hey should rename the Hugo and the Nebula Awwards the Connie Willis Awards, because she has so many of them. She has won eight Hugos and six Nebulas and even a John W. Campbell award. Willis is an accomplished speculative-fiction writer who has turned out such superb work as Lincoln's Dreams, Doomsday Book, Impossible Things, Remake, Bellweather, To Say Nothing of the Dog and Passage.
Her latest, a short story called "Inside JOB," is going to appear in the January issue of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.
In May 2005, she will be one of the featured science-fiction writers in the Dell Magazine cruise with Kevin J. Anderson, Gardner Dozois and Stanley Schmidt. For more information go to www.sciencefictioncruise.com
You've noted that Mandrake, a rather despicable character from your novel Passage, was someone you wanted to whack from the moment you invented him. What was the inspiration for that character?
Willis: When I wrote Passage, I read all those near-death books and watched a lot of those guys on TV—the psychics and the mediums—those sorts of persons. I hate those people. I think they are predators in an Elmer Gantry way. They are the worst kind of predator. They frequently believe their own PR and think they are godlike creatures, and I think that is extremely dangerous. I really wanted to show what kind of people they really are.
I wrote Mandrake as an exposé of that kind of person. A lot of people say, "Why do you go after psychics, and why do you go after mediums? They are harmless." They are not harmless. People give them their money. People give them their trust. People who are very vulnerable and helpless. You don't hit people who already have fallen flat. They are manipulating people and taking terrible advantage of them. I read this from "Dear Abby" about a scam that people read the obituaries. They write or come see a bereaved widow, and they say, "I'm your husband's daughter that he never acknowledged, and if you give me money I'll go away." That is just wicked and cruel. Anything that gets my blood boiling is easy to write about.
Will there ever be another novel set in the world of Remake? Is there going to be a remake of Remake in the future?
Willis: No, there won't be a sequel to that novel. I have always wanted to do another Hollywood novel. I'm very interested in the future of Hollywood, and its past. One of the things I'm very interested in is the number of "lost" films there are. There are a whole bunch of films from the days of the silent movie and the early days of the talkies, and later on, when they were messing around with color technologies—the film is gone, destroyed. There were fires because the highly flammable film, and others turned to goo. Some of these things are true classics, wonderful stuff, and I always felt that would make an interesting topic, a story about both the present, future and the past of Hollywood coming together. I thought about it a lot. I love the movies. I think you'll see more from me about the movies.
Talking about movies, would you like to see the fabled fourth Indiana Jones film?
Willis: Absolutely. I would love to, although he's going to be in a walker if he doesn't do it soon [laughs]. I love the Indiana Jones movies. I really do want to see a fourth one, but the third had such a nice ending, not just to the movie but to the series. Of course, I would love to see another Indiana Jones, and I'd love for Sean Connery to be in it, if he could. River Phoenix was also effective in his role.
The technology will make it possible for River Phoenix to be back in the next one, although Hollywood is getting into such strange territory now. I just saw Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, with Laurence Olivier.
That is a little like your book Remake, isn't it?
Willis: I think we're very close to Remake [laughs]. Remake was supposed to be a cautionary tale. Hollywood is just going full steam ahead.
What are your thoughts about Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow using a dead actor in a film today?
Willis: I thought that it was appropriate enough, but you can think of a zillion horrible possibilities. Originally, I thought they're going to have a true digitalized Laurence Olivier, but instead they used him as a transmission, like a fuzzy hologram. You'd wonder if he would want to be in a science-fiction flick or not; that is another question altogether.
It's sort of raising you up from the dead and sticking you in things that you never would have wanted to be in in the first place. I need to do a story about that, too. I can certainly think of far worse things, like Fred Astaire dancing with a vacuum cleaner, and that was pretty bad.
I can think of so many worse than that—if the technology gets to the point that we can put Marilyn Monroe in porn films, that seems like a cruelty beyond cruel. Every time I think there's a floor below which we will not go, they just sink right through it and to the next level.
