable characters. She has written several pieces involving time travel by history students and faculty of the future University of Oxford. These pieces include her Hugo Award-winning novels Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog and the short story "Fire Watch," found in the short story collection of the same name.
Willis tends to the comedy of manners style of writing. Her protagonists are typically beset by single-minded people pursuing illogical agendas, such as attempting to organize a bell-ringing session in the middle of a deadly epidemic (Doomsday Book), or frustrating efforts to analyze near-death experiences by putting words in the mouths of interviewees (Passage).
She has won, among other awards, ten Hugo Awards and six Nebula Awards. Willis most recently won a Hugo Award for All Seated on the Ground (August 2008). She was the 2011 recipient of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA).
She lives in Greeley, Colorado with her husband Courtney Willis, a professor of physics at the University of Northern Colorado. She also has one daughter, Cordelia.
Willis is known for her accessible prose and likable characters. She has written several pieces involving time travel by history students and faculty of the future University of Oxford. These pieces include her Hugo Award-winning novels Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog and the short story "Fire Watch," found in the short story collection of the same name.
Willis tends to the comedy of manners style of writing. Her protagonists are typically beset by single-minded people pursuing illogical agendas, such as attempting to organize a bell-ringing session in the middle of a deadly epidemic (Doomsday Book), or frustrating efforts to analyze near-death experiences by putting words in the mouths of interviewees (Passage).
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 450 reviews
September 24, 2023
20 May, 2018
The amazing thing about Willis is that she writes the funniest screwball comedies and the most deeply-moving stories of grief. It never ceases to impress me that she is such a master of writing at these two extremes of emotion. And she managed to make it look effortless. Her many awards and recognitions will never equal what she deserves.
***21 Sep 2023
I took extensive notes, so if I catchall break I can be a lor more specific that 'he'll, yes!*
***
Library copy
The amazing thing about Willis is that she writes the funniest screwball comedies and the most deeply-moving stories of grief. It never ceases to impress me that she is such a master of writing at these two extremes of emotion. And she managed to make it look effortless. Her many awards and recognitions will never equal what she deserves.
***21 Sep 2023
I took extensive notes, so if I catchall break I can be a lor more specific that 'he'll, yes!*
***
Library copy
February 16, 2014
Before I became a romance reader, I was addicted to sci-fi. Connie Willis was like my crack. She writes these really engaging, time travel-y books that keep my interest like no other. When I saw that a book of her short stories was coming out, I immediately snatched it up.
The majority of the stories in this anthology were awesome. I think my least favorites were the first and last stories in the collection (both felt really dated). However, some of the other stories were both historically fascinating (I never get tired of reading about the Blitz, like Connie Willis) and flat out hilarious. I didn't know Connie Willis was so funny. She really is.
Here is a little taste of how she brings the funnies (from one of my favorite stories of the bunch):
"I'm Stephanie," the waitress said. "How many are there in your party?"
There was no one remotely in my vicinity. "Are you an actress-slash model?" I asked her.
"Yes," she said. "I'm working here part time to pay for my holistic hairstyling lessons."
"There is one of me," I said, holding up my forefinger to make it perfectly clear. "I want a table away from the window."
She led me to a table in front of the window, handed me a menu the size of the macrocosm, and put another one down across from me... "I'll take your order when your other party arrives."
**snort**
"Which one's in the main theater?"
"I don't know. I just work here part time to pay for my organic breathing lessons."
I have the biggest geek crush on Connie Willis' writing right now. She is such an interesting, fascinating writer and I felt privileged to read these award-winning stories.
**Copy provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review**
The majority of the stories in this anthology were awesome. I think my least favorites were the first and last stories in the collection (both felt really dated). However, some of the other stories were both historically fascinating (I never get tired of reading about the Blitz, like Connie Willis) and flat out hilarious. I didn't know Connie Willis was so funny. She really is.
Here is a little taste of how she brings the funnies (from one of my favorite stories of the bunch):
"I'm Stephanie," the waitress said. "How many are there in your party?"
There was no one remotely in my vicinity. "Are you an actress-slash model?" I asked her.
"Yes," she said. "I'm working here part time to pay for my holistic hairstyling lessons."
"There is one of me," I said, holding up my forefinger to make it perfectly clear. "I want a table away from the window."
She led me to a table in front of the window, handed me a menu the size of the macrocosm, and put another one down across from me... "I'll take your order when your other party arrives."
**snort**
"Which one's in the main theater?"
"I don't know. I just work here part time to pay for my organic breathing lessons."
I have the biggest geek crush on Connie Willis' writing right now. She is such an interesting, fascinating writer and I felt privileged to read these award-winning stories.
**Copy provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review**
July 14, 2013
It’s not a secret that I’m a fan of Connie Willis’s writing. Mind you, I’m not the only one.
Connie has accumulated eleven Hugo Awards and seven Nebula Awards at the time I’m typing this, more than any other living writer, and has the distinction of becoming an SFWA Grand Master in 2011. She was also inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2009.
Such awards often reflect a great deal of hard graft and honing a writer’s skill over many years. This is also true of Connie. Her first story was published in 1970. This book attempts to distil nearly 45 years of writing into one volume. It’s not easy, and I’m sure there are others that could have been included. But as ‘Best-of’s’ go, it’s a good selection, being the Award-Winning Stories.
There are 10 stories, the 2006 Worldcon Guest of Honor Speech and her Grand Master speeches (both given and as an alternative version) included. As the editor of the book points out, Connie is nearly as well known for her presence on the US convention circuit as she is for her writing, so her speeches are nearly as entertaining.
What may also make this a must-buy for those who know the stories is both the Introduction by Connie and an Afterword by Connie for each of the ten tales. Like the speeches, they are, as you might expect, emotional, filled with warmth, wit and great self-deprecation, as well as clearly showing a deep everlasting love for the genre. Connie’s Introduction to her stories and how she came to read (and write) SF is about as eloquent an homage to older writers as you can get. The Afterwords end each of the tales nicely.
To the stories, then. They are (in order):
A Letter from the Cleary's (Nebula Award winner 1983)
At the Rialto (Nebula Award winner 1990)
Death on the Nile (Hugo Award winner 1994)
The Soul Selects Her Own Society (Hugo Award winner 1997)
Fire Watch (Hugo & Nebula Award winner 1983)
Inside Job (Hugo Award winner 2006)
Even the Queen (Hugo and Nebula Award winner 1993)
The Winds of Marble Arch (Hugo Award and World Fantasy Award winner 2000)
All Seated on the Ground (Hugo Award winner 2008)
Last of the Winnebagos (Hugo and Nebula Award winner 1989)
With such an Award winning assemblage, it is difficult to criticise any of them. Connie herself does a little - in her Introduction Connie claims that A Letter from the Cleary’s owes a lot to Ward Moore’s Lot (an early favourite), Even the Queen and At the Rialto have a debt to Heinlein in terms of style. Personally I do think the lady doth protest there a little too much. Whilst the influences are there, Connie has taken those influences and turned them to something with her own style, although I think they take a little time getting there.
It is probably the oldest stories that are least effective. A Letter from the Cleary’s remind the reader of a time when nuclear annihilation was quite possible in the 1980’s, but its point is pretty obvious. Similarly, At the Rialto is a less successful tale, being a sometimes-amusing screwball comedy, creating humour by combining scientific theory with the horrors of attending conventions. It’s not a chuckle-fest, but I did appreciate the jarring juxtaposition of experimental science with the razzmatazz of downtown Hollywood. They’re OK, but in both cases, in my opinion, Connie has done better.
With Death on the Nile the stories become a little more memorable. It is a lengthier piece that begins as a human-relationships tale and ends up as a Twilight-Zone-esque psychological horror. The Soul Selects Her Own Society is a not-too-serious alternate history, combining Emily Dickinson with, amongst others, HG Wells. As the tale continues, some of the links made by the fictitious ‘writer’ increasingly show the creation of a bizarre thesis at work. The story shows a deftness and depth that At the Rialto lacks, although a detailed knowledge of the other authors work might ensure a better understanding of the humour. The Afterword does help here, and might actually work better as an Introduction.
By Fire Watch we are into rich territory. The author has clearly found her niche and the stories here are richer, and more memorable. Fire Watch is one of my own personal favourites of Connie’s, a time-travel tale that reuses some characters that we have first met in Doomsday Book. Here it tells of the difficulties of keeping London’s St Paul’s Cathedral from being destroyed during the firebombing in the Blitz of the 1940’s. It is both unashamedly emotional and almost reverential in its love of history, of old art and religious buildings, as well as evoking a respect for the ordinary people doing a difficult job. One of the strengths of this collection, enhanced by the message within the Afterword.
Inside Job is a lengthy (but great) modern tale of fake mediums in California, written in a fast, sparky style, very reminiscent of the 1930’s comedy movies. It entertainingly looks at the question, “What happens when a fake spiritualist begins channelling an old skeptic?” It’s a contemporary version of the old film comedies such as His Girl Friday, or Spencer Tracy/Katherine Hepburn’s collaborations (the genre of which Connie loves.)
Even the Queen is a near-future tale about being a woman in a world of gender equality that makes some great points about the biological aspects of women, culture and religion without resorting to hectoring rhetoric. And a great Afterword, too.
The Winds of Marble Arch is one of my favourites: a modern tale that is sad, funny, and full of lots of little touches that reflect London and England at its best (and worst), as well as commenting on the transitional nature of life. It shows a love of the London Underground (yes-really!) and London as a city. Her Afterword here explains her love for an iconic railway system, and is delightful. Another strength of this collection.
The last couple of tales in the collection are very enjoyable, although to my mind less so than Marble Arch. All Seated on the Ground is another long story, an amusing and unashamedly romantic one of alien first-contact that uses singing as a means of possible communication. I was amazed at Connie’s knowledge of Christmas carol lyrics, although this is partly explained by Connie in her Afterword.
Finally, Last of the Winnebagos is a tale about a near future where large road vehicles (such as the titular Winnebago) and petrol/gasoline are going. It’s a lengthy tale that is deceptive in its telling. It begins as if it is about the last RV, but really it is about a dystopian future where dogs have died out due to a pandemic, the newparvo virus. Our lead character, photojournalist David McCombe, is haunted by the death of his dog due to a road accident fifteen years ago. Although it begins as if it was another one of Connie’s lighter-toned narratives, it changes about a third of the way in into a darker tale, with the story becoming something about loss and the emotional impact of dealing with a shock event. In the end, it’s a much more complex tale than I thought it was going to be, with elements that only make sense on a re-reading. Its tenor in places is so bleak that I can see why it has been left until the end of this collection, a tone only relieved by the lighter, sparkier scripts of her acceptance speeches.
Speaking of which, the acceptance speeches are very nice, and eloquently put, but tell us little that hasn’t already been said in the book’s Introduction. Consider them as additional items of interest, but really non-essential.
In summary, although some have dated better than others, pretty much all of the stories here are worth reading. There are amusing tales, quirky tales, elegiac tales and memorable tales. What is striking reading them in such a collection is the range of story included. As you might expect from the author of Doomsday Book and Black Out/All Clear, there are time travel stories, but there are also stories about (as Connie puts it in her Introduction), “psychics, RV’s, 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 is this variety that keeps a booklover reading, I think.
If you’ve not read Connie’s work before, this is a great place to start. It’s not entirely even, but there are great riches in here, stories full of emotion, filled with warmth and sadness, great drama, witty dialogue, characters you will care about and moments that you will remember for a long time afterwards.
If nothing else, I think this will whet your appetite for more Connie. I would suggest Doomsday Book (despite the awful title, one of my all-time favourite books), Black Out/All Clear (really one lengthy book) and To Say Nothing of the Dog, should you wish it.
Whatever you decide, my advice here is to go and read. You will not, in my opinion, regret it.
Connie has accumulated eleven Hugo Awards and seven Nebula Awards at the time I’m typing this, more than any other living writer, and has the distinction of becoming an SFWA Grand Master in 2011. She was also inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2009.
