In which women aren’t funny, don’t write important books, but come in handy as assassins and thieves.

News

Connie Willis named SFWA Grand Master

Liz Bourke on Strange Horizons & the art of the mean review

Survey shows that men (as well as women) often play characters of the other gender while gaming – in many cases, men are bored with or alienated by the big musclebound male characters, which game designers think they want. Sound familiar?

Hoyden about Town are asking for guest bloggers to crosspost their Australian Women Writers Challenge reviews on Hoyden (ASIF also keen to do so)

More on feminine tosh: a good solid article in the Australian media (shock!) about the women in literature issues of recent months (and, you know, decades).

Have we been following the “Women aren’t funny” stoush that played out in NYT? This interesting development.

DC Comics – cancellations & new titles – Tansy is especially excited by World’s Finest (featuring the Earth 2 Huntress & Power Girl)

Stranger with My Face – Women in Horror film festival in Hobart, Tasmania – 17-19 February

Tansy’s book launch for Reign of Beasts (Creature Court Book Three) on 2 February at Hobart Bookshop, 5:30pm.

What Culture Have we Consumed?

Alex: Ashes to Ashes season 2; Dr Who season 1; Rocannon’s World, Ursula le Guin; The Declaration, Gemma Malley; Grey, Jon Armstrong; The Collected Works of TS Spivet, Reif Larsen. BBC 4 “Cat Women of the Moon” podcast

Tansy: Destination: Nerva (Big Finish, audio), Astonishing X-Men by Joss Whedon, The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson, DVD Extras Include Murder, by Nev Fountain

Alisa: absorbed in novel submissions; The Big Bang Theory; Swordspoint Audiobook, written and performed by Ellen Kushner

GS Award will be proclaimed… in a short while!

Winner of Alex’s Yarn giveaway: Jo

Tansy: Creature Court trilogy give away!
Email to tell us about one book you read after we talked about it on GS to be eligible

Please send feedback to us at galacticsuburbia@gmail.com, follow us on Twitter at @galacticsuburbs, check out Galactic Suburbia Podcast on Facebook and don’t forget to leave a review on iTunes if you love us!

I went out and watched both movies, as I usually do when Connie Willis structures a story around a piece of Classic Hollywood. They’re both very good movies. But neither of them, for me, has a patch on the personal resonance of, say, Bernard and the Genie, which I adore beyond all reason, or even the resonance of “Miracle” itself.

It’s all personal, though. Christmas cultural texts come from our childhood, from happy moments in our lives, or they just happen like lightning – like anything else that becomes a new, instant favourite. But really, I didn’t start thinking about Christmas texts until I read “Miracle.” So it’s rather meta that, at Christmas time, I start getting the urge to re-read that story.

In my teens, Christmas became a form of rebellion. My Mum had been putting on Christmas festivities for me for my whole childhood and frankly, she was done. Stockings, tree, meh. It wasn’t really her thing at all. So I took over. I filled the damn stockings and decorated the tree, and while I never went to far as roasting a beast (we weren’t really roast kinds of people, the two of us preferring cold seafood picnics on the day) I took on a lot of the energy and work of making Christmas feel Christmassy (the work which now I perform as a mum of small children) because the alternative was not having it at all.

I had a much-worn VHS of Christmas UK shows that I watched over each year while wrapping presents and doing all that festive stuff. I barely remember now what was on it – Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, yes, and a pretendy family video by Smith and Jones, and a Lenny Henry Christmas special, I think. That sort of thing. A bunch of things that had all been on at the same time one year and were now preserved in video tape amber. We probably still have the tape somewhere, but I no longer have a working video (SAD) and a lot of those old tapes are pretty stretched and crackly now.

Then there was Bernard and the Genie. Which, to my dismay, I have still not managed to get hold of on DVD. I must hunt it down. It really is my favourite Christmas movie of all time, and I hope desperately that it holds up. It has Lenny Henry in it, right? And Alan Cummings? And Rowan Atkinson? It holds up, right? (already my inner Galactic Suburbanite is pointing out the minor role of women in the movie, damn it)

Maybe I’d better not watch it again. But… I always think of it when I hear that supermarket favourite, “It’ll be lonely this Christmas.” Also whenever I see pictures of Bob Geldof, because this movie was the first time I ever became aware of his existence. Him and Gary Lineker. True story.

