Connie Willis and why she’s fabulous

When you despair, as I do, frequently, of what will become of you…

When you are out of work and have no money to pay the rent…

When your boss is a tyrant and you don’t know how you can last another day…

When the politics finally has you beaten down because the idiots outnumber you…

There is an answer.  Albeit a temporary answer…an answer nonetheless…

And her name is Connie Willis.

Connie is one of the most brilliant people I have ever met…and I consider it an incredible privilege that I was able to meet her at all…at a few cocktail parties, years ago.  She probably doesn’t remember me, but that’s all right.

She is a brilliant writer.  That’s all that matters.

More below the fold.

I first heard of her in 1983 at the Nebula Awards banquet in New York City.  She won two awards that year, for her novelette “Fire Watch” and for her short story “A Letter from the Clearys.”  She has written hard-hitting stories like “All My Darling Daughters” and written screwball comedies like “At the Rialto” (about quantum physics) and “Spice Pogrom” (what if the aliens came and we had no idea how to translate them? with annoying small children, lol).

Within the science fiction community, she is one of the most feted and one of the few who consistently wins awards.

But she should have a broader audience: she is, and has been for the last twenty years, one of the best humorists working in the U.S.–she has been ignored by the “literary” community only because of her roots in sf/fantasy.  Nobody–and I do mean nobody–can pull off what she does on a regular basis:

She writes complex stories about complicated subjects (chaos theory in To Say Nothing of the Dog; quantum mechanics in “At the Rialto”) and not only makes it look easy; not only makes every word she uses count; but adds humor besides.  Her short novel Bellwether asks the question: where do fads come from? but it is also about leadership; and not following trends: not being a sheeple, in other words.

Connie made her reputation as a writer of short fiction; and even her longer works show this: she is able to write at length and yet not one word is out of place.  In fact, I find that I need to read her works at least twice to catch all the references in them.

Gardner Dozois wrote the forward to Connie Willis’s second collection of stories, Impossible Things, and so I will leave you with a quote from him:

Because she wears Peter Pan collars, and looks relentlessly cheerful and normal, and talks openly about going to Tupperware parties and choir practice, and has a deadpan and ferociously sardonic sense of humor, and is after all a suburban housewife and mother, people tend to underestimate Connie.  This is a serious mistake.  Connie is as tough-minded and smart as anyone in the business.  One is tempted to trot out an old cliche and say that Connie has a mind like a steel trap–except that in Connie’s case it would be some much rarer and more subtle device, something with mirrors and lasers perhaps, that would somehow give the mice such a good laugh that they’d never even notice that their throats were being cut.

Connie’s work is like that, too.  Deceptive and deadly, and ruthlessly effective.

It also tends to be underestimated, especially by bored sophisticates.  I have heard Connie’s work dismissed as “sentimental,” but that’s a dangerously superficial reading.  Connie is not afraid of honest emotion, and certainly there’s a good deal of it in her work–but it is never all that is going on there, just as even the fastest and funniest of her comic stories (and Connie at her best may be one of the funniest modern writers since Thurber, in any genre) are never just funny.  One is always ill-advised to take one of Connie’s stories at face value.  No matter how quiet and simple they appear, there is often a delayed kick to them, a hidden edge; even the ostensibly most “sentimental” of her stories  have that hidden edge to them–like a paper cut, you may not feel the wound when you receive it, you may finish the story and think you’ve been untouched, but then you move and your hand falls off.  Or your arm.  Or your head.

I couldn’t agree more.