Such awards often reflect a great deal of hard graft and honing a writer’s skill over many years. This is also true of Connie. Her first story was published in 1970. This book attempts to distil nearly 45 years of writing into one volume. It’s not easy, and I’m sure there are others that could have been included. But as ‘Best-of’s’ go, it’s a good selection, being the Award-Winning Stories.
There are 10 stories, the 2006 Worldcon Guest of Honor Speech and her Grand Master speeches (both given and as an alternative version) included. As the editor of the book points out, Connie is nearly as well known for her presence on the US convention circuit as she is for her writing, so her speeches are nearly as entertaining.
What may also make this a must-buy for those who know the stories is both the Introduction by Connie and an Afterword by Connie for each of the ten tales. Like the speeches, they are, as you might expect, emotional, filled with warmth, wit and great self-deprecation, as well as clearly showing a deep everlasting love for the genre. Connie’s Introduction to her stories and how she came to read (and write) SF is about as eloquent an homage to older writers as you can get. The Afterwords end each of the tales nicely.
To the stories, then. They are (in order):
A Letter from the Cleary's (Nebula Award winner 1983)
At the Rialto (Nebula Award winner 1990)
Death on the Nile (Hugo Award winner 1994)
The Soul Selects Her Own Society (Hugo Award winner 1997)
Fire Watch (Hugo & Nebula Award winner 1983)
Inside Job (Hugo Award winner 2006)
Even the Queen (Hugo and Nebula Award winner 1993)
The Winds of Marble Arch (Hugo Award and World Fantasy Award winner 2000)
All Seated on the Ground (Hugo Award winner 2008)
Last of the Winnebagos (Hugo and Nebula Award winner 1989)
With such an Award winning assemblage, it is difficult to criticise any of them. Connie herself does a little - in her Introduction Connie claims that A Letter from the Cleary’s owes a lot to Ward Moore’s Lot (an early favourite), Even the Queen and At the Rialto have a debt to Heinlein in terms of style. Personally I do think the lady doth protest there a little too much. Whilst the influences are there, Connie has taken those influences and turned them to something with her own style, although I think they take a little time getting there.
It is probably the oldest stories that are least effective. A Letter from the Cleary’s remind the reader of a time when nuclear annihilation was quite possible in the 1980’s, but its point is pretty obvious. Similarly, At the Rialto is a less successful tale, being a sometimes-amusing screwball comedy, creating humour by combining scientific theory with the horrors of attending conventions. It’s not a chuckle-fest, but I did appreciate the jarring juxtaposition of experimental science with the razzmatazz of downtown Hollywood. They’re OK, but in both cases, in my opinion, Connie has done better.
With Death on the Nile the stories become a little more memorable. It is a lengthier piece that begins as a human-relationships tale and ends up as a Twilight-Zone-esque psychological horror. The Soul Selects Her Own Society is a not-too-serious alternate history, combining Emily Dickinson with, amongst others, HG Wells. As the tale continues, some of the links made by the fictitious ‘writer’ increasingly show the creation of a bizarre thesis at work. The story shows a deftness and depth that At the Rialto lacks, although a detailed knowledge of the other authors work might ensure a better understanding of the humour. The Afterword does help here, and might actually work better as an Introduction.
By Fire Watch we are into rich territory. The author has clearly found her niche and the stories here are richer, and more memorable. Fire Watch is one of my own personal favourites of Connie’s, a time-travel tale that reuses some characters that we have first met in Doomsday Book. Here it tells of the difficulties of keeping London’s St Paul’s Cathedral from being destroyed during the firebombing in the Blitz of the 1940’s. It is both unashamedly emotional and almost reverential in its love of history, of old art and religious buildings, as well as evoking a respect for the ordinary people doing a difficult job. One of the strengths of this collection, enhanced by the message within the Afterword.
Inside Job is a lengthy (but great) modern tale of fake mediums in California, written in a fast, sparky style, very reminiscent of the 1930’s comedy movies. It entertainingly looks at the question, “What happens when a fake spiritualist begins channelling an old skeptic?” It’s a contemporary version of the old film comedies such as His Girl Friday, or Spencer Tracy/Katherine Hepburn’s collaborations (the genre of which Connie loves.)
Even the Queen is a near-future tale about being a woman in a world of gender equality that makes some great points about the biological aspects of women, culture and religion without resorting to hectoring rhetoric. And a great Afterword, too.
The Winds of Marble Arch is one of my favourites: a modern tale that is sad, funny, and full of lots of little touches that reflect London and England at its best (and worst), as well as commenting on the transitional nature of life. It shows a love of the London Underground (yes-really!) and London as a city. Her Afterword here explains her love for an iconic railway system, and is delightful. Another strength of this collection.
The last couple of tales in the collection are very enjoyable, although to my mind less so than Marble Arch. All Seated on the Ground is another long story, an amusing and unashamedly romantic one of alien first-contact that uses singing as a means of possible communication. I was amazed at Connie’s knowledge of Christmas carol lyrics, although this is partly explained by Connie in her Afterword.
Finally, Last of the Winnebagos is a tale about a near future where large road vehicles (such as the titular Winnebago) and petrol/gasoline are going. It’s a lengthy tale that is deceptive in its telling. It begins as if it is about the last RV, but really it is about a dystopian future where dogs have died out due to a pandemic, the newparvo virus. Our lead character, photojournalist David McCombe, is haunted by the death of his dog due to a road accident fifteen years ago. Although it begins as if it was another one of Connie’s lighter-toned narratives, it changes about a third of the way in into a darker tale, with the story becoming something about loss and the emotional impact of dealing with a shock event. In the end, it’s a much more complex tale than I thought it was going to be, with elements that only make sense on a re-reading. Its tenor in places is so bleak that I can see why it has been left until the end of this collection, a tone only relieved by the lighter, sparkier scripts of her acceptance speeches.
Speaking of which, the acceptance speeches are very nice, and eloquently put, but tell us little that hasn’t already been said in the book’s Introduction. Consider them as additional items of interest, but really non-essential.
In summary, although some have dated better than others, pretty much all of the stories here are worth reading. There are amusing tales, quirky tales, elegiac tales and memorable tales. What is striking reading them in such a collection is the range of story included. As you might expect from the author of Doomsday Book and Black Out/All Clear, there are time travel stories, but there are also stories about (as Connie puts it in her Introduction), “psychics, RV’s, 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 is this variety that keeps a booklover reading, I think.
If you’ve not read Connie’s work before, this is a great place to start. It’s not entirely even, but there are great riches in here, stories full of emotion, filled with warmth and sadness, great drama, witty dialogue, characters you will care about and moments that you will remember for a long time afterwards.
If nothing else, I think this will whet your appetite for more Connie. I would suggest Doomsday Book (despite the awful title, one of my all-time favourite books), Black Out/All Clear (really one lengthy book) and To Say Nothing of the Dog, should you wish it.
Whatever you decide, my advice here is to go and read. You will not, in my opinion, regret it.
April 21, 2020
Thank you, Connie Willis!
Short story collections usually don't get 5 stars, simply cause there is so much variation in quality inherent to the format. Yet this one earns all the stars. Not every single story is a 5, but a rounded up 3.5 the least, and the introductions, afterwords to the stories and acceptance speeches at the end of the book give such a loving, well rounded feeling to this collection. I felt more like being with a friend than reading a book. I adored Connie Willis before and now I love her even more.
All of the stories in this collection won at least one of the major SF awards (I've read that she was nominated 165 times … just wow!) and they show a superb range of Willis' style.
"A letter from the Clearys" is a rather conventional end-of-the-world story, yet the slow and very intimate build up worked wonderfully. I was all there in this snow-clad evening scene with a girl and a dog.
With "At the Rialto" she is the Connie Willis I learned to know through her Oxford timetravellers: screwball, chaotic, apparently sense-free and utterly enjoyable. I think I could endlessly read her characters in near misses and confusions.
Another side showed "Death on the Nile" (yep, the title is intentional). A slow burning and very effective horror that works entirely without the usual yuk and splatter.
"The Soul selects her own society" may very well be the weirdest explanation of a saving of humankind from alien invasion that I've ever read. The Brits had bacteria against the Martians, the US had Emily Dickinson.
"Fire Watch" is a kind of prequel/tie-in to her "Blackout/All Clear" books and shows the enormous interest she had for the Blitz and St. Paul's and the love for her timetravelers. I always get a bit bleary eyed when I read how emotional she gets about that time. She effortlessly transfers this feeling to me while I'm reading.
"Inside Job" was a big surprise (and perhaps my favourite here). If I had read this story without knowing the author I would have attributed it to Theodore Sturgeon in a jiffy. The same feeling for characters, the same 'datedness', the same kind of inventive idea and solution.
"Even the Queen" is …. everything! I laughed so hard while reading this utterly piss-taking conversation between 4 generations of women and a pro-natural feminist. In her afterword she explains that she wrote it because she was told to write more about 'women's issues' instead 'just' SF - and hell she did!
"All seated on the ground" is a delightful Christmas story where Willis puts in her love for church choirs and Christmas carols - a perfect combination with a first contact situation.
"The Winds of Marble Arch" and "The Last of the Winnebagos" both were deeply atmospheric, melancholic and foreshadowing stories that started lightly and then cut deep. I was crying at the end of both of them, because they struck so hard.
Folks who never read anything by Connie Willis (yes, those people exist, I must shamefully admit that I was one of them only 1.5 years ago) can't go wrong in choosing this excellent collection as a beginning to get acquainted with one of the greatest SF writers.
Short story collections usually don't get 5 stars, simply cause there is so much variation in quality inherent to the format. Yet this one earns all the stars. Not every single story is a 5, but a rounded up 3.5 the least, and the introductions, afterwords to the stories and acceptance speeches at the end of the book give such a loving, well rounded feeling to this collection. I felt more like being with a friend than reading a book. I adored Connie Willis before and now I love her even more.
All of the stories in this collection won at least one of the major SF awards (I've read that she was nominated 165 times … just wow!) and they show a superb range of Willis' style.
"A letter from the Clearys" is a rather conventional end-of-the-world story, yet the slow and very intimate build up worked wonderfully. I was all there in this snow-clad evening scene with a girl and a dog.
With "At the Rialto" she is the Connie Willis I learned to know through her Oxford timetravellers: screwball, chaotic, apparently sense-free and utterly enjoyable. I think I could endlessly read her characters in near misses and confusions.
Another side showed "Death on the Nile" (yep, the title is intentional). A slow burning and very effective horror that works entirely without the usual yuk and splatter.
"The Soul selects her own society" may very well be the weirdest explanation of a saving of humankind from alien invasion that I've ever read. The Brits had bacteria against the Martians, the US had Emily Dickinson.
"Fire Watch" is a kind of prequel/tie-in to her "Blackout/All Clear" books and shows the enormous interest she had for the Blitz and St. Paul's and the love for her timetravelers. I always get a bit bleary eyed when I read how emotional she gets about that time. She effortlessly transfers this feeling to me while I'm reading.
"Inside Job" was a big surprise (and perhaps my favourite here). If I had read this story without knowing the author I would have attributed it to Theodore Sturgeon in a jiffy. The same feeling for characters, the same 'datedness', the same kind of inventive idea and solution.
"Even the Queen" is …. everything! I laughed so hard while reading this utterly piss-taking conversation between 4 generations of women and a pro-natural feminist. In her afterword she explains that she wrote it because she was told to write more about 'women's issues' instead 'just' SF - and hell she did!
"All seated on the ground" is a delightful Christmas story where Willis puts in her love for church choirs and Christmas carols - a perfect combination with a first contact situation.
"The Winds of Marble Arch" and "The Last of the Winnebagos" both were deeply atmospheric, melancholic and foreshadowing stories that started lightly and then cut deep. I was crying at the end of both of them, because they struck so hard.