What other Christmas texts resonate with me? More versions of A Christmas Carol, actually. I enjoy the Muppets one, though it’s not a patch on Blackadder. I read the actual book about eight years ago, and was surprised at how good it was, all sleek tight prose and clever bits. Dickens had one good story in him, as far as I’m concerned, and it was this one – a near-perfect structure, and it’s hardly surprising that new, different versions get told over and over again.

(Did I mention, though? Blackadder did it better)

Old movies generally, too. I associate High Society with Christmas because I first saw it (thanks to John Hinde) on Boxing Day. Also I have an annual tradition of noticing that one of the handful of Fred Astaire movies I’ve never seen is scheduled on TV, being delighted, and then missing it entirely. Not all traditions are about what you actually do…

Then there’s the Doctor Who Christmas Specials, which feels like a tradition that has been with us forever, but it really hasn’t. I’m pretty sure last year was the first time that Australia actually got the special on terrestrial TV at Christmas (which for us means Boxing Day, thanks to living in the future), and back in 1996 when David Tennant’s Doctor rang in the tradition, we had to wait something like 4-6 months. That was before I learned how to magically view things that weren’t technically on the telly yet, too! Didn’t figure that one out until… The Next Doctor, maybe? So Doctor Who Christmas Specials weren’t actually a Christmas thing for our family until recently. I am rather chuffed about them now, though. Even if, away from the festivities, they’re rarely as good as an everyday episode. They are CERTAINLY MORE CHRISTMASSY.

It may also be why last year’s Doctor Who Christmas special is my favourite so far. And not because it’s yet another version of A Christmas Carol…

The British tradition of Christmas specials is one that doesn’t quite work in Australia. We try our best, but generally if we do get Christmas TV it’s from a year or two ago. A few of the light entertainment shows do a half-hearted stab at the holiday, but mostly this is the period when our actors all fly to Britain to do panto, and there’s nothing new on the TV at all apart from cricket, so the idea of having event TV scheduled now pretty much baffles us. Having said that, I’m not sure what I’m more excited about this year – Doctor Who or Downton Abbey. Or MAYBE BOTH.

There’s the EastEnders Christmas special, too, which I don’t watch, because the ABC deprived Australians of EastEnders somewhere around the late 80′s. But I got addicted again back in 2002 and followed the damn show through episode synopses for about 5 years afterwards, and I even now I do enjoy hearing about the EastEnders Christmas Doom of Kitchen Sink DOOM every year, in the Guardian.

Hogfather isn’t my favourite Pratchett novel or even my favourite Susan novel but oh, it’s Christmassy! I’ve read that at Christmas a few times. Back when I actually had leisure time at Christmas, HA. These days even getting around to rereading one Connie Willis short story will be a stretch… I have picked up the DVD of the movie, though, and will finally get around to watching it.

There is a clutch of cultural artefacts that remind me deeply of that Christmas we were in London, and had been travelling for five weeks, and couldn’t take it any more, and just bought BOOKS, PRECIOUS BOOKS, even though they were far too heavy. The Last Hero, then, is a Pratchett book of greater holiday significance to me than Hogfather, as is The Lord of the Rings, both book and the first film. Likewise the first Harry Potter film, in which Christmas is the best bit (there is this argument actually for nearly every Harry Potter book or film ever. Christmas is ALWAYS the best bit, because of the jumpers.)

The Futurama Xmas episodes are fun, though we accidentally put one on the other week after decorating the Christmas Tree, only for it to freak out Jem completely. Then I realised that might be her first remembered encounter with a pop culture Santa. OOOOPS. Maybe should have gone with one of the Buffy Christmas episodes instead…

Wow, there’s a lot more of this than I thought.

This year, if I choose to embrace one Christmas cultural text, I think it’s going to be from Big Finish land. Last year I listened to Relative Dimensions, a lovely (if not overly HAPPY) audio play featuring the Eighth Doctor, Lucie, Susan and Alex, and I plan to do so again. Listening to audio, after all, can be done WHILE wrapping presents instead of, well, instead of.

