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An Interview With Connie Willis

Connie Willis is the most-honored writer in the science fiction field. For her fiction she’s received six Nebula and eight Hugo Awards, not to mention a variety of other kudos such as the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.

For her efforts, she’s steadily become one of those writers who people “who don’t read science fiction” read, and then rave about to their friends. Her professional writing career began with typical strangeness some years ago in the confessions field with such epics as “I Called For Help on My CB Radio and Got a Rapist Instead!”

Connie Willis has an adult daughter, Cordelia, and presently lives in Greeley, Colorado, with her physics professor husband Courtney, bulldog Gracie, and a feline or two. To her best knowledge, she has never been abducted by extraterrestrials.

Connie Willis is the author of Wormhole chapbook Roswell, Vegas, and Area 51: Travels with Courtney .

Wormhole Books: I believe you are presently the most honored writer in science fiction. We've got our own theory how that happened. But how about yours?

Connie Willis: I know it was because the awards weren't instituted until after Heinlein had written lots of his best stuff. And whenever I start feeling too smug about my awards, I always have to remember that Fred Astaire never won an Oscar. Or Spencer Tracy. Speaking of which, have you ever seen Bad Day at Black Rock ? What an absolutely amazing movie! It does my favorite thing in literature, which is to make the audience do exactly what the characters in the movies are doing, like in The Sixth Sense . "They see what they want to see," the kid says of the dead people, and so do we, watching the movie. Bad Day at Black Rock is like that, and Spencer Tracy is so wonderful in it that the fact that he didn't win an Oscar seems to completely eliminate their credibility. On the other hand, A Beautiful Mind did win.

WB: Your reputation is equally bright at both short story and novel lengths. Do you have any preferences in terms of these forms?

CW: My heart belongs to the short story, both because I love writing them and because I think they are where all the great writing in science fiction has been done. When somebody asks me to name the ten best SF novels, I have to work to come up with a list. When they ask for the ten best SF short stories, I can think of a hundred right off the bat. Like "The Light of Other Days" and "One Ordinary Day with Peanuts" and "The Man Who Lost the Sea" and "Lot" and "Flowers for Algernon" and "The Quest for St. Aquin" and "The Veldt" and... see what I mean? I like novels, too, because you can explore an idea from so many directions and have so many complications, but the short story's my favorite.

WB: Is the decision whether an idea is worth novel or story treatment in any way conscious?

CW: Material's material. It could be long or short, tragedy or comedy. It's all in how it's handled. Of course, sometimes you get an idea that's really just a gimmick, and in that case you probably won't get away with it for very long, so it had better be a short story. Then again, look at Rebecca .

WB: Your first book for Wormhole is actually nonfiction, travel writing. But it's very, very funny. Give us a clue about your sense of humor.

CW: I just think the world--or rather, the people in it--is really funny. Just try watching the news on CNN for a day. It's hilarious. And I think comedy is more a point of view than an ability to make jokes.

WB: What is the secret of making of large groups of people laugh, whether through the printed page or when they're seated in a huge audience in front of you?

CW: Beats me. I do know my humor comes largely from poking fun at people who take themselves too seriously. Comedy is kind of like a pin poking at balloons--they don't explode unless they're already far too full of hot air. Our "that's not funny" era is full of people who are incapable of seeing the funny side of what they're doing--from John Ashcroft to radical vegans to restaurants that have not only a wine sommelier on staff to help you choose the right wine for dinner, but a water sommelier. To the people who believe in UFOs. They come up with a theory, and then hold onto it for dear life, no matter what the evidence (or lack thereof) and thereby tie themselves in some wondrously funny knots.

WB: Your last novel, Passage , is a very serious book about serious matters. But it also includes a clear vein of humor, and it draws on your love of history. How did this novel germinate?

CW: In the short term, Passage arose out of a friend's insisting I read one of those near-death experience books with "Light" in the title and telling me I'd love it. I loathed it. It seemed to me to prey on people's greatest fears about death and tell them a soothing lie, like someone patting a child on the head and saying, "Now, now, don't you worry about that." I wanted to address, really address the issue of death head-on. But I think the book probably really started germinating when I was fifteen and read Walter Lord's A Night To Remember about the Titanic. I have been puzzling out the meaning of it ever since and the reason why it affects us so much all these years later. I don't know that Passage has the answer, but I feel I got a little closer to knowing by writing the book. And when it comes to death, I didn't do any head-patting.

WB: How important is the notion of history in the way you perceive the world?

CW: History's the writer's material. We're supposed to be writing about human behavior, and there it all is, hundreds and hundreds of years' worth. It tells us everything we need to know, only in code so that it has to be deciphered. And nobody can agree on the translation.

WB: Does your sense of history have any connection with your heartland upbringing in Nebraska?