Folks who never read anything by Connie Willis (yes, those people exist, I must shamefully admit that I was one of them only 1.5 years ago) can't go wrong in choosing this excellent collection as a beginning to get acquainted with one of the greatest SF writers.
July 24, 2016
Originally posted on my website, Koenix
Time is the Fire is a collection of 10 Hugo and Nebula award-winning stories by Willis, ranging from short stories to novellas. Willis is well-known for her humor and "comedy of manners" plots, which usually involve characters running around, unable to communicate, and completely misunderstanding each other. These stories walk a thin line for me between amusing and annoying, since lack of communication is one of my habitual pet peeves in fiction. I think it's too easy to lean on communication problems to create tension in a story, and such abysmal communication is often unrealistic.
Willis's stories are timeless in the sense that the humor is often grounded in universal human behavior and personality types that we all know. They are "soft sci fi" and focus tightly on individuals. Technology and science are background elements. And technology is the only weakness in many of these stories. Willis hasn't made many accurate predictions about future technology, especially about future communications technology! And it really irks me when I'm reading a futuristic tale in which all the characters' problems shouldn't be problems because really they should have cell phones, email, text messages, and social media. Ahh, I know this happens in science fiction! But like I said, lack of communication can irk me.
A few of these stories were rereads for me, and I loved them even more this time. "Fire Watch" packed much more of a punch, and it's the perfect length for the story, with its craziness and sleepless, neurotic feel. I've criticized the last two Oxford time travel books (Blackout/All Clear) for their excessive bloat and repetitiveness, and it was nice to revisit this original story in that world which nails the length.
"Inside Job" is about a man and his assistant who debunk mediums in Hollywood - and then they encounter a new medium in town who may be truly channeling the spirit of H.L. Mencken! (Such irony!) I enjoyed it the first time I read it last year, and even more so this time, knowing full well from the beginning about Mencken. It was fantastic and funny and made me want to read more scathing, pithy, and hilarious commentary by Mencken. I also think this is a rare Willis story that doesn't rely so much on communication problems to develop plot tension, so the change is very pleasant. This is one of the best Willis stories I've read and the one I'd recommend people pick up first, as it's a standalone.
"A Letter from the Clearys" was a reread too, and another one I enjoyed more the second time around. There's this magnificent shift in the story, in which you realize you've gotten the setting completely wrong, because you assume at the beginning... and it's written cleverly enough that nothing contradicts your assumption, but when you go back and reread the opening paragraphs, you see exactly what you missed the first time. I don't know how else to explain it without ruining it! It's about paranoia and post-nuclear explosion life.
The absolute funniest story, in my opinion, is the fantastically titled "The Soul Selects Her Own Society: Invasion and Repulsion: A Chronological Reinterpretation of Two of Emily Dickinson's Poems: A Wellsian Perspective". Where do I even begin! It's a total hilarious parody of excessively detailed, over-analyzed, and misinterpretive academic essays on really flawed esoteric opinions. You know, those things academics write that are total made-up BS and clearly a desperate attempt to publish something (anything!). It's funny because it's so, so true. It also imagines a zombie Emily Dickinson fighting an alien invasion!!
Some disappointments: "The Winds of Marble Arch" and "The Last of the Winnebagos" did not live up to my expectations at all. I didn't understand the message of "The Winds of Marble Arch". Or perhaps I did, and I just don't want to accept how bleak it felt. "The Last of the Winnebagos" hasn't aged well since it imagines a pretty crazy future of highways and travel limitations. I was impressed at the writing, because like I mentioned before, Willis is great at vividly sketching in a world and its rules, and the frustrations. However, I think this story particularly hinges on the reader's emotional attachment to dogs as pets, in order to invoke similar feelings about other issues. Maybe I'm cold-hearted, but I was just not that sad by the end.
Overall, Time is the Fire was a grab-bag of great and average stories. Some of them were really fantastic, and it's great to read humorous award-winning science fiction, because it's so rare!
July 19, 2023
I've been reading science fiction since the 1960s, but I can still come across a writer that's new to me who has been in the business for decades - and that happened recently with Connie Willis' Time is the Fire. This remarkable collection is of stories, published between the 70s and the 90s, that have all won either Hugos or Nebulas - the big US awards for SF writing. I suspect one reason they are new to me is that they are all from US science fiction magazines, which I've never regularly read.
There's certainly plenty of quality in this collection. Willis is a brilliant storyteller in the gentle narrative style, giving us stories that are strongly imbued with either humour or longing and sadness. If you haven't come across her writing, Ray Bradbury most directly came to mind as a parallel, though here the folksiness is joined by an enthusiasm for some non-US settings, notably in London, St Paul's Cathedral and the Underground. To pick out a few favourites, we kick off with A Letter from the Clearys, which delivers a punch to the gut with a very small scale view of a post-apocalyptic America.
Fire Watch is a great time travel story set in London during the Blitz, which has a poignant twist. (With a typical Willis touch of humour, the time traveller has spent years research St Paul before his trip, only to discover that he is actually to visit St Paul's.) Despite the moan below, I loved the way All Seated on the Ground pulled together an alien visit and choirs. And although it faces the usual problems of near-future SF writing, Willis's circa 2008-set The Last of the Winnebagos brilliantly intertwines environmental decline (including the extinction of dogs) with RVs being rendered illegal and the way two people's lives have been changed by an accident in the past involving a dog. The technology (and, thankfully, the state of the world) is all wrong - but just as this doesn't really matter with Blade Runner's ludicrous portrayal of 2019, it's also not a problem here.
I admit there are a couple of stories that don't seem to reach the heights the awards they received suggest. Death on the Nile is a great story, but it's fantasy, not SF (as is The Winds of Marble Arch). At the Rialto is less successful: its humour is very heavy handed, while its setting verges on the ludicrous. (Heavy-handed humour is also a bit of problem in the pseudo-academic paper The Soul Selects her own Society - though the premise, linking Emily Dickinson and the world of H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds is brilliant.) At the Rialto is supposed to feature a conference for quantum physicists, but the topics discussed are at the most basic popular science level. It's just inconceivable that quantum physicists in the 1980s would be shocked and confused as they appear to be by, for example, tunnelling. The response to this one on both its humour and its science was to groan.
My only other complaint is that a couple of the stories - The Winds of Marble Arch and All Seated on the Ground are too long. It may be the cynic in me, but given stories are paid by the word I do wonder if this had something to do with how lengthy they are. It's not that they're bad stories. All Seated on the Ground particularly takes an absolutely brilliant (and light-hearted) approach to dealing with the problems of communicating with aliens. But both these stories feature an obsessive trying many different variations on theme to try to work something out, and after a while they get a touch repetitive.
However, the majority of the stories were excellent - and I don't think I've ever read a collection that was uniformly brilliant. The short story is a format where science fiction writers excel - and Willis shows why. Her style a cross between Bradbury and Aldiss, with the former’s lyricism and poignancy, and the latter’s sharpness.
There's certainly plenty of quality in this collection. Willis is a brilliant storyteller in the gentle narrative style, giving us stories that are strongly imbued with either humour or longing and sadness. If you haven't come across her writing, Ray Bradbury most directly came to mind as a parallel, though here the folksiness is joined by an enthusiasm for some non-US settings, notably in London, St Paul's Cathedral and the Underground. To pick out a few favourites, we kick off with A Letter from the Clearys, which delivers a punch to the gut with a very small scale view of a post-apocalyptic America.
Fire Watch is a great time travel story set in London during the Blitz, which has a poignant twist. (With a typical Willis touch of humour, the time traveller has spent years research St Paul before his trip, only to discover that he is actually to visit St Paul's.) Despite the moan below, I loved the way All Seated on the Ground pulled together an alien visit and choirs. And although it faces the usual problems of near-future SF writing, Willis's circa 2008-set The Last of the Winnebagos brilliantly intertwines environmental decline (including the extinction of dogs) with RVs being rendered illegal and the way two people's lives have been changed by an accident in the past involving a dog. The technology (and, thankfully, the state of the world) is all wrong - but just as this doesn't really matter with Blade Runner's ludicrous portrayal of 2019, it's also not a problem here.
I admit there are a couple of stories that don't seem to reach the heights the awards they received suggest. Death on the Nile is a great story, but it's fantasy, not SF (as is The Winds of Marble Arch). At the Rialto is less successful: its humour is very heavy handed, while its setting verges on the ludicrous. (Heavy-handed humour is also a bit of problem in the pseudo-academic paper The Soul Selects her own Society - though the premise, linking Emily Dickinson and the world of H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds is brilliant.) At the Rialto is supposed to feature a conference for quantum physicists, but the topics discussed are at the most basic popular science level. It's just inconceivable that quantum physicists in the 1980s would be shocked and confused as they appear to be by, for example, tunnelling. The response to this one on both its humour and its science was to groan.
My only other complaint is that a couple of the stories - The Winds of Marble Arch and All Seated on the Ground are too long. It may be the cynic in me, but given stories are paid by the word I do wonder if this had something to do with how lengthy they are. It's not that they're bad stories. All Seated on the Ground particularly takes an absolutely brilliant (and light-hearted) approach to dealing with the problems of communicating with aliens. But both these stories feature an obsessive trying many different variations on theme to try to work something out, and after a while they get a touch repetitive.
However, the majority of the stories were excellent - and I don't think I've ever read a collection that was uniformly brilliant. The short story is a format where science fiction writers excel - and Willis shows why. Her style a cross between Bradbury and Aldiss, with the former’s lyricism and poignancy, and the latter’s sharpness.
August 17, 2019
Great short stories by one of my favorite authors.
May 23, 2023
Gorgeous. Some of these were old favorites, some were new to me, and I really loved her speeches at the end as well. I have the physical book, but also listened to it on audio, which was a bit hit or miss. The guy reading The Last of the Winnebagos had clearly never been west of the Mississippi and hadn't bothered to ask about the names of towns. Like Tempe. (TEMpi, not, my goodman, temPEEEEE.) But the woman who read All Seated on the Ground did an amazing job, and so did the guy who read Fire Watch.
Willis is one of our finest living writers, as adept at novels as at short stories, and this is as good a place to start as any, if you haven't indulged in her books yet.
Willis is one of our finest living writers, as adept at novels as at short stories, and this is as good a place to start as any, if you haven't indulged in her books yet.
August 5, 2023
3.7 ⭐
Apart from " Firewatch" and "A Letter From The Clearys" I personally wouldn't rate the rest of these stories as Willis' best although they're all good, if not superior, short science fiction. I think " Daisy in the Sun" was a major omission, in my totally subjective opinion, from any collection purporting to be this author's "best." The remaining stories, while as always imaginative and well written, didn't strike me as 'peak' Willis, despite the numerous awards they have racked up. Again, totally subjective.
I'll admit I got a politically incorrect chuckle from " Even the Queen" and Willis' wicked take on 'Liberation' and the 'Cyclists' ( who are not bicycle enthusiasts). I've never been enamored of her Christmas/romance obsession though, represented here by "All Seated on the Ground." I found her take on the horror genre, " Death on the Nile " slightly eerie at best.. but then again I am not a fan.
When this author is on, she can hit it out of the park. Even the merely good stories are two and three base hits. So while maybe not the mythical "best" it is still a collection of above average science fiction. -30-
Apart from " Firewatch" and "A Letter From The Clearys" I personally wouldn't rate the rest of these stories as Willis' best although they're all good, if not superior, short science fiction. I think " Daisy in the Sun" was a major omission, in my totally subjective opinion, from any collection purporting to be this author's "best." The remaining stories, while as always imaginative and well written, didn't strike me as 'peak' Willis, despite the numerous awards they have racked up. Again, totally subjective.
I'll admit I got a politically incorrect chuckle from " Even the Queen" and Willis' wicked take on 'Liberation' and the 'Cyclists' ( who are not bicycle enthusiasts). I've never been enamored of her Christmas/romance obsession though, represented here by "All Seated on the Ground." I found her take on the horror genre, " Death on the Nile " slightly eerie at best.. but then again I am not a fan.