So, those of you who celebrate Christmas, what are your favourite bits of Christmas pop culture? What books, movies, short stories, music, TV specials, etc. do you like to embrace at this time of year, either alone or with your family? Which ones drive you up the wall? If you don’t celebrate Christmas at all (or if like many you celebrate it but don’t actually LIKE it) then are there any other times of year when you embark upon ritual reading, or watching, or listening?

In which we save the Tasmanian Devils, take on the Classics, review cars, discover that toy fandom exists, plan to read LOTS of Australian women writers, and Wonder Woman still doesn’t have pants.

News

Coffeeandink on The Erasure of women writers in SF and Fantasy

Mur Lafferty – My Problem With Classics

Open letter to publishers: book bloggers are not your bitches

Kate Gordon’s Devil Auction – help to save the Tasmanian Devils! (kitten pictures with TEETH)

Australian Women Writers Challenge
Sign up now

Jason Nahrung posted a list of the books he plans to read for the challenge – let us know what yours are!

In association with this, Tansy produced a list of award-winning SF/Fantasy books by Australian women.

Please keep sending in your suggestions for a Galactic Suburbia Award – we hope to have a plan for this by our 50th episode and are loving reading the tweets and emails so far.

What Culture Have we Consumed?

Alisa: Bellwether by Connie Willis; American Horror Story; Yarn by Jon Armstrong

Tansy: Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor; Jingo & The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett; Shortpacked, a webcomic about toy fandom, obsessed people, lots of GLBTQ characters and feminist commentary on pop culture such as this strip about False Equivalence.

Alex: Coode St podcast with Ursula le Guin, and also with Ian McDonald and Alistair Reynolds; Spook Country, William Gibson; One of Our Thursdays is Missing, Jasper Fforde; Pirates of the Caribbean 4!

Feedback from Kitty of Panel2Panel:
Reasoning With Vampires
Kitty’s post about why Marvel has no equivalent hero to Wonder Woman

TANSY RECS for DC comics that don’t treat women appallingly:
Birds of Prey (start as early as possible, either with the Chuck Dixon issues which are pretty good, or the Gail Simone run which is #56-108)
Power Girl: A New Beginning & Aliens and Apes – Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, Amanda Conner
Catwoman run by Ed Brubaker
Stephanie Brown Batgirl: Batgirl Rising, The Flood etc.
Secret Six, Gail Simone
Batwoman. Anything with Batwoman.
I HAVE NOT YET FOUND THE PERFECT WONDER WOMAN TRADE TO RECOMMEND. But I do think anyone interested in comics history could get value from reading her first year of adventures, available as Wonder Woman Chronicles Vol. One

Marvel dude saying we don’t have to have female characters

Australian podcasts about comics: Panel2Panel and How I Got My Boyfriend Into Comics

Please send feedback to us at galacticsuburbia@gmail.com, follow us on Twitter at @galacticsuburbs, check out Galactic Suburbia Podcast on Facebook and don’t forget to leave a review on iTunes if you love us!

EPISODE 38

In which none of your fearless podcasters are impregnated by mysterious aliens for the duration of a single episode, nor do any of us experience a rapidly accelerated pregnancy or give birth to an otherworldly demon/alien/vampire. Also: Batgirl, Bujold and a cranky feminist rant or two.

News

Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award – given to a living writer for the first time, Katherine MacLean.

Mythopoeic Awards

World Fantasy, of course!

World SF Travel Fund raising money to send Charles A Tan to WFC

The Mystical Pregnancy trope - torture porn? Reproductive terrorism, exploiting women for being female.
Violent degradation of women’s bodies for plot.

Vote For Top-100 Science Fiction, Fantasy Titles
Swedish Writing Fairy crunches the numbers

Andromeda’s Offering Offspring Issue 1 – new fanzine to “open up new female voices in SF, raise the awareness of female SF writers and share ideas.”
(you can find them on Facebook apparently)

Where are the women in the new DC Comics?
newsy report
proper interview with Batgirl crusader

SF Signal Episode 70 – 6 men talk about their favourite podcasts and illustrate what we mean by gender disparity in SF gatekeeping
Alisa makes reference to recent Mind Meld

What Culture Have we Consumed?

