#Connie Willis

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[as-dreamers-do]

TAKE MY MONEY MA'AM

[gollancz]

Nearly broke my wrist attempting to get an ~aesthetic photo of all the books by my authors that came out this year in front of the Christmas tree before giving up and using the chair instead.

(yes that is a rogue Orion Fiction title, I sometimes moonlight in non-SFF)

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this is all (non) fiction

a self indulgent crosstalk comic based on andrew bird's "are you serious" because i can

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mild spoiler for The Road to Roswell in panel 2

I think I found the Tumblr post that got me hooked on Connie Willis 🥲

[tales-from-the-abbey]

Father Roche.

That's it, that's the post

[oraclecat]

Some Thoughts to Get You Through Inauguration Day — and the Next Four Years

I want to share this post from one of my favorite writers, Connie Willis, that I found incredibly helpful today. I needed it. I hope it helps someone else like it did me.

January 20, 2025

By Connie Willis

I know I promised no news today, just inspirational stuff to get us through the inauguration, but there were two pieces of good news, two good things that Biden did just before he left office, that I thought I should share:

--The first three hostages were released in the Gaza ceasefire deal that Biden engineered. They are all young women and seem to be in good health. They were smiling, and their families were overjoyed at their release, but of course they’ve been through hell, and their recoveries will take a very long time. Still, Biden got them out, with the promise of more to come.

--Biden pre-emptively pardoned a number of people Trump and Kash Patel have announced their intention of going after: Dr. Fauci, General Mark Milley, the members of the January 6 Committee (including Liz Cheney, Trump’s number one target) and all their staffers, plus the police officers who testified before the January 6th committee.

--Biden said of the pardons: "The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgement that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense. Our nation owes these public servants a debt of gratitude for their tireless commitment to our country."

--Here’s Dr. Fauci’s response, which I think is pitch perfect: "Let me be perfectly clear: I have committed no crime, and there are no possible grounds for any allegation or threat of criminal investigation or prosecution of me. The fact is, however, that the mere articulation of these baseless threats and the potential that they will be acted upon, creat immeasurable and intolerable distress for me and my family. For these reasons, I acknowledge and appreciate the action that President Biden has taken today on my behalf."

--The sputtering fury from MAGAs and Republican Congressmen and Senators, screaming that they’ll go after them in state courts and open new investigations into their actions, shows that these pardons were completely necessary. Thank God Biden did it. And that he did it at the very last minute so that Trump didn’t have the chance to forestall the pardons.

Oh, and in an absolutely hilarious bit of good news, you know Mike Johnson ordered that all the flags at the Capitol and the White House be raised to half-staff for Trump’s inauguration, even though it broke the law. Well, this morning when they tried to raise them, the cords had all frozen to the staffs and they couldn’t get them unstuck to raise the flags. (Suggestion: You could try licking the flagpoles with your tongue.)

Okay, here are some quotes to get you through the day. And the next four years. (Note: You might copy the ones you like the best and stick them on your bathroom mirror or your refrigerator as a reminder when the going gets rough.)

--pelagicray: "We are all going to have to embrace the chaos, ride it out. That "ride it out" is something the sea taught me. Before actually being out there I simply raged at chaos. I still have that rage, but it is tempered by that ‘ride it out’ attitude one has to have with long times at sea. Caught in a storm one cannot avoid, and that is nearly impossible if one spends much time out there, and about which one can do not a thing, teaches the ‘ride it out’ way. In my case we were not even ‘crew’ who had real work to do keeping the ship riding it out. We did what of our work we coud do in conditions that made it near impossible, but sometimes even that was not possible. We became total passengers. And some storms are scary, even for the experienced. One has to learn self control when the rolls are beginning to test the limits of the ship’s righting moment, knowing that any next wave could be the one to tip the balance, hearing things break loose that should not have broken loose and sometimes themselves endangering the ship. That is when the crew may endanger limb and even life controlling that problem. But one learns to go with the rolls, ride it all out, trust in survival, or, as some I knew did, break down and react to everythinng. And tht itself risks survival. We are all going to be riding a lot of bad stuff out. We will ride it out--or not."

--rugbymom: "You also learn, I gather, to always keep that safety line clipped on. And that survival requires teamwork and taking care of each other. That’s what I hold onto. Whatever happens, we have to take care of each other, our neighbors, our friends, our family members, our community. Don’t let anyone be stuck in the storm alone."

