All About Emily - Connie Willis

All About Emily is one of those gorgeous little books Subterranean Press likes to publish. It is a (shortish) novella length work, published in a small hardback format, with great attention paid to the cover art and interior artwork. The artwork for this novella was done by J.K. Potter.  They are pricey but they are also very pretty. This one was published in December 2011 and also appeared in Asimov's that month.  I did read it back then but never got around to reviewing it. Since I haven't quite managed to finish David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas yet, I reread it on Friday.  Some readers might be expecting one of Willis' trademark comedies. This story is not one of those. All About Emily aims to touch the heart. 

Claire Haviland is an ageing actress on Broadway. She fears her career is coming to an end but then her manager arranges a media appearance with Claire's greatest fan, an innocent looking girl named Emily. She is not a regular fan however. Emily is a very lifelike robot, one who seems quite capable of becoming an actress. One who never forgets her lines, never makes a mistake and never ages. Claire does not like this development one bit.

Willis writes the entire story from the perspective of Claire in the first person. She is an experienced actor, well acquainted with Broadway's darker side. She is quite cynical about her manager, the parts she'll be able to get and the prospect of being replaced by a robot. And yet, despite knowing that Emily is designed to do just that, the girl works her way into Claire's heart.

Plays, musicals and classic movies crop up in Willis' writing quite often. In this story the movie All About Eve (1950, starring Bette Davis and Anne Baxter), in which a younger, upcoming actress manages to get away with an established actress' career and almost her husband) plays an important role.  Claire fears she has met her own Eve, but Emily turns out to have her heart set on another career. She wants to be a Rockette. With their dependence on perfectly choreographed routines and superficially identical appearance, a robot is even more threatening to them than she is to Claire.

There are lots of details about Broadway and Hollywood in the story. Some of them are references to existing works but Willis also makes a few of them up. The story is set in the future, about a generation after it was written probably, and the world of entertainment clearly has developed in those years. Claire's contempt for some of the younger, and in her opinion only marginally talented stars, is quite clear. Willis frequently uses Claire's manager, who doesn't seem to have seen any play or movie Claire mentions, to make sure the reader doesn't get lost in the references to plays, musicals and movies. Which was nice for a reader like me, I was unfamiliar with almost all of what Willis mentions in the story, but for readers who are more experienced in these matters, it may feel a bit like being spoon-fed.

Besides thinking about her career, Claire also gives a lot of thought to artificial intelligence in the novel. What Emily doing is, according to Claire at least, mimicking emotions she isn't feeling. In fact, she is probably incapable of feeling them. Which makes what she is doing very close to acting. There are some very sharp observations about Emily in the story, but towards the end Claire finds herself examining her own behaviour towards Emily.

Willis has produced a large number of award winning short fiction in her career and that she knows how to write a good story at this length shows in All About Emily. It is well paced, pretty lean and yet manages to create a well developed character. I did think the ending of the story is rather abrupt. Not that when we reach that point there is much more to say but it is not the most graceful way to end a story. That being said, All About Emily is a very decent read. I don't think Willis quite reaches the level of some of the stories in The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories but it is well worth the time it takes to read.

Book Details
Title: All About Emily
Author: Connie Willis
Publisher: Subterranean
Pages: 96
Year: 2011
Language: English
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-59606-452-2
First published: 2011

The Best of Connie Willis - Connie Willis

Connie Willis has received a staggering eleven Hugo and seven Nebula awards in her career, an achievement nobody has equaled. Her induction in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2009 and receiving the SFWA Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement in 2011 can hardly be called surprising. Of her novels, thee or four, depending on whether or not you count the two volumes Blackout and All Clear as a single work, have won awards, the rest Willis received for her short fiction. My reading of Willis' work is limited to three novels and one novella, all of which I have enjoyed, so when Del Rey offered this collection for review on NetGalley I snapped it up.