When this author is on, she can hit it out of the park. Even the merely good stories are two and three base hits. So while maybe not the mythical "best" it is still a collection of above average science fiction. -30-
May 13, 2021
Infuriatingly good. Not saying I didn't want to like this book as much as I did—of course I wanted to like it—, but I must confess that at each story I was ready to be annoyed; they are so long, unnecessarily long, ridiculously so, but then they're also so... good, you know? Engaging. All of them? That's rare in a collection. Every single story here takes you on a journey that's weird, wonderful, beautifully constructed. Every one of them has won an award, of course, and you'll know exactly why.
July 14, 2013
After discovering Connie Willis when her book Blackout came out I eagerly searched for her other books in vain. She is not what you would call a speedy author. Her books are complex using science fiction time travel to fact check she takes us back to times we could only imagine and then see firsthand through the eyes of the time traveler how difficult it can be to only observe never change the outcome.
After Blackout and the sequel, All Clear, I had hoped to see a new title. Alas, this collection is all that has come out but it is a wonderful group of stories that showcase Connie Willis in all her time travel sci-fi glory. They are not a quick read but should be savored slowly like a fine wine or good scotch - cheers! I read this as an advance. It is due to be published in July of 2013.
After Blackout and the sequel, All Clear, I had hoped to see a new title. Alas, this collection is all that has come out but it is a wonderful group of stories that showcase Connie Willis in all her time travel sci-fi glory. They are not a quick read but should be savored slowly like a fine wine or good scotch - cheers! I read this as an advance. It is due to be published in July of 2013.
August 20, 2024
Rating: 4 stars
There is a line between clever and weird, and classic sci fi always seems to be teetering on the edge of it. Some lean more to the saner side (think Flowers for Algernon) while others dive head first into the weirdness (Stranger in a Strange Land, Ringworld). Time is the Fire: The Best of Connie Willis is the best example of both. There are a couple truly strange stories in here, but also some really grounded ones. I reviewed every story in this collection (some more effectively than others) so this is going to be a loooong review that probably only Future Me will read. Anyway, letsa go.
A Letter from the Clearys:
Awards and nominations: Nebula winner
So the collection opens with a bang. A Letter from the Clearys was a great short story that is a perfect example of what is literarily possible with a minimal page count. I mean, it's 13 fricken' pages! Set during a nuclear winter, it's essentially a post apocalyptic story, but since it is told from the point of view of a child, it doesn't really feel that way until about half way through. There is a dog too, and we always appreciate canine representation.
At the Rialto:
Awards and nominations: Nebula winner; Hugo and Locus nominee
I took forever to read this collection almost entirely due to this story. I kept trying to understand it. Was Connie Willis just being so incredibly smart that everything went over my head? Was I trying to find something that wasn’t there and Willis was simply writing the story as it seemed?
On the surface, At the Rialto is set during a conference surrounding quantum theory, and there is this physicist that is constantly being pursued by this dude and she keeps saying no. Under the surface, however, At the Rialto is a complex story where each character cleverly mirrors elements in the scientific field of quantum theory. BUT the manner that quantum physics is applied to the plot is obscured by the way that it is all portrayed as a Hollywood screwball comedy. Make sense? No? Well, then you understand just as much as I do. And I'm the one who's read the dang thing.
Death on the Nile:
Awards and nominations: Hugo winner; Nebula and Locus nominee
Yesss this one is right up my alley: Agatha Christie and mythology. Fundamentally, Death on the Nile (not to be confused with the Christie novel) is about these tourists in Egypt who end up behaving strangely, like they are characters from Egyptian mythology. It's not so directly paralleled, though, as in it's not shoved in your face that this person is Osiris and this one is Set, but more so in that subtle way Connie Willis is so proficient at. Then we get to the end. Ever heard of open endings? Well, this one is about as open as a-
The Soul Selects Her own Society:
Awards and nominations: Hugo winner; Locus nominee
This one was tiny. Only 10 pages. And yet it still manages to be the weirdest story in here. I will tell you what it is about, but you will just have to take my word for it, because reading this back, I don't even believe myself. This "short story" is actually a (fictional) literature student's dissertation, and the full title is The Soul Selects Her Own Society: Invasion and Repulsion: A Chronological Reinterpretation of Two of Emily Dickinson's Poems: A Wellsian Perspective. It is about Emily Dickinson being a zombie and therefore witnessing the Martian invasion of Earth (i.e. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells) and then writing poems about it. And these poems scared the Martians away because of Dickinson's rhyming. Yes, that is genuinely the premise of this story.
Fire Watch:
Awards and nominations: Hugo and Nebula winner; Locus nominee
Already read this one. Review here
Inside Job:
Awards and nominations: Hugo winner; Locus nominee
This story is about a dude who goes to spiritual stuff like séances to debunk them and expose the coordinators as frauds. He also has an associate who is a fancy movie star and is pretty. They go to this spooky Egyptian-style medium person who they want to expose as fake. Then some creepy stuff happens. Overall, the story is fine, if not my particular taste. Perhaps my least favourite in the collection.
Even the Queen:
Awards and nominations: Hugo, Locus and Nebula winner
This one is about periods. No, not the American version on a full stop, I mean menstrual cycles. Monthlies. Menses. When Aunt Flo comes to visit. Basically, it's set in the near future where women have found a way to stop themselves from having periods, full stop. (Ha ha, just realised what I did there.) There is this group of people called the Cyclists who are essentially a cult, and they like to have periods (or something) so they continue to bleed every month because they are making some statement. It's by and large Connie Willis saying "Fine. You want a feminist sci-fi story? Here. Here's your feminist sci-fi story." It also includes this absolutely brilliant quote:
The Winds of Marble Arch:
Awards and nominations: Hugo winner; Locus and World Fantasy Award nominee
This one is Connie Willis' love letter to the London Underground. Now I've only ever been on above ground trains, and even then only a handful of times, so I have to take Willis' word for how great the Underground really is. I mean, she says it's her favourite place in London besides St. Paul's, which is certainly is high praise. The Winds of Marble Arch is more of a domestic, grounded sci fi story, and the sci fi elements (which are probably more fantasy, if you think about it) are subtle. Isn't my favourite, but good all the same.
All Seated on the Ground:
Awards and nominations: Hugo winner; Locus nominee
This one is about an alien invasion, but the aliens are boring. They just stand there and look disapproving. (In my head, they looked like those bulbous head dudes from the first Star Trek pilot, but that's just me.) Humans try anything and everything in attempts at provoking them (almost every alien invasion movie you can think of is referenced) and still, nothing. The story follows a journalist who is documenting the aliens (i.e. trying to get them to do something so she can film it) when one day, they just sit down. What ensues is a bunch of religious nuts yelling obscenities, quite a few choir practices, a budding romance that I didn't hate for once, many nagging pre-teen girls, and a whole lot of violent Christmas carols. I don't think I can sum it up any better than that.
The Last of the Winnebagos:
Awards and nominations: Hugo and Nebula winner; Locus nominee
This one is the most bleak post-apocalyptic stories out there. It is the worst, dismalest, grimmest, saddest, most miserably depressing story you will probably ever read. In The Last of the Winnebagos, Connie Willis uses the most harrowingly joyless premise she could scrounge up from the deepest, darkest depths of human consciousness. (Ok I think I have drained the thesaurus dry.) This story takes place after a plague has wiped out humanity’s only happiness: dogs. I know. How much more traumatic can you get.
In all seriousness, this story was really hard to read as a dog owner. Willis must have owned a dog herself at some point, because she really knows just how to pull on those particular strings of grief. I won't go much more into it, only just to say that this story should come with some serious trigger warnings about the reopening of old childhood wounds.
The book ends with some speeches Connie Willis has given over her career. There is the wonderful story on how she married her husband (it has to do with Lord of the Rings), and this scarily accurate line about staying up late to finish books that I, at ten past twelve in the morning, almost checked for hidden cameras.
And with that, I mark this review as DONE.
There is a line between clever and weird, and classic sci fi always seems to be teetering on the edge of it. Some lean more to the saner side (think Flowers for Algernon) while others dive head first into the weirdness (Stranger in a Strange Land, Ringworld). Time is the Fire: The Best of Connie Willis is the best example of both. There are a couple truly strange stories in here, but also some really grounded ones. I reviewed every story in this collection (some more effectively than others) so this is going to be a loooong review that probably only Future Me will read. Anyway, letsa go.
A Letter from the Clearys:
Awards and nominations: Nebula winner
So the collection opens with a bang. A Letter from the Clearys was a great short story that is a perfect example of what is literarily possible with a minimal page count. I mean, it's 13 fricken' pages! Set during a nuclear winter, it's essentially a post apocalyptic story, but since it is told from the point of view of a child, it doesn't really feel that way until about half way through. There is a dog too, and we always appreciate canine representation.
At the Rialto:
Awards and nominations: Nebula winner; Hugo and Locus nominee
I took forever to read this collection almost entirely due to this story. I kept trying to understand it. Was Connie Willis just being so incredibly smart that everything went over my head? Was I trying to find something that wasn’t there and Willis was simply writing the story as it seemed?
On the surface, At the Rialto is set during a conference surrounding quantum theory, and there is this physicist that is constantly being pursued by this dude and she keeps saying no. Under the surface, however, At the Rialto is a complex story where each character cleverly mirrors elements in the scientific field of quantum theory. BUT the manner that quantum physics is applied to the plot is obscured by the way that it is all portrayed as a Hollywood screwball comedy. Make sense? No? Well, then you understand just as much as I do. And I'm the one who's read the dang thing.
Death on the Nile:
Awards and nominations: Hugo winner; Nebula and Locus nominee
Yesss this one is right up my alley: Agatha Christie and mythology. Fundamentally, Death on the Nile (not to be confused with the Christie novel) is about these tourists in Egypt who end up behaving strangely, like they are characters from Egyptian mythology. It's not so directly paralleled, though, as in it's not shoved in your face that this person is Osiris and this one is Set, but more so in that subtle way Connie Willis is so proficient at. Then we get to the end. Ever heard of open endings? Well, this one is about as open as a-
The Soul Selects Her own Society:
Awards and nominations: Hugo winner; Locus nominee
This one was tiny. Only 10 pages. And yet it still manages to be the weirdest story in here. I will tell you what it is about, but you will just have to take my word for it, because reading this back, I don't even believe myself. This "short story" is actually a (fictional) literature student's dissertation, and the full title is The Soul Selects Her Own Society: Invasion and Repulsion: A Chronological Reinterpretation of Two of Emily Dickinson's Poems: A Wellsian Perspective. It is about Emily Dickinson being a zombie and therefore witnessing the Martian invasion of Earth (i.e. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells) and then writing poems about it. And these poems scared the Martians away because of Dickinson's rhyming. Yes, that is genuinely the premise of this story.
Fire Watch:
Awards and nominations: Hugo and Nebula winner; Locus nominee
Already read this one. Review here
Inside Job:
Awards and nominations: Hugo winner; Locus nominee
This story is about a dude who goes to spiritual stuff like séances to debunk them and expose the coordinators as frauds. He also has an associate who is a fancy movie star and is pretty. They go to this spooky Egyptian-style medium person who they want to expose as fake. Then some creepy stuff happens. Overall, the story is fine, if not my particular taste. Perhaps my least favourite in the collection.