Alisa – Passage by Connie Willis; Red Glove by Holly Black; The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang;
Alex - Diplomatic Immunity and Cryoburn, Bujold; Chicks Dig Time Lords, ed. Lynne Thomas; The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell; Shades of Milk and Honey, Mary Robinette Kowal (http://wp.me/p11HLi-Nf); Songs of the Earth, Elspeth Cooper (abandoned). SF Squeecast.
Tansy – Glenda Larke-Stormlord Rising; Malinda Lo-Huntress; Penni Russon-Only, Ever, Always

Feedback
lovely review at Hoyden About Town

Please send feedback to us at galacticsuburbia@gmail.com, follow us on Twitter at @galacticsuburbs, check out Galactic Suburbia Podcast on Facebook and don’t forget to leave a review on iTunes if you love us!

EPISODE 35

In which “best” becomes “superior,” Pottermore is Pottermeh, one of us wins all the awards, and we visit/revisit classic non-hard works of SF and Fantasy by Bujold, Willis and Pratchett (with bonus Russian fairytales by Valente).

News

Pottermore announcement made during our podcast…

Theodore Sturgeon finalists

David Gemmell Awards…

NatCon professional guests for next year are Kelly Link and Alison Goodman.

Chronos Awards

Sidewise Awards finalists

Translation Awards winners

Stoker Awards announced

Coode Street Horror Special with Stoker winners Datlow & Straub

Gender Spotting Tool – Naff.

What Culture Have we Consumed?

Alisa: Connie Willis’ Passage in progress, the next 3 Twelve Planets.
Alex: so much Bujold (Cordelia’s Honor and Young Miles omnibuses… omnibi… whatever, Fly by Night, Frances Hardinge, Red Glove, Holly Black. Series 2 of V (reboot)
Tansy: Deathless, Catherynne Valente; I Shall Wear Midnight, Terry Pratchett; Wyrd Sisters audiobook, Terry Pratchett/Celia Imrie.

Next Fortnight: Galactic Suburbia’s Spoilerific Book Club Presents: Joanna Russ. Reading How to Suppress Women’s Writing, The Female Man, “When It Changed.”

Please send feedback to us at galacticsuburbia@gmail.com, follow us on Twitter at @galacticsuburbs, check out Galactic Suburbia Podcast on Facebook and don’t forget to leave a review on iTunes if you love us!

EPISODE 34

In which we surf the wave of feminist SF news that has deluged the internet this fortnight, plus Margaret Brundage, why YA books are allowed to be as dark as they want to be, the Tiptree Award, Connie Willis, were-thylacines, Ted Chiang and Alex finally discovers Bujold…

News

Nicola Griffith on the m/f imbalance in an informal SF favourites poll in the Guardian
The Guardian: Damien Walter, author of the poll & followup articles revises his comments in response to Griffith
Niall Harrison follows up on Strange Horizons
Cheryl Morgan on invisibility of women (some really interesting discussion in the comments, too)
The Guardian again, asking with wide innocent eyes if SF is inherently sexist
Ian Sales announces the SF Mistressworks blog project
Nicola Griffith asks you to take the Joanna Russ pledge

Gwyneth Jones, Karen Traviss & Farah Mendlesohn talk on radio about the perception of women in British SF http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011c220
Transcript here: http://vectoreditors.wordpress.com/2011/06/04/womans-hour-women-and-sf/

MK Hobson on the term ‘bustlepunk’ and why there is a place for a domestic sub-genre of steampunk
MK Hobson’s follow up post on the assumptions made about works coded ‘female’

2011 Chesley Award Finalists
Cheryl Morgan on female & trans artists

Nine Reasons Women Don’t Edit Wikipedia
(interesting, I think, in light of the recent spout of incidents we’ve watched, notably the one with Nick Mamatas where winning World Fantasy Award was considered too regional to be significant)

Wall Street Journal on YA fiction

Change to the Norma eligibility guidelines

Why Galactic Suburbia T-shirts are no longer available through RedBubble.