Do you have any works in progress?
Willis: It's called All-Clear, after the siren meaning the raid was over, when it is safe to come out of the shelters during the Blitz in London during World War II.
I was working on a novel about aliens and Roswell. That went smash on Sept. 11 [2001], along with so many other things. It's just not the right plot, the right time and the right tone for that book. I abandoned it for the time being. I'll come back to some of the same themes later.
I decided to write some of things we were going through and our circumstances now. We have a lot in common with the London Blitz. Especially the uncertainty of what is going to happen next—living from day to day, not knowing what the next blow is. Not seeing our way clear.
One of my themes in my time-travel novels [Fire Watch and Doomsday Book] is how time travelers—although they try very hard to put themselves into the place of the people living through that time, they really can't, because they know how it turns out.
Even if you went back and experienced the Blitz, and bombs were falling above your head, you [would be] going through many of the same emotions. At the same time, you wouldn't be, because you know Hitler didn't invade. You know he didn't use poisonous gas. You know that the Allies eventually triumphed. You also know some of the terrible things that happened, they don't—like the Holocaust. Basically, it is a huge advantage to know that it's all going to work out.
The basic story, I have several people working the Blitz, working various parts of World War II in England. One of them is with the evacuated children in the countryside, another is there during the phony war before the bombs actually fall, and one is actually working the Blitz. One's working with a fake army in Kent, where they were trying to convince Hitler that we were going to invade across Calais instead of Normandy.
Suddenly they find themselves stranded, and they have no idea why. They have no idea what is going on in their future. Don't know if something has malfunctioned in the time travel itself, or in fact, or their present life has been attacked in some way, or war has broken out, or the whole world has been destroyed by a meteor, and they don't know what, and they can't get back.
Although they are there together, in the sense that they are all in the past, they are not in the same place, and they are not at the same time.
They're coping with much of the same uncertainty as those in the Blitz.
It may sound grim, but it actually has a lot of humor in it. The evacuated-children story is very funny in many ways.
World War II is especially an interesting time, because there were parts of it that were absolutely fascinating and exciting, and other parts that were terrible and tragic, and other parts that were very funny.
Hopefully I'll put all those in my book.
When do you decide to use the element of humor in your work? Before or after you have the plot and characters in place?
Willis: That is such a tough question. Basically, humor is my natural state. It is how I see the world. If I'm dealing with a serious story, I try to keep the humor from coming in. When I'm working with serious work, I'm using irony, which is the dark side of humor. I guess it is never totally absent.
I feel if you are writing a book-length work, you'd better have some humor in it somewhere. [William] Shakespeare put the porter scene in the middle of MacBeth, one of his grimmest plays. He knew that there needed to be some comic relief there.
One of the reasons I have always been attracted to the London Blitz, which I'm working on right now with All-Clear, is that there was so much humor in this terrible situation. The Blitz was very well documented to have had lots of humor. People would have had their shop windows blown out, and they'd be sweeping up the glass, and they'd put up a big sign that'd say "Open For Business, And We Do Mean OPEN." Or "Special Hitler Half-Price Sale." That is how they coped. That was their coping mechanism. There is a lot of comic potential, even though this is a dark period of history.
Firewatch, All-Clear and your short story "Jack" all take place during the London Blitz. You've noted that this your favorite historical time period. Why?
Willis: I keep writing about the Blitz. There are the two stories that you named [Firewatch and "Jack"], plus in To Say Nothing of the Dog there is a segment in Coventry during the Blitz. I kept writing about it, hoping I'd get it out of my system. I realized I needed to do an entire book about World War II. I find the Blitz endlessly fascinating.