Even the Queen:
Awards and nominations: Hugo, Locus and Nebula winner
This one is about periods. No, not the American version on a full stop, I mean menstrual cycles. Monthlies. Menses. When Aunt Flo comes to visit. Basically, it's set in the near future where women have found a way to stop themselves from having periods, full stop. (Ha ha, just realised what I did there.) There is this group of people called the Cyclists who are essentially a cult, and they like to have periods (or something) so they continue to bleed every month because they are making some statement. It's by and large Connie Willis saying "Fine. You want a feminist sci-fi story? Here. Here's your feminist sci-fi story." It also includes this absolutely brilliant quote:
" 'You know what I've always wondered?' Karen said, leaning conspiratorially close to Mother. 'If Maggie Thatcher's menopause was responsible for the Falklands War.' "
The Winds of Marble Arch:
Awards and nominations: Hugo winner; Locus and World Fantasy Award nominee
This one is Connie Willis' love letter to the London Underground. Now I've only ever been on above ground trains, and even then only a handful of times, so I have to take Willis' word for how great the Underground really is. I mean, she says it's her favourite place in London besides St. Paul's, which is certainly is high praise. The Winds of Marble Arch is more of a domestic, grounded sci fi story, and the sci fi elements (which are probably more fantasy, if you think about it) are subtle. Isn't my favourite, but good all the same.
All Seated on the Ground:
Awards and nominations: Hugo winner; Locus nominee
This one is about an alien invasion, but the aliens are boring. They just stand there and look disapproving. (In my head, they looked like those bulbous head dudes from the first Star Trek pilot, but that's just me.) Humans try anything and everything in attempts at provoking them (almost every alien invasion movie you can think of is referenced) and still, nothing. The story follows a journalist who is documenting the aliens (i.e. trying to get them to do something so she can film it) when one day, they just sit down. What ensues is a bunch of religious nuts yelling obscenities, quite a few choir practices, a budding romance that I didn't hate for once, many nagging pre-teen girls, and a whole lot of violent Christmas carols. I don't think I can sum it up any better than that.
The Last of the Winnebagos:
Awards and nominations: Hugo and Nebula winner; Locus nominee
This one is the most bleak post-apocalyptic stories out there. It is the worst, dismalest, grimmest, saddest, most miserably depressing story you will probably ever read. In The Last of the Winnebagos, Connie Willis uses the most harrowingly joyless premise she could scrounge up from the deepest, darkest depths of human consciousness. (Ok I think I have drained the thesaurus dry.) This story takes place after a plague has wiped out humanity’s only happiness: dogs. I know. How much more traumatic can you get.
In all seriousness, this story was really hard to read as a dog owner. Willis must have owned a dog herself at some point, because she really knows just how to pull on those particular strings of grief. I won't go much more into it, only just to say that this story should come with some serious trigger warnings about the reopening of old childhood wounds.
The book ends with some speeches Connie Willis has given over her career. There is the wonderful story on how she married her husband (it has to do with Lord of the Rings), and this scarily accurate line about staying up late to finish books that I, at ten past twelve in the morning, almost checked for hidden cameras.
And with that, I mark this review as DONE.
June 19, 2013
Connie Willis is a writer of ideas. In longer novel form, I think this is a good thing; I enjoyed Blackout/All Clear quite a bit. I still haven't made it to her earlier works like To Say Nothing of the Dog or The Doomsday Book - both books that others say are her best work. When this collection of stories was listed in NetGalley, I jumped at the chance, to try to get to know this Grand Master a little better.
Back to this ideas issue. Connie Willis often zooms in on a thought she has (What if we found a way to turn off the menstrual cycle? This becomes Even the Queen) or personal obsessions (A love affair with the London Underground becomes The Winds of Marble Arch, an interest in H.L. Mencken becomes Inside Job) and fleshes it out into a story. The problem for the reader occurs when he or she does not share this same obsession. Honestly, I don't understand the obsession with H.L. Mencken, so that was an automatic turn-off for me. I did enjoy Even the Queen though, with its continuation of concepts in the Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (kind of the opposite scenario).
The other stories range from quantum physics to post-apocalyptic letters to aliens that respond to Christmas carols. All ideas that are explored in the length of a short story. Each story comes with an afterword written by the author, explaining where the idea comes from and why the story is significant in her eyes, great stuff for fans of her work.
So what is missing, and why am I only giving this three stars? (Three stars for me means decent but not really for me.) I suppose I expect more from a short story. I want beautiful, expressive language. I want depth of character and emotion. Ideas alone just don't cut it, and that's all I really find here. For a lot of readers, that will be more than enough.
Back to this ideas issue. Connie Willis often zooms in on a thought she has (What if we found a way to turn off the menstrual cycle? This becomes Even the Queen) or personal obsessions (A love affair with the London Underground becomes The Winds of Marble Arch, an interest in H.L. Mencken becomes Inside Job) and fleshes it out into a story. The problem for the reader occurs when he or she does not share this same obsession. Honestly, I don't understand the obsession with H.L. Mencken, so that was an automatic turn-off for me. I did enjoy Even the Queen though, with its continuation of concepts in the Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (kind of the opposite scenario).
The other stories range from quantum physics to post-apocalyptic letters to aliens that respond to Christmas carols. All ideas that are explored in the length of a short story. Each story comes with an afterword written by the author, explaining where the idea comes from and why the story is significant in her eyes, great stuff for fans of her work.
So what is missing, and why am I only giving this three stars? (Three stars for me means decent but not really for me.) I suppose I expect more from a short story. I want beautiful, expressive language. I want depth of character and emotion. Ideas alone just don't cut it, and that's all I really find here. For a lot of readers, that will be more than enough.
June 28, 2013
‘The Best Of Connie Willis’ is a collection of award-winning short stories by Connie Willis. The hefty volume also includes an introduction by the author and three of her speeches. Both the introduction and the speeches are as entertaining as the stories.
In the introduction, Willis explains why it’s hard to talk about her own stories or the process by which they journey from idea to completion. She explains that the stories often change, conceptually, as she is writing them. She says, ‘While you’re writing one story, your subconscious is busily writing another.’
I’ve had this happen! Nice to know such wandering is not the product of a disorganised mind, but more a creative side step.
Willis also talks about her introduction to and enthusiasm for the speculative fiction genres. I remembered reading the same stories and thinking the same thoughts when I fell headfirst down the rabbit hole some thirty-five years ago.
Each story in the anthology is followed by an afterword where Willis does guide the reader from seed to story. These journeys of thought are fascinating and contain a lot of interesting biographical information, making this volume essential for Connie Willis fans.
On to the stories. There are ten of them and they are, as the title of the anthology suggests, her best.
The one I enjoyed the most was ‘Even The Queen’. The premise is simple: sometime in the future, women are freed from the monthly chore of menstruation. There is a pill and a procedure, both reversible when they decide to have kids. In the story, Perdita, one of the younger women, declares her intent to join the Cyclists. It’s not a bicycle group, it’s a cult who menstruate. The older women in her family stage an intervention, but Perdita doesn’t show. Her ‘docent’ turns up to lunch instead, armed with pink leaflets explaining the joys of menstruation. She also has a spiel:
‘They Cyclists are dedicated to freedom,’ she said. ‘Freedom from artificiality, freedom from body-controlling drugs and hormones, freedom from the male patriarchy that attempts to impose them on us.’
The Cyclists wear a red scarf around their arm as a badge of freedom and femaleness. Yep. After the older women reminisce on what life was like before they submitted to the male patriarchy, the docent leaves in a huff. The one male guest does well not to pass out and the youngest woman in the group is understandably horrified.
While this story is especially relevant to women, I think men will find it equally amusing and the afterword is just as entertaining.
The other story that really, really captured me was ‘The Winds Of Marble Arch’. Tom and Cath are in London for a conference. They’ve visited before. In fact, they’ve been just about everywhere and in each city, Tom chooses to use public transport rather than take taxis. Cath prefers not to enter the underground tunnels. It’s an argument that pops up throughout the story. Tom’s enthusiasm for the Underground is as apparent as Cath’s disdain.
His first morning in the Underground, Tom is buffeted by a strange wind. It’s something more than the air pushed through the tunnel by an oncoming train. It’s not the vacuum effect that chases after one, neither. It’s more an explosion of air, with a sense of sound and terror. Though shaken, he manages to attribute the incident to an overactive imagination, until it happens again.
As Tom becomes obsessed with the winds, all but ignoring his conference to research the phenomena, the people close to him — his wife, Cath, their close friends and colleagues — seem to be going through a process of displacement and decline. No one wants to go near the Underground. They all have various reasons for avoiding the subterranean system and it’s clear their aversion has something to do with getting older. Tom’s thoughts run inversely to those of his friends. It isn’t until he realises they are all aware of the disturbing winds that he actually understands what the winds really are.
There is a point near the end where this story (or the reader) begins to feel compressed by a sense of impending doom and then something happens and it’s wonderful. It’s hard to describe without going into greater depth on the themes and giving away the ending. Suffice to say, ‘The Winds Of Marble Arch’ is now one of my favourites.
I could ramble on about all the stories in this anthology. Award-winning as they are (some of them have won more than one), they’re all noteworthy. I had read ‘Inside Job’ before and enjoyed it. It’s about a skeptic who sets out to expose a channeller as a fraud, only to find she is channelling famed skeptic H.L. Mencken and doing a pretty convincing job of it.
‘At The Rialto’ sets quantum theory against Hollywood to amusing effect. There is often a thread of horror in Willis’ stories, like the world could end on the next page. ‘A Letter From The Clearys’, ‘The Last Of The Winnebagos’ and ‘Death On The Nile’ tug that thread hard. ‘All Seated On The Ground’ is an altogether different take on an alien invasion that had me chuckling.
‘The Best Of Connie Willis’ is a great collection. The stories are diverse, but each is clearly the work of Connie Willis. Her interests and sense of humour are evident throughout. With the Introduction and Afterwords, the anthology is a must for fans and a great introduction to those unfamiliar with her work.
Written for and originally posted at SFCrowsnest.
In the introduction, Willis explains why it’s hard to talk about her own stories or the process by which they journey from idea to completion. She explains that the stories often change, conceptually, as she is writing them. She says, ‘While you’re writing one story, your subconscious is busily writing another.’
I’ve had this happen! Nice to know such wandering is not the product of a disorganised mind, but more a creative side step.
Willis also talks about her introduction to and enthusiasm for the speculative fiction genres. I remembered reading the same stories and thinking the same thoughts when I fell headfirst down the rabbit hole some thirty-five years ago.
Each story in the anthology is followed by an afterword where Willis does guide the reader from seed to story. These journeys of thought are fascinating and contain a lot of interesting biographical information, making this volume essential for Connie Willis fans.
On to the stories. There are ten of them and they are, as the title of the anthology suggests, her best.
The one I enjoyed the most was ‘Even The Queen’. The premise is simple: sometime in the future, women are freed from the monthly chore of menstruation. There is a pill and a procedure, both reversible when they decide to have kids. In the story, Perdita, one of the younger women, declares her intent to join the Cyclists. It’s not a bicycle group, it’s a cult who menstruate. The older women in her family stage an intervention, but Perdita doesn’t show. Her ‘docent’ turns up to lunch instead, armed with pink leaflets explaining the joys of menstruation. She also has a spiel:
‘They Cyclists are dedicated to freedom,’ she said. ‘Freedom from artificiality, freedom from body-controlling drugs and hormones, freedom from the male patriarchy that attempts to impose them on us.’
The Cyclists wear a red scarf around their arm as a badge of freedom and femaleness. Yep. After the older women reminisce on what life was like before they submitted to the male patriarchy, the docent leaves in a huff. The one male guest does well not to pass out and the youngest woman in the group is understandably horrified.
While this story is especially relevant to women, I think men will find it equally amusing and the afterword is just as entertaining.
The other story that really, really captured me was ‘The Winds Of Marble Arch’. Tom and Cath are in London for a conference. They’ve visited before. In fact, they’ve been just about everywhere and in each city, Tom chooses to use public transport rather than take taxis. Cath prefers not to enter the underground tunnels. It’s an argument that pops up throughout the story. Tom’s enthusiasm for the Underground is as apparent as Cath’s disdain.
His first morning in the Underground, Tom is buffeted by a strange wind. It’s something more than the air pushed through the tunnel by an oncoming train. It’s not the vacuum effect that chases after one, neither. It’s more an explosion of air, with a sense of sound and terror. Though shaken, he manages to attribute the incident to an overactive imagination, until it happens again.