Con Quilt

What Culture Have we Consumed?
Tansy: Thyla, Kate Gordon; Will Supervillains Be on the Final? Naomi Novik
Alisa: Coode St Podcast with Ellen Klages, Eileen Gunn and Geoff Ryman; Connie Willis – Even the Queen; Octavia Butler – Bloodchild
Alex: Chill, and Grail, Elizabeth Bear; The Lifecycle of Software Objects, Ted Chiang ; Welcome to the Greenhouse, Gordon van Gelder; Steampunk! Kelly Link and Gavin Grant.

Please send feedback to us at galacticsuburbia@gmail.com, follow us on Twitter at @galacticsuburbs, check out Galactic Suburbia Podcast on Facebook and don’t forget to leave a review on iTunes if you love us!

Now, finally, with the release of All Clear, we can treat this book (Blackout/All Clear as I hope it will appear on all the awards shortlists) as it should be treated: a single, sprawling epic about time travel and the Blitz which is, quite simply, Connie Willis’s masterwork.

Willis has been writing around this book for most of her career. Her previous time travel novels The Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog introduced readers to several key characters who appear in this story as well as her rules for time travel: the Oxford history department, the nets, the slippage. In these as well as stories such as “Jack” and “Fire Watch,” Willis’ obsession with the Blitz rang true, and it seems a little bewildering to look back and realise that she had not, before now, written a full novel centred around this era.

But I am in danger of repeating myself. I already reviewed Blackout back in February. The important point is that All Clear is brilliant. I was lucky enough to secure a review copy early enough that all the build up and characterisation of Blackout was still clear in my head when I started the second volume, and I can tell you that it hits the ground running.

If Blackout is the child of Fire Watch and To Say Nothing of the Dog, then All Clear is the child of The Doomsday Book. Where Blackout was about the social detail of living in wartorn Britain, All Clear is about the devastation that the war wrought on the country. It is bombs and tears and Dunkirk spirit and death and loss and eternal friendship.

Most of all, it’s about finding lost time travellers, when all the traditional means are ripped away from you, in a time long before the information revolution. It’s a shame in many ways that Willis began creating her future of time travellers long before mobile phones and emails and Twitter, because if those details had been more firmly cemented into the world that our protagonists come from, then the lack of information during the Blitz would be more starkly horrifying. That contrast is there, though, if not quite so active within the text, because we as readers bring those presumptions in.

The most powerful aspect of Blackout is that we only see the events through the eyes of those three stranded time travellers, with no idea what has happened to the future they take for granted. The power of All Clear is that we the readers discover that truth, and yet remain utterly lost, unsure whether there will be a rescue, and certain that not everyone is going to make it back in one piece. Having built up this world and time travel rules and hung so many classic works upon it, I was not quite prepared for Willis to take that world apart as thoroughly as she does, to break all of her rules, and to show that in fact the time travellers and their team of smug researchers back in Oxford had it wrong all along.

Nothing is what it seems.

I suspected from Blackout that this book would turn out to be a Willis classic, one of my favourites of hers. But the similarities to the jovial To Say Nothing of the Dog in the first volume were thoroughly misleading. Like The Doomsday Book and Passage, this one is a heartbreaker. I cried great big buckety sobs over it, as each character found their fate and their future. Some tears of happiness, some of genuine grief. The cleverest narrative thread, the one about a character hardly named that was sneakily woven into Blackout, pays off in spades, and the whole tapestry of the book turns out to be brilliant and thought-provoking and completely worth the hassle of buying it in two separate volumes.
I don’t think Willis is coming back to her time travellers again. This is it. If you have ever loved her work, you need this book.

In which we talk World Fantasy, female editors, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree, Connie Willis, Pat Murphy, and more World Fantasy – plus Alisa tells us off for not mentioning how awesome certain books actually are (we totally did).

