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Willis, Connie

Entry updated 13 October 2025. Tagged: Author.

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Working name of US teacher and author Constance Elaine Trimmer Willis (1945-    ). She began publishing sf with "Santa Titicaca" forWorlds of Fantasy (Winter 1970/1971 #3), but appeared only intermittently in the field until the early 1980s, when she became a full-time author, winning several awards almost immediately. Most of her best work of the 1980s was in short-story form; her first book,Fire Watch (coll1985; cut [title story only]2010 chap) (for this story see below), assembled a remarkable range of tales, mostly from the 1980s, "All My Darling Daughters" – published as an original inFire Watch because its language and theme were still unacceptable in the US magazine market of 1980 – is a significantly harsh tale of alienation andSex set in a boarding school in an L5 orbit, where the male students rape small animals (apparently products ofGenetic Engineering) which have vagina-like organs, making them scream in pain; and the female protagonist tries to make sense of her hyperbolic adolescence in terms strongly reminiscent of J D Salinger (1919-2010). Among other tales of interest in this first collection areDaisy, in the Sun (November 1979Galileo;1991 chap), "A Letter from the Clearys" (July 1982Asimov's), which won aNebula, "The Sidon in the Mirror" (April 1983Asimov's) and the comic "Blued Moon" (January 1984Asimov's). A later novella, "The Last of the Winnebagos" (July 1988Asimov's), won Willis both the Hugo and the Nebula; "At the Rialto" (October 1989Omni) won a Nebula; "Even the Queen" (April 1992Asimov's) won a Hugo and a Nebula for Short Story and "Death on the Nile" (March 1993Asimov's) won a Hugo for Short Story.

As a novelist, Willis began slowly with the relatively lightweightWater Witch (1982) with CynthiaFelice, set on a sand planet where the ability to dowse for water is a precious gift (seeESP).Light Raid (1989) with Felice also skids helter-skelter through an sf environment, in this case a balkanizedRuined Earth America fighting off Canadian royalists, featuring the adventuresen route to spunky maturity of a young female protagonist much like those found in Robert AHeinlein's less attractive books. But it seemed clear that both Willis and Felice were treating their collaborations asjeux d'esprit, and Willis's first solo novel,Lincoln's Dreams (1987), aimed successfully at a very much higher degree of seriousness, winning theJohn W Campbell Memorial Award. Once again – as with much of her most deeply felt work – the enabling sf instrument isTime Travel, though in this case via a psychic linkage between a contemporary woman and General Robert E Lee (1807-1870), while at the same time the male protagonist increasingly, and without a breath of frivolity, seems to be taking on the psychic attributes of General Lee's famous horse, Traveller (himself the protagonist ofTraveller [1988] by RichardAdams). The power ofLincoln's Dreams lies in the haunting detail of Willis's presentation of the American Civil War, which seems in her hands terrifyingly close – both geographically and psychically – to the contemporary world.

Her most extended and popular work is almost certainly herTime Travel sequence, beginning withFire Watch (February 1982Asimov's;2010 chap), which won bothNebula andHugo awards. This first tale applies itsTime-Travel premise – a distantNear Future institute of historiography connected to Oxford University that sends individuals back in time throughTime Gates to study artefactsin situ – in order to embed its protagonist in a richly conceivedLondon at the time of the Blitz (seeWorld War Two), where he engages himself in attempts to save St Paul's Cathedral from bombing. The tale is told with reverence for time and place. Her second novel,Doomsday Book (1992), which won the 1993Hugo award andNebula awards, resumes theTime Travel sequence. The frame setting – the same mid-twenty-first-century institute – is shared withFire Watch, but the tale itself is set at a more remote and less minutely recorded time, the period of the Black Death (around 1350), and mounts gradually to a climax whose intensely mourning gravity is rarely found in sf, even in novels of travel to times past, where a sense of irretrievable loss is not commonly expressed.Doomsday Book attracted some claims of historical inaccuracy, which did not seriously diminish the burden of the tale. The same cannot be said ofTo Say Nothing of the Dog; Or, How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump at Last (1998), which also won aHugo award; it is a long (perhaps excessively long)jeu d'esprit set in 1880s England along the River Thames, where its model –Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) (1889) by Jerome KJerome – is also set. The oddness of the tale may lie in the fact that Willis's nostalgia about Jerome's 1888 seems as intense as though – like St Paul's in 1941 – it had actually existed; but in fact Jerome created his own, concise idyll as a counterfactual homage to an imaginary England.