As Tom becomes obsessed with the winds, all but ignoring his conference to research the phenomena, the people close to him — his wife, Cath, their close friends and colleagues — seem to be going through a process of displacement and decline. No one wants to go near the Underground. They all have various reasons for avoiding the subterranean system and it’s clear their aversion has something to do with getting older. Tom’s thoughts run inversely to those of his friends. It isn’t until he realises they are all aware of the disturbing winds that he actually understands what the winds really are.
There is a point near the end where this story (or the reader) begins to feel compressed by a sense of impending doom and then something happens and it’s wonderful. It’s hard to describe without going into greater depth on the themes and giving away the ending. Suffice to say, ‘The Winds Of Marble Arch’ is now one of my favourites.
I could ramble on about all the stories in this anthology. Award-winning as they are (some of them have won more than one), they’re all noteworthy. I had read ‘Inside Job’ before and enjoyed it. It’s about a skeptic who sets out to expose a channeller as a fraud, only to find she is channelling famed skeptic H.L. Mencken and doing a pretty convincing job of it.
‘At The Rialto’ sets quantum theory against Hollywood to amusing effect. There is often a thread of horror in Willis’ stories, like the world could end on the next page. ‘A Letter From The Clearys’, ‘The Last Of The Winnebagos’ and ‘Death On The Nile’ tug that thread hard. ‘All Seated On The Ground’ is an altogether different take on an alien invasion that had me chuckling.
‘The Best Of Connie Willis’ is a great collection. The stories are diverse, but each is clearly the work of Connie Willis. Her interests and sense of humour are evident throughout. With the Introduction and Afterwords, the anthology is a must for fans and a great introduction to those unfamiliar with her work.
Written for and originally posted at SFCrowsnest.
May 7, 2020
What it says on the tin, plus a couple of rather good award acceptance speeches.
Read
August 15, 2018Willis is the reverse of a lot of the other writers I’ve been reading lately, who tend to rely on esoteric prose to paper over narrative holes. Her internal mechanisms work really well—sometimes too well, bluntly, with the jokes too clearly telegraphed, and the plot getting wrapped up too neatly. She’s also a little too friendly for my tastes, but then I’m a miserable person. I did really like Death on the Nile, though, and the one about there being no more dogs.
May 20, 2024
A solid collection of stories overall. I had originally borrowed it from the library to read one novella ("The Last of the Winnebagos"), but ended up reading the whole book. I was surprised to find that I had actually read two of the stories before (well, listened to in various SF story podcasts) and had not connected them to Connie Willis for some reason. After each story, there is a short afterword by the author, which I found interesting.
Favorite stories were (in the order they appear in the collection):
-"A Letter From the Clearys" (I can't describe why I liked it without spoilers)
-"Fire Watch" (if you enjoyed To Say Nothing of the Dog, this novelette was the first story set in that universe)
-"Even the Queen" (this one was a re-read, and the commentary at the end added to my enjoyment of the story)
-"All Seated on the Ground" (the Christmas carol details did get to be a bit much, but I really liked how it ended)
-"The Last of the Winnebagos" - this was probably my favorite of the favorites, but it is also pretty sad. Content warning:
Favorite stories were (in the order they appear in the collection):
-"A Letter From the Clearys" (I can't describe why I liked it without spoilers)
-"Fire Watch" (if you enjoyed To Say Nothing of the Dog, this novelette was the first story set in that universe)
-"Even the Queen" (this one was a re-read, and the commentary at the end added to my enjoyment of the story)
-"All Seated on the Ground" (the Christmas carol details did get to be a bit much, but I really liked how it ended)
-"The Last of the Winnebagos" - this was probably my favorite of the favorites, but it is also pretty sad. Content warning:
December 15, 2021
It's hard to rate a book of short stories, especially when I liked some of the stories and disliked others, but overall I can't deny that Connie Willis is an exceptional writer. (I like her novels exponentially more than any of these stories, though.) The author's commentaries after each story were enjoyable, as were the three speech transcripts included as a bonus at the end. Worth picking up, if you're a fan.
June 17, 2023
Mostly Entertaining, if Overlong in Some Cases
After reading all her Oxford Time Travel series and the delightfully humorous and quirky Bellwether, I figured I should give her short stories a try, as she seems to have won more Hugo & Nebula awards for them than just about any other SF writer. As it turns out, she has an impressive range of subjects, emotional tones, and writing styles at her disposal, it’s clear she knows her craft and doesn’t stick to a formula. I think each reader will have their favorites and not-favourites. I thought the final three stories all had good potential but were a bit overlong, as was Inside Job. And much like her full-length novels, the “science” part of her fiction always seems dated and not really the key selling point.
Her skills like in characters, storylines, and emotion, not prognostication or hard science. The collection also is enhanced by forwards and afterwords to each story, which really gives you a picture of Connie Willis as a person deeply in love with the genre’s Golden Age writers and how they shaped her early years and gave her a calling she loves and excels at. The award acceptance speeches were also entertaining, though they betray what annoys me about all fan-gatherings of any kind (sports, SF, whisky, what have you) - it’s often just a lot of name dropping and reminiscing about “remember that time when so-and-so told a joke so funny I snorted a noodle up my nose?” Just too in-group to be that interesting unless you are a SF convention goer.
A Letter from the Cleary's (Nebula Award winner 1983)
At the Rialto (Nebula Award winner 1990)
Death on the Nile (Hugo Award winner 1994)
The Soul Selects Her Own Society (Hugo Award winner 1997)
Fire Watch (Hugo & Nebula Award winner 1983)
Inside Job (Hugo Award winner 2006)
Even the Queen (Hugo and Nebula Award winner 1993)
The Winds of Marble Arch (Hugo Award and World Fantasy Award winner 2000)
All Seated on the Ground (Hugo Award winner 2008)
Last of the Winnebagos (Hugo and Nebula Award winner 1989)
After reading all her Oxford Time Travel series and the delightfully humorous and quirky Bellwether, I figured I should give her short stories a try, as she seems to have won more Hugo & Nebula awards for them than just about any other SF writer. As it turns out, she has an impressive range of subjects, emotional tones, and writing styles at her disposal, it’s clear she knows her craft and doesn’t stick to a formula. I think each reader will have their favorites and not-favourites. I thought the final three stories all had good potential but were a bit overlong, as was Inside Job. And much like her full-length novels, the “science” part of her fiction always seems dated and not really the key selling point.
Her skills like in characters, storylines, and emotion, not prognostication or hard science. The collection also is enhanced by forwards and afterwords to each story, which really gives you a picture of Connie Willis as a person deeply in love with the genre’s Golden Age writers and how they shaped her early years and gave her a calling she loves and excels at. The award acceptance speeches were also entertaining, though they betray what annoys me about all fan-gatherings of any kind (sports, SF, whisky, what have you) - it’s often just a lot of name dropping and reminiscing about “remember that time when so-and-so told a joke so funny I snorted a noodle up my nose?” Just too in-group to be that interesting unless you are a SF convention goer.
A Letter from the Cleary's (Nebula Award winner 1983)
At the Rialto (Nebula Award winner 1990)
Death on the Nile (Hugo Award winner 1994)
The Soul Selects Her Own Society (Hugo Award winner 1997)
Fire Watch (Hugo & Nebula Award winner 1983)
Inside Job (Hugo Award winner 2006)
Even the Queen (Hugo and Nebula Award winner 1993)
The Winds of Marble Arch (Hugo Award and World Fantasy Award winner 2000)
All Seated on the Ground (Hugo Award winner 2008)
Last of the Winnebagos (Hugo and Nebula Award winner 1989)
December 30, 2019
Ten early award winning short stories/novellas by Connie Willis as an audio-read. Best ones were Letter from the Clearys and the one about debunking mediums, with the assistance of channeling H.L. Mencken.
There's humor in many of Willis's stories although it gets old to me because so much relies on people not taking the time to communicate with one another. And Willis was not at all clairvoyant about technology -- I think cell phones were known at the time some of these stories were written but she's still seeing the future world dependent on land lines and pay phones. Wow, how that changed things.
There's humor in many of Willis's stories although it gets old to me because so much relies on people not taking the time to communicate with one another. And Willis was not at all clairvoyant about technology -- I think cell phones were known at the time some of these stories were written but she's still seeing the future world dependent on land lines and pay phones. Wow, how that changed things.
September 7, 2018
This was my first reading of this author. Some of the stories were pretty entertaining and nothing like what I expect from science fiction genre.
Note to self: remember Hollywood descriptions
I enjoyed the author's description after the story "A Letter from the Clearys" that leads off the collection as she shared how many stories she submitted to the major science fiction magazines and how many rejection slips she got.
Library Loan
Note to self: remember Hollywood descriptions
I enjoyed the author's description after the story "A Letter from the Clearys" that leads off the collection as she shared how many stories she submitted to the major science fiction magazines and how many rejection slips she got.
Library Loan
January 3, 2024
A must read!
February 26, 2018
Connie Willis is the stalwart center of the science fiction establishment, one of a select group of editors and writers connected to the SF magazine Asimov’s who continue to uphold the cherished “Golden Age” traditions of her illustrious forebears that ran from the 1940s to the 1970s, depending on how you count these things.
These luminaries include Isaac Asimov himself, of course, along with such figures as Frederick Pohl, Jack Williamson, Theodore Sturgeon, Ray Bradbury, and, first among equals, Robert Heinlein. If they were writing today, as in their heyday, they would be producing the kind of stories that Willis writes.
There are pros and cons to being such an establishment figure. Willis is often an inventive and even charming writer, but never an original stylist or pioneer willing to push the boundaries of the field, with the possible exception of her explorations of the theme of time travel (represented here by “Fire Watch”). She was never part of SF’s new wave (such as Harlan Ellison), cyberpunk (William Gibson), or today’s contemporary genre-bending “slipstream” fiction (China Miéville).
This is solid, entertaining mainstream fiction for PG audiences. One surprise for someone more familiar with Willis’s name than her work (like me) is how many of the stories rely on literary effects rather than SF concepts. Her unsettling horror tale, “Death on the Nile,” builds on incremental shifts in details and perceptions to take the narrator from a tourist flight to Egypt to an ancient burial chamber. “At the Rialto” uses the same technique – with references to quantum mechanics and wave/particle divisions – to comic effect.
“Fire Watch,” set in London during the Blitz, features a time-traveling graduate student, but again, Willis hardly bothers with any scientific explanations, or how exactly, time travel has become a purely academic pursuit. Instead, “Fire Watch” becomes a meditation on time and memory, especially we grow to realize that St. Paul’s Cathedral, which the firewatchers are protecting, will face even an greater threat of destruction in the future.
Similarly, “The Winds of Marble Arch,” set in London’s Underground, references the Blitz and talks of “temperature inversions,” but the story is actually about premonitions of death, the end of relationships and the consolations of love. It is a SF story only because Willis wrote it and Asimov’s published it. Otherwise, its natural home would be any standard-issue literary journal (with a tenth of Asimov’s visibility and circulation).
Some stories fall flat, in my view, and leave me wondering about the caliber of the competition, since they all won either a Nebula or Hugo award. “Inside Job,” in which a New Age guru is possessed by the irascible spirit of H.L. Mencken, belabors its point. We get it. “Even the Queen” is a post-feminist sendup, I suppose, but doesn’t work at all.
The star of the collection is “All Seated on the Ground,” which is utterly charming and plays to all of Willis’s strengths. Aliens land in Colorado and stand in an unresponsive row despite every attempt at greeting and communication. Only when they hear certain lyrics from a Christmas choir do they respond – by sitting – and a frantic scramble ensues to understand what is happening before they depart. The delight of the story is not the phlegmatic aliens, but the madcap choir, and its struggles with both its music and members.
These are cozy SF stories, much like cozy mysteries set in bookstores and scenic small towns: evil may lurk but intelligence and a good heart wins out in the end. A sentiment reinforced by the warm afterwords that Willis writes for each story, along with several of her engaging Worldcon speeches, which again link her to SF’s mainline tradition.