It was a time where the front comes to the people. It is kind of like 9/11, with that kind of drama and emotional intensity repeated night after night after night. The Blitz went on through the whole war, sporadically. From Sept. 7, 1940, through May 1941, there were nightly bombings. They had these devastating things happen to them, but didn't have a chance to recover. It was an ongoing barrage of terrible things happening. Over 60,000 civilians died in the Blitz.
The people managed to continue coping after these incredible circumstances. Getting to work in the morning was an ordeal. You'd be sleeping all night in a shelter, or you didn't get any sleep at all, then you would go back to your flat to change clothes. Which may or may not be there. Even if it is there, it may or may not have any water or electricity, because that may have been bombed in the night, and they don't have it hooked up again. Then you have to struggle to get to work. The buses have all been rerouted; your normal method of getting to work is all out of whack, because there is a big double-decker bus stuck in a big hole halfway down a tube [subway] station.
The tubes and the buses are both out. You have to walk around all these fallen things—just to get to work. Yet everyone went to work every day.
The English are known for being quiet, reserved and not talking to strangers. They began talking to each other and saying, "Good luck tonight," "Hope I see you in the morning." To acknowledge this fear that they might not live through the night. That any night could be the bomb with your name on it.
How do you live? When you have no idea what is going to happen tomorrow? That is one of the reasons I'm writing All-Clear, because I'm fascinated by the whole time period of the Blitz. Although I wrote before about the tube stations and St. Paul's, the Blitz is huge, there's tons of stuff I haven't written about. I am also fully convinced that it was Britain's finest hour.
You use time travel in several of your works. How did you get interested in this topic?
Willis: The first time-travel novel I read was Robert Heinlein's A Door Into Summer, which is a great time-travel novel. I just fell in love with the whole idea of time travel. I just think that it is so endlessly interesting. I'm not interested at all in the mechanics of time travel. How would you put together this time machine? How would it physically work? I'm interested in the theory of time travel. How do you deal with the paradoxes? How do you deal with the grandfather paradox? If you go back in time and you changed the future, and become part of that system, you changed the future, but if you changed the future, that future that you were once living in doesn't exist for you to come back from. It just gets endlessly complicated. It is what I call the theory of time travel, and how it would work if we had such a thing.
Then the whole idea of the ethical dilemmas that time travel creates, which time-travel writers have been in love with forever. If you had a chance to go back and stop Hitler, by killing a completely innocent person, would you do that? Should you do that?
If you have this clear shot at Hitler, who clearly is a good person to shoot in 1933, should you shoot him? Everybody says yes. But I don't know. If it meant that Germany would be sitting there and nursing its wounds for another 30 years, and finally when another demigod like Hitler rose, it would be during the time of the Bomb. I think that would be worse.
There are all kinds of scenarios you can come up with which are worse than what happened.
That makes time travel very interesting.
One of the things I'm doing with All-Clear is: What if you got trapped in time, in the past, how could you communicate with the future? How can you tell them how to come get you? Or how can you get out of it on your own? It is different than being stranded in Hong Kong, where you could get a cell phone and call somebody. This is being really stranded.
I love writing time travel. I have two or three other time-travel stories.
How do you keep your fascination with science fiction?
Willis: I love science fiction. I think it is more necessary than ever. We're living in a time right now when all sorts of things are happening that are totally new and different and very troubling.
In many ways, none of them are new at all. Science-fiction writers of the '50s and '40s have thought of a great many of these things.
That's one of the reasons we have a vocabulary to deal with the shift in personal liberties—the idea of, how much security do you want? How many of those personal rights are you willing to trade for those securities—those go straight back to Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World.
The fear of what can happen tomorrow? That someone can wipe us out? Those post-apocalypse stories have been around forever.
I would recommend that while people read the science fiction that is being written now, and see the science fiction of now at the movies, they should also be reading the classics.
It's always ironic to have the literature of the future, to read the classics [laughs].
Science fiction is great to deal with all these current issues and crises. I'm glad to be in science fiction, to help give guidance to the future.
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Also in this issue:
The cast and crew of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events
