The Best of Connie Willis by Connie Willis

Published by Del Rey on July 9, 2013

I'm a fan of the "Best of" series, but how does an editor pick the best of a writer who won eleven Hugos and seven Nebulas, among other awards? Some writers are better at drama than comedy, some are better at comedy, but rare is the writer who is equally adept at both. Connie Willis is one of the rare ones. Her range of talent -- her ability to write hilarious stories alongside stories that are sad and moving -- is on full display in this anthology.

Willis excels at time travel stories, making "Fire Watch" a welcome addition to the volume. History student Bartholomew doesn't know why he's been sent to London during World War II, but he suspects he's there to keep St. Paul's Cathedral from burning down. Willis' time travel stories are often quite funny but this one is both an ironic tale of paranoia and a sad reminder that the real lessons to be learned from history are often concealed. "Fire Watch" won both the Hugo and the Nebula in 1983 and it's my favorite serious story in the anthology. A close runner-up, "The Last of the Winnebagos" (1988 Nebula, 1989 Hugo) -- a story about guilt and forgiveness that combines a mystery with a commentary on the loss of privacy -- imagines a sad world in which all the dogs have died.

The other serious stories are: "A Letter from the Clearys" (1983 Nebula), in which a letter written before the nuclear war reminds a family of everything they've lost. A visitor to London notices a cold winds and smells death and decay at several tube stations in "The Winds of Marble Arch" (2000 Hugo), but when he investigates the phenomenon, he comes to understand some sad truths about life.

The funniest story (I'm still laughing) is "The Soul Selects Her Own Society," a sendup of doctoral students written as a scholarly paper arguing (rather convincingly) that Emily Dickinson was visited by Martian poets. It won a well-deserved Hugo in 1997. A close second is "All Seated on the Ground" (2008 Hugo) which asks the amusing question: What if aliens visit Earth but make no attempt to communicate and only respond to one stimulus ... Christmas carols?

The other funny stories are: Attending a convention "At the Rialto" (1990 Nebula), a physicist comes to realize that the randomness inherent in quantum physics makes perfect sense in Hollywood, where chaos theory reigns supreme and the uncertainty principle is a way of life -- particularly in a hotel where nothing can be predicted. A woman who visits Egypt with her husband and two other couples experiences "Death on the Nile" (1994 Hugo) -- that is, she wonders whether she's actually on the journey to the afterworld described in The Book of the Dead. In "Inside Job" (2006 Hugo), a skeptic is prepared to expose a spelling-challenged spiritualist who channels "Isus" until the spiritualist appears to channel the greatest skeptic of all. "Even the Queen" (1993 Hugo and Nebula) turns the concept of women's liberation upside down as a family debates a young woman's decision not to free herself from menstruation.

Each story is followed by an afterword in which Willis talks about the story. The volume ends with three entertaining speeches that Willis prepared. Fans of science fiction are probably familiar with Willis, but any fan of short stories, and for that matter, any fan of good writing, should enjoy this volume.

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