--lpeacock: "I have no illusions as to how fucked up things are going to be. I’m just glad and thankful that we have so many good people in the fight to try to combat the fascism..."

--Steve Schmidt: "Everything Donald Trump has ever done has been chaotic, shambolic, and, in the end, a failure. All of it."

--Howard Zinn: "To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will detemine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capability to do something."

--Douglas Wood: "I...know that in the midst of constant, hourly assaults by bad news and worse news, of awful people doing awful things, and all of it rolling over us faster than we can understand or process it...I know that there is this. Always this. The wild, unnamable beauty of the natural world. Of the same shining moon that the Buddha and Jesus and Lao Tse and Shakespeare and Da Vinci and Galileo knew. Of winter trees standing like ladders to the stars. Of the impenetrable silence of the universe. Of humble feet standing on a tiny plot of ground while eyes gaze upward into the mysterious All of which we are a part. And suddenly one realizes the simple, saving truth...that the News is not the world."

--J.R.R. Tolkien, on Sam in the depths of Mordor: "Far above the Ephel Duath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for awhile. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach."

Today is also Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and that’s sort of fitting because he above any other American knew what it was like to live under a cruel and unjust system for generations and still not give up--or become embittered and cynical and just as hateful as the other side. So here are some MLK, Jr. quotes:

--"If you can’t fly, then run. If you can’t run, then walk. If you can’t walk, then crawl--but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward."

--"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of convenience and comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."

--"We will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope."

--"We must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future."

--"I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant."

And finally, from Hakeem Jeffries: "Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. All that matters is the courage to continue."

Think of this as Dunkirk. It’s a bad day, and there are many worse to come. But it’s not over.

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #35 – To Say Nothing Of The Dog by Connie Willis

This was my second shot on reading something of Willis’, and I found it far more enjoyable than the first. Which is something of a feat, honestly – it’s a rare book that you can more-or-less accurately describe s a ‘cozy romcom’ that doesn’t make me recoil. But it was charming! And dated, but mostly only charmingly as well.

The story is the second in a series, which no one ever told me when recommending it because it does not matter in the slightest (at least, I had no issues at all following along with the story) – though it does mean that it hits the ground running and requires you to pick up quite a bit from context for the first while. It follows Ned Henry, a historian at the University of Oxford in the mid-21st century – a field that has been changed dramatically by the invention of time travel. For example, it’s suddenly in desperate need of particle-accelerator money, which is why and the entire rest of the department have been conscripted by an incredibly generous donor to help her reconstruct Coventry Cathedral exactly as it was before being destroyed in the Blitz. Exactly. ‘God is in the details’, and Henry has spent subjective weeks running himself ragged attending wartime rummage sales and sifting through bombed out ruins to try and verify the fate of a glorified flower pot mainly notable for being overdone and ugly even by Victorian standards.

After going through so many rapid-fire temporal shifts that the jump sickness leaves him waxing rhapsodic about the highway and falling in love with every woman he sees, he’s sent to Victorian Oxford to lay low and recuperate, and deliver a vitally important package to a contact already in situ. Unfourtunately that jump sickness means that he’s pretty unclear on the particular what and who. Really it’s remarkable that things don’t spin even more wildly out of control than they do (and there’s a period where he might have accidentally made the nazis win WW2).

So yeah, not what you’d call a serious novel. Most of the plot is sneaking around trying to make sure various members of the Victorian gentry fall in love in the right pattern to make sure someone’s grandson can fly in the RAF down the line and someone else elopes off to America on schedule (with drastically limited details and new information from back home changing things ever so often). Also sneaking a pampered rare-fish-hunting pet cat and slothful bulldog around before they arouse the wrath of their hosts. The apocalyptic threat that’s theoretically hanging over everyone never really feels real, and it’s all just pleasently absurd and enjoyable to read.

The comedy reminds me of early Prachett, in a way? Which like, a light comedy from the ‘90s in large part poking fun at English academia, of course there are similarities, but still. Not that that’s n insult. There’s plenty of absurd situations caused by miscommunication or desperately trying to work around absurd social conventions or personal foibles. Almost the entire Victorian cast (and a decent number of the present-day characters as well) are objectively ridiculous people, and the book has a lot of fun making do the literary equivalent of chewing scenery for the camera.