No such oddness afflicts what may be the copestone of theTime Travel sequence, the 2010 novel published in two separate volumes asBlackout (2010) andAll Clear (2010), which, treated as one consecutive story, once again won theHugo award for best novel and also theLocus Award. The enormous tale is set, likeFire Watch, inLondon during the Blitz, and details in great (and sometimes overwhelming) detail the travails of three visitors from 2060 who are desperately afraid that their temporary inability to return home is fatally linked to their frequent involuntary transgressions against what they deem to be the proper flow of reality at a time of terrible fragility in the flow of the time of the world, thus imperilling their access to theTime Gates that will bring them back home. Their plight is only resolved when they learn that their own future, which is ours, the future in which Hitler does not winWorld War Two, is in fact anAlternate World; and that the utterwrongness of the far more likelyHitler Wins future has inspired some force – Willis is not clear about the nature of this force, which may be no more than a convergence of right outcomes of history prescriptively conceived, but which also be something like thespiritus mundi, or perhaps evenGaia – to trick the three visitors into creating our own less plausible world. As withDoomsday Book, there is a sense of reverence about the world; in this case, though some very well-known details of life in this period are presented here by Willis as though newly discovered, the reverence is strengthened by her clear, attentive love for the England of 1940.

During the years in which she primarily focused her energies on theTime Travel sequence, Willis continued to winHugo awards for her shorter work: for best short story, "The Soul Selects Her Own Society: Invasion and Repulsion: A Chronological Reinterpretation of Two of Emily Dickinson's Poems: A Wellsian Perspective" (April 1996Asimov's); for best novella, "The Winds of Marble Arch" (October/November 1999Asimov's),Inside Job (January 2005Asimov's;2005 chap) andAll Seated on the Ground (2007). Most of her best work can be found inImpossible Things (coll1994), inThe Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories: A Connie Willis Compendium [for full subtitle see checklist] (coll2007) and inThe Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories (coll2013), which assembles all her stories which have won awards under a title that may seem tendentious, though in fact the collection does present an ample conspectus of her best-known work. Her fascination with the intersections of film realities and worlds of the past or future may constitute something of a byway in her career, though the hilarious spoofing of the Western in Space inUncharted Territory (1994; with two stories added, as coll1994), which is a strong tale, and the more sustained delvingRemake (dated 1994 but1995) into the film mythos governing Hollywood (seeCalifornia), mixing together aNear Future venue, hints ofTime Travel, and touching portraits of long-dead (but electronically revived) figures like Marilyn Monroe.

Willis's most important later novel,Passage (2001), which won theLocus Award, shares focus and structure withLincoln's Dreams. Both are constructed as dream-like trips into the past on the part of female protagonists whose experiences are involuntary but convulsive, though they treat of very different events. The protagonist ofPassage, who is involved in a medical study of near-death experiences, falls deeply into the corridors and passages of the doomedTitanic, which increasingly becomes a living/dying emblem of the inevitable passage humans undertake into death. A later singleton,Crosstalk (2016), examines with a lightSatirical touch problems ofIdentity and behaviour in aNear Future world whose electronic interconnectivities threaten to eliminate privacy for good, especially in the case of its protagonist, who is inadvertently gifted with the power ofTelepathy.

In the best of Willis's stories, as in her longer work, a steely felicity of mind and style appears effortlessly married to a copious empathy. Perhaps most memorably in theTime Travel books, she is a celebrator, conveying in her written work much of the pleasure she gives in her frequent, masterful public appearances. She was inducted into theScience Fiction Hall of Fame in 2009 and received the 2011SFWA Grand Master Award for life achievement. [JC]

further awards or honours:Eastercon;Robert A Heinlein Award;Worldcon.

see also:Asimov's Science Fiction;Omni;Physics;Psychology;Weapons.

Constance Elaine Trimmer Willis

born Denver, Colorado: 31 December 1945

works

series

Time Travel

  • Doomsday Book (New York: Bantam Books,1992) [Time Travel: hb/Tim Jacobus]
  • To Say Nothing of the Dog; Or, How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump at Last (New York: Bantam Books,1997) [book is dated 1998:Time Travel: hb/Eric Dinyer]
  • Fire Watch (Baltimore, Maryland: WSFA Press,2010) [novelette: chap: first appeared 15 February 1982Asimov's:Time Travel: hb/JohnCoulthart]
  • Blackout (New York: Ballantine Books/Spectra,2011) [separately published part one of single novel,Blackout/All Clear:Time Travel: hb/Charles Brock]
  • All Clear (New York: Ballantine Books/Spectra,2011) [separately published part two of single novel,Blackout/All Clear:Time Travel: hb/Charles Brock]

individual titles

collections and stories

works as editor

links

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