News
World Fantasy Award winners

Peter Tennant at Black Static looks at the stats for women being published in recent horror & dark fantasy anthologies
Hathor Legacy compares representation of female authors in two recent horror anthos

Cat Sparks is the new fiction editor of Cosmos, taking over from Damien Broderick

Discussion on the lack of female editors in pro fantasy publications (read through the comments which raise many important points about the post)

Steampunkgate (yes, really)
Charles Stross criticises the “glut” of steampunk and calls it out as a subgenre
Nisi Shawl talks about how the literary side of steampunk just isn’t as diverse and interesting as the other aspects of steampunk… yet
Catherynne Valente rants and then raves about steampunk
Scott Westerfeld gets cranky about the steampunk haterz

Small press turned imprint to publish line of multicultural SF/Fantasy for children:

Jeff VanderMeer reports on Amazon Best of SF/F lists for 2010

What have we been reading/listening to?
Alex: Changeless, Gail Carriger; The Two of Them, Joanna Russ (http://randomalex.net/2010/11/02/the-two-of-them/); Brightness Falls from the Air, James Tiptree Jr; backlog of Tor.com (esp. Robert Reed’s The Next Invasion) and Strange Horizons (esp. Sandra McDonald’s Seven Sexy Cowboy Robots)
Alisa: Fire Watch, Remake (both Connie Willis), White Cat by Holly Black, Ethan of Athos by Lois McMaster Bujold
Tansy: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, NK Jemisin, Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell, by Pat Murphy (http://tansyrr.com/tansywp/pseudonyms-and-pat-murphy/)

Pet Subject
Capclave and World Fantasy Convention! Alex and Tansy interrogate Alisa about her trip away, her loot, and her adventures.

Please send feedback to us at galacticsuburbia@gmail.com, follow us on Twitter at @galacticsuburbs, check out Galactic Suburbia on Facebook and don’t forget to leave a review on iTunes if you love us!

Well, Connie Willis is one of those authors for me, and Alisa, one of my favourite people, just met Connie and then started reading her work this weekend and now wants to read everything she’s ever written, which I can totally understand because that’s how I felt the first time I heard Connie speak. (it was at Swancon where she read the first chapter of the then-unfinished ms of Passage)

So rather than just tweet recs at Alisa, I thought I’d post a beginner’s guide here. Feel free to chime in with your own comments about the works, particularly the ones you disagree with me on, though try to keep reasonably spoiler-free if you can!

HOW TO CHOOSE YOUR NEXT CONNIE WILLIS

Fire Watch (1982, published as main act in a short story collection of the same title 1984)
Her first major work, the beginning of her love affair with the Blitz as a historical period, and the first story to feature the time travelling “historians” from Oxford. A great place to start!
won Hugo & Nebula

Lincoln’s Dreams (1987)
This is my blind spot, the only Willis novel I haven’t been able to enjoy. I’ve heard so many people refer to it as a classic book and a work of brilliance, though, that I’m loathe to dismiss it. Not sure if it’s a me thing or a not being American thing, or what. I’d love to hear from you if you liked it, and why.
won John W. Campbell Memorial Award

Doomsday Book (1992)
A magnificent though emotionally gruelling tale of another Oxford historian, the first to travel back as far as the Middle Ages, despite everyone telling her it’s a bad idea because of all that Black Death. And then, you know, she gets stuck in a village under siege by the Black Death. I usually tell people that this is one of the best novels I’ve ever read and one I never want to read again… but since Blackout/All Clear I’ve been wanting to go back to it, damn it all. It’s amazingly intense, the kind of novel that needs an isolated weekend, a kilo of chocolate and a jumbo box of tissues, but it’s also a brilliant exploration of time travel and history.
won Hugo, Nebula, Locus SF Novel

Impossible Things (1993)
One of my favourite short story collections ever, and one I regularly return to for re-reading. It includes many stories I adore, such as “Spice Pogrom” (Katherine Hepburn Cary Grant screwball comedy in space), “Jack” (another Blitz story with a paranormal twist), and “Even the Queen,” (a story that predicted the technology to suspend or limit menstruation, and looks at the ways that this could affect womanhood and social attitudes – it’s rather quaint now in retrospect but remains an important footnote in the history of women’s science fiction).

