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Fire Watch

This is a collection of Connie Willis' earliest short fiction. I was first introduced to her writing through her much later book Bellwether. Now, several years and books later, I'm finding that that was perhaps her strongest book. Fire Watch points out many of Willis' weakest points, shared by some of her other stories: She's a weak plotter, and rarely presents a satisfying ending.

The title story is notable primarily for being part of the world of her later tour-de-force Doomsday Book. Here, the narrator travels only as far back as World War II, to defend St. Paul's Cathedral in London during the Battle of Britain. To be fair, this story probably plays much better if you haven't previously read Doomsday Book, as they evoke the same themes, but the novel is a much deeper and edifying work.

Regrettably, with one exception "Fire Watch" is the strongest story in the book. At the other end of the spectrum is "All My Darling Daughters", which I found to be a story completely without point. A foul-mouthed teenaged girl is in boarding school aboard a decrepit space station, getting into trouble and frustrated that the boys are more interested in their peculiar new pets than in screwing her. The piece is just downright cruel and at best might be considered illustrative of how awful teenage years feel to some people, but basically it's just distasteful.

A friend of mine has remarked that Willis' stories rarely seem like science fiction, or even fantasy, and that's often true here. "Service for the Burial of the Dead" might be considered a ghost story after a fashion, but is more of a vignette about a woman whose lover betrayed her and then died, and seemingly returns as a ghost. "Mail Order Clone" is a light humor piece which relies entirely on its punch line. "And Come From Miles Around", although a pretty solid story about deduction from evidence that many people don't see, is not fantastic at all.

On the other hand, "The Sidon in the Mirror" is definitely science fiction, about a mining colony on a cooling dwarf star, but the background of the story is muddily portrayed (the nature of a "Sidon" is poorly described, for instance), and the plot hinges on cheap psychological confusion on the part of the main character, effectively divorcing the story from what seems to be its intended emotional impact.

Willis writes a brief blurb before each story, and the one before "A Letter from the Clearys" is quite bizarre. She explains how learning the tricks of the writing trade means it's difficult for her to be surprised by other writers' works, but the compensation is that "I can still be the one who makes the reader lean back and wonder how he was set up." How this relates to the story in question - a thoroughly pedestrian post-apocalyptic yarn (as is evident from page two) with nary a surprise in store - made no sense to me.

The true redeeming yarn of the book is the closing "Blued Moon", a comedic piece which shares a lot in common with Bellwether in its use of coincidence and broad humor to keep the story moving. As with Bellwether it's written with a light touch, with likeable characters and a heavy or two to mix things up, and it's easily the most strongly-plotted piece in the book, with an ending which (by the internal logic of the story) makes sense. How Willis made the leap from the other pieces in the collection to this one is a true mystery.

Ultimately, I can't recommend Fire Watch as a volume. Although Willis' writing itself is solid enough, there isn't a true spark in most of the stories to set the imagination reeling or engage the intellect or emotions. It's a terribly disappointing book.

Lincoln's Dreams

A novel about the Civil War? Not quite: It's a novel about a woman who's dreaming about the Civil War. The narrator Jeff Johnston is a researcher for a Civil War novelist, and his former roommate Richard is a psychiatrist for Annie, who's having bad dreams. It seems becomes clear to Jeff that she's dreaming about events as experienced (more or less) by Confederate leader Robert E. Lee, and that Richard is taking peculiar measures to try to cure her of the dreams, which she feels it's important for her to continue having.

Jeff agrees to hide and protect Annie from Richard, and they embark on a quest of sorts to understand the dreams and attempt to accomplish whatever they're being sent for. The book is equal parts Civil War context (Jeff is also doing research into Abraham Lincoln's dreams, but despite this - and as many others have noted - the novel might have been more accurately titled Lee's Dreams) and dream interpretation. Willis reasonably includes a variety of information about both subjects throughout the novel, as well as pictures of modern-day sites of key Civil War events and figures.

By the end, though, the book turns out to be rather light. The payoff of the story's big mystery is rather metaphysical, which after living with these characters for 200 pages is not enough. I'd been hoping for something harder-hitting, a real answer. In a subdued fashion the book is also a love story, but it's not a large enough component of the story to really lend it meaning.

The strongest elements of Lincoln's Dreams are its imagery and detail, but that's not enough to sustain the story. Give this one a pass.

Doomsday Book

It's nearly impossible to discuss Doomsday Book without giving away one of the surprises late in the book, since the whole thing turns largely on that surprise. However, since the surprise is fairly evident much earlier, and is fairly widely known even to people who haven't read the book, I don't think this is a big problem. But, if you want to read it all for yourself, then here's a capsule review: It's a good book, but not as satisfying as it could have been.