These luminaries include Isaac Asimov himself, of course, along with such figures as Frederick Pohl, Jack Williamson, Theodore Sturgeon, Ray Bradbury, and, first among equals, Robert Heinlein. If they were writing today, as in their heyday, they would be producing the kind of stories that Willis writes.
There are pros and cons to being such an establishment figure. Willis is often an inventive and even charming writer, but never an original stylist or pioneer willing to push the boundaries of the field, with the possible exception of her explorations of the theme of time travel (represented here by “Fire Watch”). She was never part of SF’s new wave (such as Harlan Ellison), cyberpunk (William Gibson), or today’s contemporary genre-bending “slipstream” fiction (China Miéville).
This is solid, entertaining mainstream fiction for PG audiences. One surprise for someone more familiar with Willis’s name than her work (like me) is how many of the stories rely on literary effects rather than SF concepts. Her unsettling horror tale, “Death on the Nile,” builds on incremental shifts in details and perceptions to take the narrator from a tourist flight to Egypt to an ancient burial chamber. “At the Rialto” uses the same technique – with references to quantum mechanics and wave/particle divisions – to comic effect.
“Fire Watch,” set in London during the Blitz, features a time-traveling graduate student, but again, Willis hardly bothers with any scientific explanations, or how exactly, time travel has become a purely academic pursuit. Instead, “Fire Watch” becomes a meditation on time and memory, especially we grow to realize that St. Paul’s Cathedral, which the firewatchers are protecting, will face even an greater threat of destruction in the future.
Similarly, “The Winds of Marble Arch,” set in London’s Underground, references the Blitz and talks of “temperature inversions,” but the story is actually about premonitions of death, the end of relationships and the consolations of love. It is a SF story only because Willis wrote it and Asimov’s published it. Otherwise, its natural home would be any standard-issue literary journal (with a tenth of Asimov’s visibility and circulation).
Some stories fall flat, in my view, and leave me wondering about the caliber of the competition, since they all won either a Nebula or Hugo award. “Inside Job,” in which a New Age guru is possessed by the irascible spirit of H.L. Mencken, belabors its point. We get it. “Even the Queen” is a post-feminist sendup, I suppose, but doesn’t work at all.
The star of the collection is “All Seated on the Ground,” which is utterly charming and plays to all of Willis’s strengths. Aliens land in Colorado and stand in an unresponsive row despite every attempt at greeting and communication. Only when they hear certain lyrics from a Christmas choir do they respond – by sitting – and a frantic scramble ensues to understand what is happening before they depart. The delight of the story is not the phlegmatic aliens, but the madcap choir, and its struggles with both its music and members.
These are cozy SF stories, much like cozy mysteries set in bookstores and scenic small towns: evil may lurk but intelligence and a good heart wins out in the end. A sentiment reinforced by the warm afterwords that Willis writes for each story, along with several of her engaging Worldcon speeches, which again link her to SF’s mainline tradition.
October 3, 2016
Got this remaindered from Daedalus Books, thinking I'd really like it since I enjoyed her "To Say Nothing of the Dog" and "Doomsday Book." Unfortunately, her short stories, which I had heard were her strong suit, were fairly dull. Her sense of humor reminds me of television sitcoms, the type that laughs at people rather than with them. If you thought the Oxford Time people fighting over toilet paper in "Doomsday Book" was unfunny, be warned: there's more of the same on offer here. As others have noted here, her characters tend to be placemarkers for actual people, useful tokens to carry the idea along. Willis also has a tendency to mistake lists for plot. For example, in the highly-regarded novella "The Winds of Marble Arch," the story is one long list of London tube stations being visited. This should have been a short story making use of summary to avoid jaw-cracking boredom. The story really didn't resonate with me. It seemed a sort of Twilight Zone-ish take on getting old, in a very maudlin, sentimental way. Another example of the list-making, which had me skipping whole pages (something I almost never do), was "All Seated On the Ground." From the author's afterword to the story, it seems Willis is a member in a church choir, and this explains her assumption that readers would find all the references to violence in Christmas songs amusing. This is the sort of thing you might hear in a sermon and titter about. It's by no means actually funny. To have to read the same "joke" hammered on for page after page was ridiculous.
Willis's fascination with the London Blitz is odd, to me. I enjoyed "Fire Watch" when I read it years ago in an anthology, but had no desire to read the two hefty volumes ("Blackout" and "All Clear") that she subsequently wrote. I don't share her obsession, nor her rather white bread approach to the world. While swear words are not a requirement for good literature, they are completely missing here, as is any kind of subject matter Ozzie and Harriet wouldn't have minded reading. This is SF from a golden age long, long past. One that does nothing to make us think, or question, the world we live in. Between the lack of real engagement on the intellectual level, and the flatness of her characters, the stories are quite forgettable. They all won Huboes or Negulas, but I've never found awards to be reliable indicators of quality.
If you liked "Doomsday Book" or the London Blitz stuff, you will probably LOVE the Company books by Kage Baker. I'm re-reading them now, and they are superior time travel stories in every way. Great, lovable characters, a smart storyline, and lots of history. Start here: Company Books on Goodreads
Willis's fascination with the London Blitz is odd, to me. I enjoyed "Fire Watch" when I read it years ago in an anthology, but had no desire to read the two hefty volumes ("Blackout" and "All Clear") that she subsequently wrote. I don't share her obsession, nor her rather white bread approach to the world. While swear words are not a requirement for good literature, they are completely missing here, as is any kind of subject matter Ozzie and Harriet wouldn't have minded reading. This is SF from a golden age long, long past. One that does nothing to make us think, or question, the world we live in. Between the lack of real engagement on the intellectual level, and the flatness of her characters, the stories are quite forgettable. They all won Huboes or Negulas, but I've never found awards to be reliable indicators of quality.
If you liked "Doomsday Book" or the London Blitz stuff, you will probably LOVE the Company books by Kage Baker. I'm re-reading them now, and they are superior time travel stories in every way. Great, lovable characters, a smart storyline, and lots of history. Start here: Company Books on Goodreads
August 6, 2013
(The five-star rating here is for the best stories; some don't quite rank so highly, but why punish the whole for a few less-than-stellar entries?) Willis is that rarity in science fiction—a comedian, and a writer who loves her characters. Maybe that's why what I remember most from the first time I read the stories in this collection (decades ago in some cases) are not the SF ideas in the stories but the things I felt while reading them. That doesn't happen so often in SF.
I would quibble with that "best" designation—any collection of Willis's that doesn't include "Blued Moon" and "Chance" should not be called her best. Why not simply "The Hugo and Nebula Award-winning Stories"? But I suppose those other stories are available elsewhere, most recently in the massive Winds of Marble Arch collection, so I can't complain too much. At least this collection will have wider distribution and may make up for how hard it is to find Fire Watch and Impossible Things on the shelves.
A few of these stories I don't love—not now and not when I first read them. "At the Rialto," for example, works a territory I adore (screwball comedy!) but feels a touch belabored. And "Even the Queen," while yes, a funny story about menstruation, somehow wasn't funny enough and ended up striking me (again) as a bit one-note.
But the stories here that are good are truly great and often very moving. "The Winds of Marble Arch" is one I hadn't read before, and though a bit long, has a powerful central conceit. "Fire Watch" remains a wonderful, concise mash-up of time travel, academic parody, and emotional heart-punch. And "The Last of the Winnebagos," an extinction tale about big cars and more, which Willis wisely saves for last, remains as affecting now as when I first read it twenty years ago. "I miss them," a character says toward the story's end, and it strikes a chord with anyone who has shared the commonplace experience Connie Willis is truly writing about (not the death of motorhomes, no).
I would quibble with that "best" designation—any collection of Willis's that doesn't include "Blued Moon" and "Chance" should not be called her best. Why not simply "The Hugo and Nebula Award-winning Stories"? But I suppose those other stories are available elsewhere, most recently in the massive Winds of Marble Arch collection, so I can't complain too much. At least this collection will have wider distribution and may make up for how hard it is to find Fire Watch and Impossible Things on the shelves.
A few of these stories I don't love—not now and not when I first read them. "At the Rialto," for example, works a territory I adore (screwball comedy!) but feels a touch belabored. And "Even the Queen," while yes, a funny story about menstruation, somehow wasn't funny enough and ended up striking me (again) as a bit one-note.
But the stories here that are good are truly great and often very moving. "The Winds of Marble Arch" is one I hadn't read before, and though a bit long, has a powerful central conceit. "Fire Watch" remains a wonderful, concise mash-up of time travel, academic parody, and emotional heart-punch. And "The Last of the Winnebagos," an extinction tale about big cars and more, which Willis wisely saves for last, remains as affecting now as when I first read it twenty years ago. "I miss them," a character says toward the story's end, and it strikes a chord with anyone who has shared the commonplace experience Connie Willis is truly writing about (not the death of motorhomes, no).
September 21, 2023
2.25 star average per story. What a disappointing collection - especially since these are supposedly the author's best!
Willis is a wordy writer, so I think that short stories simply aren't the format in which she shines brightest.
Add to that the profanity (including many instances of the names of God/Jesus used disrespectfully), the not-so-subtle jabs at Christianity in general and Creationists in particular, and the political preaching, and this is just a mess of a book that made me like Willis a whole lot less.
- A Letter From the Clearys: 1.5
- At the Rialto: 3.5
- Death On the Nile: 3.5
- The Soul Selects Her Own Society: 2.5
- Fire Watch: 3.5
- Inside Job: 2.0
- Even the Queen: 1.0
- The Winds of Marble Arch: 1.0
- All Seated On the Ground: 1.5
- Last of the Winnebagos: 2.5
Willis is a wordy writer, so I think that short stories simply aren't the format in which she shines brightest.
Add to that the profanity (including many instances of the names of God/Jesus used disrespectfully), the not-so-subtle jabs at Christianity in general and Creationists in particular, and the political preaching, and this is just a mess of a book that made me like Willis a whole lot less.
- A Letter From the Clearys: 1.5
- At the Rialto: 3.5
- Death On the Nile: 3.5
- The Soul Selects Her Own Society: 2.5
- Fire Watch: 3.5
- Inside Job: 2.0
- Even the Queen: 1.0
- The Winds of Marble Arch: 1.0
- All Seated On the Ground: 1.5
- Last of the Winnebagos: 2.5
June 26, 2013
You know how sometimes you just click with an author's writing? That's what has happened to me with Connie Willis's stories. The humour, the fast pace, the sheer number of ideas delight me.
I am not normally one for short stories, but I enjoyed the majority of these and found myself looking forward to diving back in to the electronic pages. Joy.
I think my favorites were:
Fire Watch - set in the world of the Oxford Time travellers, of course I love this one.
Winds of Marble Arch - set in my favorite city, London - and the Tube
Death on the Nile - brought me right back to my visit to Egypt, and loved the nod to Agatha Christie.
All of these were 5 stars for me.
I received this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
I am not normally one for short stories, but I enjoyed the majority of these and found myself looking forward to diving back in to the electronic pages. Joy.
I think my favorites were:
Fire Watch - set in the world of the Oxford Time travellers, of course I love this one.
Winds of Marble Arch - set in my favorite city, London - and the Tube
Death on the Nile - brought me right back to my visit to Egypt, and loved the nod to Agatha Christie.
All of these were 5 stars for me.
I received this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
March 8, 2017
Avant-propos
Une lettre des Cleary
Ce texte est une vision très fine de la classique fin du monde, vue toutefois avec l'espoir des yeux d'un enfant. C'est rempli d'éléments non dits, mais pourtant visibles.
Au Rialto
Ce congrès scientifique à Hollywood, avec ses quiproquos, ses portes qui claquent, a en lui un indéniable potentiel de vaudeville, mais aussi une vraie galerie de personnages.