CW: I grew up (actually in Colorado, but all my relatives were from Kansas and Nebraska) on the stories of my grandmother and great-aunts, all of whom knew great stuff about the Depression and the war and had no qualms about disclosing family secrets. Their stories were fascinating and appalling and hilarious and hardly ever had a moral, all of which I've clearly absorbed.

WB: Your dedication to science fiction seems both sincere and unapologetic. Do you nurse any dreams of stretching out your achievement into other areas?

CW: All I ever wanted to be was a science fiction writer, even though I'm fully aware that when I say that I automatically lose readers, who say things like "I hate science fiction" and "Scifi is for kids." I know I could have a broader audience by pretending to be a mainstream author, but it seems to me that SF will never get anywhere if anytime somebody's successful or well-liked, they immediately disavow their roots. It's like continually skimming off the cream. I have no ambitions of writing anything else, except maybe a non-fiction book about England, or some essays about my favorite authors. Otherwise, I expect to be a science fiction writer till I die.

WB: I'm thinking about some of the subject matter in Roswell, Vegas, and Area 51. Talk about relating or accommodating to the streak of the irrational in this world.

CW: You can't. I think we're far too tolerant of crackpot theories and dumb ideas out of some misplaced notion of tolerance. You see these people on the Today show, and there's Katie Couric smiling and nodding at people who are spouting the most amazing nonsense. I think we have an obligation to stand up and say, "That's ridiculous!" If we don't, we run the risk of sinking back into superstition and ignorance, and you know where that's gotten us in times past. When I write my UFO abduction-Roswell-Area 51 novel (right after the novel I'm working on, which is called All Clear and is about the London Blitz) I plan to address all this. I realize this is a suicidal plan. There was a poll recently that said 81% of Americans believe in UFOs. But they're wrong.

WB: And speaking of, oh, O.J. Simpson as an example, what are some of your guilty pleasures in this world? Or are they really guilty at all?

CW: The great thing about being a writer is if you want to lie on the couch for a year and a half watching the O.J. Simpson trial or following the Ramsey case or watching All My Children , you can. It's research. And, all kidding aside, it really is. The O.J. trial was like a giant, sprawling Dickens novel with all sorts of interesting characters and dozens of plot twists. For the record, I am convinced O.J. and the Ramseys did it. Other guilty pleasures include singing in a church choir, counted cross-stitch embroidery, watching CNN (I'm a news junkie), and movies. I had a crush on Harrison Ford for years, but now that he has left his wife and dating Callista Flockhart, who he could snap in two if he's not careful, I seem to be completely over it. I still love Six Days, Seven Nights , though. And Hanover Street , but that's because it's set in the Blitz. The love scenes have absolutely nothing to do with it.

WB: Are you truly an optimist?

CW: I am. And I always think my books have a happy ending (or at least a hopeful one) in spite of what my readers sometimes think. I was a true pessimist in my late twenties, but Watergate convinced me that people really are good at heart (well, some people anyway, like Senator Inouye and Barbara Jordan and Woodward and Bernstein), and as I get older and older, I feel more and more hopeful about the human race. With reservations, of course. Lots of reservations.

WB: What could happen in the near future that might set science fiction afire?

CW: The thing I love most about SF is that it reinvents itself about twice a week. And it's the only literature that's designed specifically to respond to technological, scientific, and political change. So who knows what's next? Maybe we'll all suddenly come to our senses and decide to go to the Moon again. Or politicians will come to theirs--no, too unlikely.

WB: Who would you most like to see the aliens abduct?

CW: Besides the CEOs at Enron, you mean? Oh, I don't know. Ben Affleck, I suppose. He needs to have that smug smile wiped off his face. And Ken Starr. Ditto. Definitely Dr. Laura, who doesn't even listen to her poor caller-inners problems before she tells them to throw their daughter our or have their mother deported (she actually did this one day.) And whoever decided that Liza Minnelli's life would make a good reality TV show. Do you think if they took Bush they could implant something that would improve his ability to get through a sentence without saying something like "malfeeance?"
Oh, wait, I know who I really want to see go. Those morons in New York who changed the literary passages on the state regents tests so they wouldn't offend anyone. Especially the one who took all references to the Nazis and the Jews out of Isaac Bashevis Singer's passage. Note to aliens: And don't bring them back until they write "I will not alter literary works for any reason," one hundred times on your spaceship's blackboard, or whatever it is you guys have.

WB: On behalf of our readership and staff, we thank you for participating in this interview.

Roswell, Vegas and Area 51: Travels With Courtney Connie Willis "A Bill Geistian hegira through the sacred sites of the saucer-obsessed: the crackpot museums, roadside attractions, theme diners ("Best Alien Chicken in Town"), and souvenir shops. Locus Magazine Learn more...