In December, 2054, Kivrin, a graduate student at Oxford University in England, uses the University's time-travelling equipment to go back to the year 1320 to study life in Medieval times. It's Christmas, and the head of the history faculty has gone on vacation, so the acting head, Mr. Gilchrist, takes the opportunity to open up a previously restricted era to send her back. Kivrin's advisor, Mr. Dunworthy, objects to this but has no authority to do anything, despite the shoddy preparations Gilchrist has taken.

Kivrin goes through "the net" into the past, and promptly falls ill with something like the flu. Back in 2054, Badri, the technician operating the next, falls ill himself. He stumbles after Dunworthy and Dr. Mary Ahrens to tell them something wrong before collapsing. While Kivrin - thanks to her enhanced immune system - gradually fights off the infection, the flu spreads like wildfire through Oxford becoming a full epidemic. And because of all this, Kivrin doesn't know where the rendezvous point for her to return is, and Dunworthy and company don't know whether Kivrin's all right.

Doomsday Book - named for William the Conqueror's census of England after his victory - takes place in both time periods. While Dunworthy and his friends deal with the epidemic and try to find out what happened to Kivrin, Kivrin is taken in by the mother, wife, and daughters of a minor noble. She befriends the daughters, Agnes and Rosemund, as well as the priest, Father Roche. The family is hiding in a small town outside Oxford waiting for the noble to come to them after dealing with matters in Bath.

Here's the revelation: Although Kivrin was supposed to have gone to 1320, "slippage" in the net has resulted in her going to 1348, just in time for the Black Death to reach England, and in particular, Bath and Oxford. Although she is inoculated, Kivrin watches her newfound friends succumb, witness to one of humanity's greatest tragedies, unable to do anything.

Doomsday Book is smartly written, with a lot of research obviously having gone into the customs of the era, the way the Black Death worked, and epidemics in general. Kivrin and Dunworthy are both sympathetic characters, and they behave rationally (to the extent one might expect) through the book. There's a neat use of the Red Riding Hood fairy tale in the book which is evocative of much of what's happened. It its best, the book is a powerful chronicle of what going through such an experience might be like.

As a novel, Doomsday Book works less well. The payoff at the end is slim: Isn't it a huge coincidence that an epidemic broke out and that Kivrin ended up being sent to another such epidemic? Where was the head of the history department all this time? It seems like there should be a big explanation for why so many things went wrong all at once (I kept expecting that the missing head would be the key, or that Kivrin somehow touched off the Black Death, or affected it in some way), but there isn't, and the book comes to a close rather abruptly. It's especially disappointing that there's no denouement, where the impact of all of these events on the characters would be seen in more detail. The themes of the book feel less than fully explored as a result of this.

Doomsday Book is not as bleak as I'd heard it was; although obviously there are some very depressing moments, there are also many times when the reader experiences Kivrin's joy at doing something no one has done, visiting the 14th century. It's got many good points and is worth reading, but it's not a great novel. It seems like it could have been better.

Bellwether

This is one of those books that's like a roller-coaster: It starts with a big dash downhill, and never quite stops to let you catch your breath (unless it's trying to fake you out). It just barrels right on until it finally reaches the end and you can hardly believe it.

And boy is it ever fun!

Bellwether actually barely qualifies as science fiction; it's more of a lighthearted study of how people think and act, and of large-group social dynamics. It makes reference to chaos theory and to the behavior of sheep, and relies heavily on synchronicity and serendipity in building the world in which its characters live. In that respect, it reminded me of nothing so much as Douglas Adams' novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and its concept of "the fundamental interconnectedness of all things".

The narrator and protagonist of the book is Sandra Foster, a researcher at a private company - HiTek - studying the origin of fads. Each chapter of Bellwether begins with a paragraph on a different fad - the hula hoop, dance marathons, Mah Jongg, and even more bizarre ones - detailing their nature, when they began, and when (and often why) they ended. One's mind boggles imagining the amount and type of research Willis must have put in to assemble this information! It's even more amazing when you consider that Sandra frequently spouts more information about fads and about the importance of serendipity in scientific discoveries throughout history.

Anyway, Sandra largely works alone, continually nagged by the company's utterly incompetent administrative assistant, Flip, a young woman with an instinctive nose for the latest fads, and not a whole lot of clue about anything else. Thanks to Flip's bungling, she ends up meeting Bennett O'Reilly, who works in another wing of the building, and who seems completely immune to fads.

What makes the book interesting is that Sandra is constantly analyzing everything around her, and wondering why people behave in such-and-such a way. The information density of the book is such that I quickly found myself very impressed with how every facet of culture has its own fads (Barbie frequently is presented as an enduring representation of many such fads). What makes the book compelling is when Sandra realizes that she's gotten some things wrong, and in particular has gone awry in understanding her own motivations.

But what ultimately makes the book is the ride. It doesn't end until the book does, and although I sometimes had the feeling that I was reading a treatise of trivia, it was always entertaining. It could be deadly serious one moment, and utterly silly the next, all the while (thank goodness!) avoiding the temptation to lapse into situation comedy.

It's wonderful. Read it.