Remake (1994)
While I have been tinkering with this post, Alisa read this one already! This short novel is a love letter to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and it’s one I regularly think about because it revolves around a quite awful and yet horribly believable future of Hollywood in which there are no new films, just constant remakes of classics with digital renderings of different famous actors. (Want Avatar with Gene Kelly in the lead?) The main character is utterly demoralised by his job, deleting evidence of addictive substances from classic films (his attempts to turn Rick’s Bar into a coffee shop are hilarious, as is his discovery that the Philadelphia Story makes no sense without the existence of alcohol). His life changes when he meets the only person in Hollywood who still believes that movies should be about something real…

Uncharted Territory (1994)
This is Connie Willis does hard science fiction and I love it greatly. It is of course all about people, but they are people doing their best to explore an alien planet, and being both challenged and bemused by all manner of genderfuckery.

Bellwether (1996)
Another brilliant and tightly thematic short novel, this one is about scientists and science funding and what’s the point of funding science if all the best scientific ideas come to people when they’re in the bath or on a bus? It’s also about fads. Completely, crazily obsessively about the complex history fads. It’s the kind of book that makes you look at the universe differently for… well, ever, but specifically for about six weeks afterwards.

To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998)
This book is so beloved that it’s almost a cliche to love it best, and there are so many reasons to adore all the others but OMG this is the best book ever! That is, if you love Victoriana and 1930′s murder mysteries and unadulterated adoration of so-English-it-hurts cultural history. Another book in the Oxford historian time travel series, this is the light hearted comedy of manners to make you feel better about the world after The Doomsday Book has ripped your heart out and left it bleeding on the floor. Verity and Ned are one of my favourite romantic couples ever, and their antics around church fairs and seances and the bishop’s bath stump delight me from beginning to end. This is the book that sold me on Dorothy Sayers, and I have never looked back.
Won Hugo & Locus SF Novel

Miracle and Other Christmas Stories (1999)
This collection of stories that Connie regularly wrote for the Asimovs December issue is a mixed bag – some more sentimental than others – but is totally worth it for “Miracle,” one of her screwball comedy riff stories (someday a canny publisher should put together a Willis anthology that combines Remake with a bunch of her other Hollywood/movie themed or inspired stories). This story is a love letter to Christmas movies, and to all the traditions that go along with those movies. It’s also a ‘give me a break’ letter to It’s A Wonderful Life, the main thesis being that it is an overrated Christmas movie and the omnipresence of it during the festive season is actually kind of sinister.

Passage (2001)
I wanted to read this book more than a year before it was published, when Connie Willis read the opening chapter at Swancon and blew me away. It’s a compelling, soul-sucking narrative about a woman trying to run a study on what people actually SEE during a near death experience, and constantly being frustrated by a rival whose methods are ethically problematic and tend to warp the evidence (“So, did you see a white light? Did you walk towards it? Were all your favourite people who have passed on already waiting for you?”) As with all Wills books, it builds a community so compelling and lovable that you don’t want to leave. Which means of course that when the bad stuff happens, you feel it like a deep sucking wound in your stomach… I’ve cried buckets over books before and since but this book gave me possibly the most visceral memory of sobbing over a book that had broken my heart in the best possible way. I love it dearly, though I don’t know if I can ever go back there for the reread. Also, this is the book that introduced me to the word “confabulation” which is an awesome thing and a surprisingly useful addition to the vocabulary.
won Locus SF novel

“Inside Job,” (2005) “D.A.” (2007) and “All Seated on the Ground” (2007) were all published as single titles but unlike Uncharted Territory, Bellwether and Remake none of them quite have that epic theme feel about them to warrant that kind of separate attention, or the status of short novels rather than long short stories. Once you’re the kind of reader who wants to inhale everything Connie Willis writes, they’re very enjoyable, but I wouldn’t recommend them as the starting point. “All Seated On the Ground” needs to be retrospectively inserted into the Miracle and Other Christmas Stories anthology. Oh and yes, they did the job of whetting our appetite while we all sat around and waited for the next Connie Willis novel…