Morts sur le Nil
Il y a là-dedans un hommage évident et appuyé au roman policier façon Agatha Christie. Mais il y a aussi cet déstabilisation progressive qui fait le coeur de Passage. Et du coup, évidement, je n'ai pas pu m'empêcher de voir dans le voyage de ces couples une espèce de métaphore de la mort.
Les Veilleurs du feu
La première nouvelle des historiens voyageurs du temps. Et John Bartolomew, ce personnage qui émaille les autres textes, apparaît (comme la plupart de ses condisciples), complètement perdu dans cette cathédrale menacée par le Blitz. Et ce sans parler du "caméo" de Krivin, qui explique presque timidement que le voyage dans le temps n'est pas forcément si facile à vivre (lisez Le Grand Livre).
Infiltration
Des enquêteurs sceptiques chez les escrocs surnaturels, une star d'hollywood et un journaliste intelligent, observateur, mais qui ne voit pas ce qui lui saute aux yeux. C'était vraiment génial.
Même sa Majesté
Une nouvelle réjouissante sur les règles féminines. J'ai gloussé à sa lecture, et apprécié l'art du dialogue de Connie Willis.
Les Vents de Marble Arch
Evidement que Connie Willis aime Londres et son métro. Mais m'infliger cet ascenceur émotionnel, où j'ai authentiquement cru que le couple central de cette histoire allait se séparer. Ca n'est pas si charitable avec le pauvre lecteur.
Tous assis par terre
Une vraie nouvelle de premier contact, réjouissante parce que c'est une oeuvre de cette auteure. La manière dont elle a su partir de son hobby de choriste pour construire un récit fin et habile, rempli de personnages aussi divers que bien décrits, est certes typique, mais aussi particulièrement réussie.
Le Dernier des Winnebagos
Peut-être le moins bon texte du récit : il part dans une espèce d'anticipation façon années 50, qui n'est pas vraiment dans le ton, ni dans le style de l'auteure.
Anne Lesley GROELL, Note de l'éditrice
L'éditrice nous explique gentiment pourquoi ces discours ont été inclus.
Discours de l'invitée d'honneur Convention mondiale de science-fiction 2006
Sans mentir, j'avais les larmes aux yeux. Vraiment. Un texte beau et poignant sur l'intérêt de la lecture.
Discours de secours pour la remise du Grand Master Award
Un autre discours, peut-être moins poignant que le premier, mais tout aussi beau, qui parle cette fois de l'intérêt des lecteurs pour la lecture.
Discours de la lauréate du Grand Master Award
Conclusion
J'adore cette auteure. Vraiment. Ces romans sont toujours incroyablement vivants. Et ces nouvelles confirment à la fois la variété et les qualités de son talent.
Et quand je lis dans ses notes que ses manuscrits ont été refusés ... Je me dis qu'on a perdu tellement d'oeuvres de qualité.
Une lettre des Cleary
Ce texte est une vision très fine de la classique fin du monde, vue toutefois avec l'espoir des yeux d'un enfant. C'est rempli d'éléments non dits, mais pourtant visibles.
Au Rialto
Ce congrès scientifique à Hollywood, avec ses quiproquos, ses portes qui claquent, a en lui un indéniable potentiel de vaudeville, mais aussi une vraie galerie de personnages.
Morts sur le Nil
Il y a là-dedans un hommage évident et appuyé au roman policier façon Agatha Christie. Mais il y a aussi cet déstabilisation progressive qui fait le coeur de Passage. Et du coup, évidement, je n'ai pas pu m'empêcher de voir dans le voyage de ces couples une espèce de métaphore de la mort.
Les Veilleurs du feu
La première nouvelle des historiens voyageurs du temps. Et John Bartolomew, ce personnage qui émaille les autres textes, apparaît (comme la plupart de ses condisciples), complètement perdu dans cette cathédrale menacée par le Blitz. Et ce sans parler du "caméo" de Krivin, qui explique presque timidement que le voyage dans le temps n'est pas forcément si facile à vivre (lisez Le Grand Livre).
Infiltration
Des enquêteurs sceptiques chez les escrocs surnaturels, une star d'hollywood et un journaliste intelligent, observateur, mais qui ne voit pas ce qui lui saute aux yeux. C'était vraiment génial.
Même sa Majesté
Une nouvelle réjouissante sur les règles féminines. J'ai gloussé à sa lecture, et apprécié l'art du dialogue de Connie Willis.
Les Vents de Marble Arch
Evidement que Connie Willis aime Londres et son métro. Mais m'infliger cet ascenceur émotionnel, où j'ai authentiquement cru que le couple central de cette histoire allait se séparer. Ca n'est pas si charitable avec le pauvre lecteur.
Tous assis par terre
Une vraie nouvelle de premier contact, réjouissante parce que c'est une oeuvre de cette auteure. La manière dont elle a su partir de son hobby de choriste pour construire un récit fin et habile, rempli de personnages aussi divers que bien décrits, est certes typique, mais aussi particulièrement réussie.
Le Dernier des Winnebagos
Peut-être le moins bon texte du récit : il part dans une espèce d'anticipation façon années 50, qui n'est pas vraiment dans le ton, ni dans le style de l'auteure.
Anne Lesley GROELL, Note de l'éditrice
L'éditrice nous explique gentiment pourquoi ces discours ont été inclus.
Discours de l'invitée d'honneur Convention mondiale de science-fiction 2006
Sans mentir, j'avais les larmes aux yeux. Vraiment. Un texte beau et poignant sur l'intérêt de la lecture.
Discours de secours pour la remise du Grand Master Award
Un autre discours, peut-être moins poignant que le premier, mais tout aussi beau, qui parle cette fois de l'intérêt des lecteurs pour la lecture.
Discours de la lauréate du Grand Master Award
Conclusion
J'adore cette auteure. Vraiment. Ces romans sont toujours incroyablement vivants. Et ces nouvelles confirment à la fois la variété et les qualités de son talent.
Et quand je lis dans ses notes que ses manuscrits ont été refusés ... Je me dis qu'on a perdu tellement d'oeuvres de qualité.
October 14, 2019
Short version: I didn't like it. But apparently I have nothing better to do this evening besides continuing to explain why.
A Letter from the Clearys: standard-issue post-apocalypse vignette.
At the Rialto: theme of physicist engaging in macroscopic expressions of the behavior of subatomic particles was too obvious too soon for me to finish.
Death on the Nile: I was thoroughly surprised to discover the author considered this to be a work of horror fiction. I think watching the movie this story was based on might have been more entertaining ("Between Two Worlds").
The Soul Selects Her Own Society: had forgotten this one was even in there until revisiting the TOC.
Fire Watch: while time travel is generally a recipe for boredom (can they affect the course of history for the millionth time? who cares), the historical detail and relatively charming narrator saved this one, and kept me from just giving up on the collection as a whole.
Inside Job: a wonderful concept (historical skeptic possesses a fake "spirit medium" in order to debunk her) mired in the cheesiest love story. I didn't know anything about H.L. Mencken, and while he seemed a charming grouch in the story, he was somewhat less charming in reality. Willis's mash note to Mencken in the afterword (presumably written in 2014, long after his less savory works had been posthumously published) is somewhat disappointing now that I know a bit more about him.
Even the Queen: a future without menstruation and a cultish group that chooses to menstruate anyway is another great concept and I wish Willis had written more in this one. The "Cyclist" character seems to be an absurd caricature, touting notions of body positivity and opposing the patriarchy in a world where one of the most inconvenient bodily functions has been eradicated and women seem fully liberated (I mean from male domination, as men are hardly mentioned and the one male character is not any kind of threat, though the end of menstruation is referred to in the story as "the Liberation"). Since we're supposed to find her laughable, should we assume that feminism has become obsolete? Has the end of menstruation effected this change and if so how? Is the Cyclist meant as a dig at contemporary feminists Willis finds exasperating?
The Winds of Marble Arch: this one broke me. Aside from revisiting London and the Blitz, the reader must suffer through multiple descriptions of Tube routes that might have been made tolerable if performed a la The Californians, but alas, this piece was as humorless as the rest of this collection. Marital infidelity was the last nail in the coffin (seriously, can we ban treatment of this topic in literature for 50 years or so? I'm pretty sure we've covered every possible angle).
A Letter from the Clearys: standard-issue post-apocalypse vignette.
At the Rialto: theme of physicist engaging in macroscopic expressions of the behavior of subatomic particles was too obvious too soon for me to finish.
Death on the Nile: I was thoroughly surprised to discover the author considered this to be a work of horror fiction. I think watching the movie this story was based on might have been more entertaining ("Between Two Worlds").
The Soul Selects Her Own Society: had forgotten this one was even in there until revisiting the TOC.
Fire Watch: while time travel is generally a recipe for boredom (can they affect the course of history for the millionth time? who cares), the historical detail and relatively charming narrator saved this one, and kept me from just giving up on the collection as a whole.
Inside Job: a wonderful concept (historical skeptic possesses a fake "spirit medium" in order to debunk her) mired in the cheesiest love story. I didn't know anything about H.L. Mencken, and while he seemed a charming grouch in the story, he was somewhat less charming in reality. Willis's mash note to Mencken in the afterword (presumably written in 2014, long after his less savory works had been posthumously published) is somewhat disappointing now that I know a bit more about him.
Even the Queen: a future without menstruation and a cultish group that chooses to menstruate anyway is another great concept and I wish Willis had written more in this one. The "Cyclist" character seems to be an absurd caricature, touting notions of body positivity and opposing the patriarchy in a world where one of the most inconvenient bodily functions has been eradicated and women seem fully liberated (I mean from male domination, as men are hardly mentioned and the one male character is not any kind of threat, though the end of menstruation is referred to in the story as "the Liberation"). Since we're supposed to find her laughable, should we assume that feminism has become obsolete? Has the end of menstruation effected this change and if so how? Is the Cyclist meant as a dig at contemporary feminists Willis finds exasperating?
The Winds of Marble Arch: this one broke me. Aside from revisiting London and the Blitz, the reader must suffer through multiple descriptions of Tube routes that might have been made tolerable if performed a la The Californians, but alas, this piece was as humorless as the rest of this collection. Marital infidelity was the last nail in the coffin (seriously, can we ban treatment of this topic in literature for 50 years or so? I'm pretty sure we've covered every possible angle).
December 17, 2019
I've long been a fan of Connie Willis, and I wanted to read or re-read this collection of her award-winning stories. They are still great.
And her three acceptance speeches, added on the end of the book, are a wonderful toast to the wonder of books. "Anyone who things 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."
I'd read about 2/3 of these before, and thought I'd read more. "Fire Watch" is a famous element of her I-don't-write-series stories about time traveling historians, and it was so much more powerful than I remembered. "Even the Queen" is still impressive even when I know what the story is about, and her story notes on it are just great. "All Together on the Ground" is a perfect sci-fi rom-com, of a sort that only Willis can write. And I wasn't sure that I could read "Last of the Winnebagoes" again. I did cry, but knowing what was coming made it less overwhelming than the first time I read it. Still great, full of emotion, human revelation, and many perspectives on loss.
All the others are worth the read, too. I look forward to whatever stories Connie may still want to tell us. And I still want to read the story of what happened to Denver.
And her three acceptance speeches, added on the end of the book, are a wonderful toast to the wonder of books. "Anyone who things 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."
I'd read about 2/3 of these before, and thought I'd read more. "Fire Watch" is a famous element of her I-don't-write-series stories about time traveling historians, and it was so much more powerful than I remembered. "Even the Queen" is still impressive even when I know what the story is about, and her story notes on it are just great. "All Together on the Ground" is a perfect sci-fi rom-com, of a sort that only Willis can write. And I wasn't sure that I could read "Last of the Winnebagoes" again. I did cry, but knowing what was coming made it less overwhelming than the first time I read it. Still great, full of emotion, human revelation, and many perspectives on loss.
All the others are worth the read, too. I look forward to whatever stories Connie may still want to tell us. And I still want to read the story of what happened to Denver.
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