Joel's Reviews > D.A.

There comes a point in every successful author's career when people just stop saying no to them. "What's that? You've sold 500,000 books? You've won every major award in your genre? People give your books five stars on Amazon before they are published? Nah, we won't need to be editing you. We can just go ahead and publish your first draft."

This apparently happened to Connie Willis shortly after the publication of To Say Nothing of the Dog, if the page counts of Passage and Blackout/Clearly Not Edited at All are any indication.

But the sickness doesn't stop at overwriting. The "We'll Publish Anything!" disease is also to blame for very short works, often published in fancy limited editions by small presses, that no one would ever look at twice if they didn't have name recognition. I mean, I can think of no other conceivable reason why I read Blockade Billy, or Cemetery Dance published it, than Stephen King's name was on the cover page; I don't give two shits about baseball and even though the story took me one (1) bathtime to read, I still felt like I wasted my time.

So, yeah, this is one of those books -- published as a novella, but barely more than a short story, it probably took Willis about half an hour to write, which is about as long as it took me to read. Girl is unexpectedly recruited into fancy space organization, whines about it, tries to get out of it. There is supposedly a "mystery" as to why she was selected, but it's either too obvious or disappointingly flat (take your pick). Oh also, even though there is a spaceship on the cover, more than half of this very short book takes place at an exciting... school assembly? Which the narrator whines about too.

Hey, don't you want to spend $40 on a limited edition of this? Well, you can't -- it's out of print and probably selling for way more than that.