Blackout/All Clear (2010) is a masterpiece. I would absolutely recommend it to any reader, regardless of their Willis history, and in particular I think it’s a great one to get for genre-agnostic parents at Christmas, or anyone who is into wartime British history. BUT it is hugely important to remember that this is one book in two volumes, and you shouldn’t start one unless the other is nearby. A long gap between reading one and the other will kill the true experience of the book, the rhythms and the pacing of it. I also think that while it’s a great book to hand to a new reader, for anyone who intends to become a Connie Willis completionist (yes you, Alisa) it should be left until last. There’s a dizzying height about this book which makes so much more sense when you’ve followed the whole journey, and especially would be best read after The Doomsday Book, Fire Watch and To Say Nothing Of the Dog. The book will have a lot more power after having read those other books, as this is the one where she takes the world view lovingly constructed in the other Oxford historian books and blasts it into schrapnel. Having seen so much of Willis’ love of and obsession with the Blitz danced around in other works, I can’t help but be DELIGHTED for her that this brilliant book exists now, that she got to it, and that it’s so very good.

When we nominate it for awards, guys, please remember to cite it as Blackout/All Clear rather than separating the volumes on shortlists. It’s all about posterity.

HOW TO READ CONNIE WILLIS

I didn’t realise this until I had gone through the post but I really think that, leaving aside the serialish nature of the Connie Willis historian books (Fire Watch, The Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog, Blackout/All Clear, which can all be read in any order though I heartily recommend leaving B/AC until last) the best way to read Connie Willis is actually in chronological order. I wouldn’t have thought that, and it’s certainly not a definitive recommendation – you don’t want to read The Doomsday Book or Passage if you’re in a depressive frame of mind, and should wait to pick up To Say Nothing of the Dog until you’re in a mood to be whimsical – but I do think that this is an author who has radically improved and matured over the decades, and that the progression from book to book is an interesting journey.

Also, if some nice publisher wanted to unite all of Connie’s Hollywood and/or romance stories, that would be most excellent. I’d queue up for a copy.

Funnily enough, my thoughts have been very much on narrative endings, lately. How they work, how you drag all the threads together, how to make it satisfying, all that stuff. My head has been filled with the end of this book for six months now, and it still keeps pulling surprises on me. All I can hope at this point is that my characters don’t gang up on me and murder me in my sleep. I would not put it past them!

I’ve always been fascinated by endings, and very critical of those that don’t work, or that finish too early or too late. Diana Wynne Jones, whose books I love so much I could make a quilt of them to snuggle under on cold, sad days, always seems to me a little too hasty to finish, as if she stopped just half a chapter short of perfection. I allow this because it makes me less likely to stab forks into my arms in utter jealousy at how good she is. Then there’s the Eddings duo and their lengthy, drawn out farewells which rival Tolkien for sheer self-indulgence (I’m pretty sure the end of the Elenium starts about a third of the way into the final book).

Then there are the perfect endings, the ones that make you feel calm and good (or awful, but in a good way) like “frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn,” and Janet writing Thomas a poem, and “Placet” (by both Sayers and Willis).

I love writing endings, normally. There’s a beautiful bumbly tumbly pace to them, like running downhill very fast. That moment when everything slots into place and you know all the scenes you have to write, and it’s just a matter of typing, and isn’t it a good thing you have those mad typing skills that almost keep up with your brain at moments like this?

This one is proving harder than most, probably because I have more POV characters than I’ve ever handled before, and no I can’t kill them all off just to make the throughline simpler, and then there’s all the pressure I’m putting on myself to pay off all the promise of book 1 & book 2… I really hope writing endings isn’t like flying in planes or taking exams, which is to say something which seemed easy peasy when I was seventeen and gets harder and harder the older I get.

It’s certainly less fun than heading for ‘THE END’ used to be, but that could be because of the inevitability of certain events which are not all fluff and happiness, so instead of romping downhill crying tally ho! I am more sort of sidling up a cliffface with a guilty look on my face as I dispense justice and injustice with pinpoint accuracy amongst my characters.

The end must be in sight, cos new books are leaping into the queue in the hopes I will pay attention to them next. Yes, I said plural. Anything less would be far too easy…