I call this a romcom, but I’m not ever sure that fits, honestly. It is a comedy with romance, between the two lead characters, whose dynamic with each other is the main throughline of the book. But it’s never really a source of drama? Or a motor of the plot. They are coworkers who end up working in close confines and get alone fine, who both awkwardly admit they find each other very attractive and start flirting and at the end they kiss and adopt a cat together. Least miscommunication- or conflict-ridden central romance in fiction you’ve ever seen. I don’t know enough about the genre constraints to determine whether it counts or not.

Part of the appeal of this was honestly the odd ways it came across as a bit dated? Not at all in a bad way but just, like – the fixation on the Blitz as the sine qua non of English history feels very 20th century? The references to the Charge of the Light Brigade and Schrodinger’s Box and Three Men in a Boat, combined with the felt obligation to step back from the narrative and explain what they were in case the reader wasn’t aware – just the idea that someone reading a time travel story won’t already be familiar with the concept of temporal paradoxes, really. It all added up to a reading experience that felt a bit off-kilter in a pleasing way.

This is obviously a story very fascinated by Victoriana – both the time period and the popular memory. Its perspective on the period is – I guess ‘affectionate contempt’ might be the best way to put it? It clearly doesn’t think much of the Oxfordshire gentry, the women shallow as a puddle and obsessed with marriage gossip and spiritualism, the men with their heads stuffed with some academic fixation and utterly divorced from all practical affairs, both obsessed with petty one-up-man-ship of their peers and casually abusive and callous towards the servants who run and organize their lives for them. But it all feels rather good-natured; not a trace of righteous fury or real class hatred is on display, the fact of the empire and the source of their fortunes is I think not even mentioned. One more way it feels a bit dated, I suppose, or maybe just a way my usual reading’s much more explicitly political about these things.

I’m also not sure if this is a matter of tastes or popular memory changing or just my impression of what the received common wisdom is being parochial or inaccurate, but – given the association of ‘Victorian’ with imperial grandeur, aesthetic superiority, eye-wateringly expensive historical real estate, etc, it is quite funny how the book takes for granted that to be ‘victorian’ means to be horrifically gaudy and over-designed, devoid of elegance or restraint, and to have probably ruined some real medieval beauty in its creation.

Anyway yes, you absolutely could dig into this book and write some meaty essays out of it, but I simply was not reading it closely enough to do so. It’s probably overlong and definitely meandering and unhurried, but I did find it a really enjoyable read.

[script-supervisor]

Connie Willis

- A man for all seasons, dir. Fred Zinnemann, 1966.

[higharollakockamamie]

The first thing I love about Doomsday Book by Connie Willis is my edition’s incredibly 90s cover.

The second thing I love about Doomsday Book is how it defies what I think of as the Kingdom Come Deliverance Assumption: the idea that women doing stuff was invented around 1989.

Doomsday Book is set in the 14th century yet is almost entirely woman-focused. The main tension, and it is seriously anxiety-inducing, is social: the time-traveling main character trying to locate her rendezvous point so she can get home. The family’s men are all off in the city trying to deal with some legal troubles. There’s a guy she should be able to get info about the rendezvous point from, but getting him alone to talk to without rousing anybody’s suspicions is not an easy task. There’s also things like, what if this little girl’s scraped knee gets infected? The MC has modern knowledge, but no stash of penicillin. Then things really go to hell.

It's an extremely sad book, but a really good one, especially if you have any interest in the time period or the contemporary language. There's also some stuff about a disease outbreak in the future period that is eerily prescient.

[everythingsecondhand]

Firewatch, by Connie Willis (Bantam, 1986).

From an Oxfam shop in Nottingham.

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Favorite Rewritings

Round 1

Blackout is a retelling of WWII

The Great Gatsby Undead is a retelling of The Great Gatsby

"its gatsby but with vampires. what else do you want"

[litandlifequotes]

That's what literature is. It's the people who went before us, tapping out messages from the past, from beyond the grave, trying to tell us about life and death! Listen to them!

Passage by Connie Willis

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[fathermulcahyofficial]

When it’s finally your turn to borrow the audiobook on Libby after a 23 week wait

[katereads]

Doomsday Book is the only plague novel I’ve been able to read since 2020.

But also, it was published in 1992. There’s a toilet paper shortage and no one wants to wear their face masks. There has been a global pandemic at some undefined point in the past (the book takes place sometime around 2050).

I guess what I’m saying is, Connie Willis time traveler?