The Best of Connie Willis: Award-winning Stories contains ten pieces of fiction, ranging from short stories to novellas. As the title suggests each has won at least one award. The author has written an introduction, brief afterwords with all of the stories and at the back three of her acceptance speeches have been added. The stories span some three and a half s of her career, starting with the 1982 story and A Messages from the Clearys to All Seated on the Ground, which first appeared in 2007. It is in other words, as good an introduction to Willis' work as you could hope to find.

Willis may have won an impressive number of awards, her work is not without its critics and this collection gives us a clue as to why that might be. Her work contains a number of themes that can be found in both her short fiction and her novels and she writes about them with a passion that is rarely seen in science fiction. One of the clearest examples is probably her fascination with London during the Blitz. Her story Fire Watch (1982) is an early expression of that. It is also the first story that introduces the Oxford time-traveling historian that are the subject of several of her novels. Fire Watch is set during the height of the Blitz in late 1940 and describes the efforts to save St. Paul's Cathedral from burning down. It's a gripping story, with lots of historical detail and a dramatic climax.

Willis uses the Blitz again in her story The Winds of Marble Arch (1999), also part of this collection, and eventually her interest in this topic culminates in the two volume novel Blackout and All Clear. A work that for some is her Magnum Opus and for others a bloated, mired down in detail and practically unreadable novel. Personally I enjoyed both Fire Watch and The Winds of Marble Arch, although I do not share Willis' amazement at the London Underground system displayed in the latter story. Of course that might be different if I had been from a country where all investment in public transport appears to have ceased after Ford introduced his Model T.

If you do not particularly care for descriptions of dozens of underground stations, including notes on which have been hit during the Blitz or how many firebombs were smothered on which particular night on the roof of St. Paul's, then yes, you are in for some difficult reading. This happened for me with the story All Seated on the Ground in which the lyrics of a large number of Christmas carols are essential to the plot. On the surface it is a first contact story, where a race against the clock to understand a recently arrived group of aliens is the backbone of the plot. I've read and enjoyed more than a few stories with similar plots and enjoyed many of them. This one was turned nearly unreadable by all the references to Christmas carols, most of which I fortunately never have had to listen to. They are described with the same passion and attention to detail as London during the Blitz, but however much the author might like them, that much detail on Christmas carols is simply unreadable to me.

Humor is another element that comes back in many stories. In that respect, At the Rialto (1990) was probably the highlight of the collection to me. In this story Willis professes her love to Hollywood, of which I am moderately more tolerant than Christmas carols. What attracted me to the story was the use of a scientific convention as an analogue for quantum mechanics. The chaotic and counter intuitive world of subatomic particles is reflected in the behavior of the people around the main character, turning the whole story into one of this nightmares where you absolutely have to get something done bu the world keeps putting obstacles in your way. Only this time we get to watch and smile at the main character's fruitless attempts to create order. It is a very clever, multilayer story. If I had to pick a favorite of the collection this one might well be it. Although it much be said that Even the Queen(1993) is a hilarious piece as well. How many writers would dare writing a humorous story about a woman's cycle?

The Best of Connie Willis: Award-winning Stories contains stories that tackle a variety of themes and approaches to story-telling and as such there are bound to be a few stories the reader will enjoy. In my mind Willis remains an author who'll get a story right and hit it out of the ballpark or delivers something completely unreadable though. I guess I am one of the lucky ones. For me, most of the stories are very good to excellent and I enjoyed the opportunity to discover some of the themes that carry over in her long fiction in this collection. It is easy to see why Willis has such a large number of fans. Her stories are well-crafted, often humorous, always well researched. Willis is an author you have to have read something of at the very least and this collection would not be a bad place to start.

Book Details
Title: The Best of Connie Willis
Author: Connie Willis
Publisher: Del Rey
Pages: 496
Year: 2013
Language: English
Format: E-book
ISBN: 978-0-345-54065-2
First published: 2013

All Clear - Connie Willis

All Clear is the sequel to Willis' novel Blackout, a new work on the Oxford time-travelling historians, which appeared earlier this year. Blackout and All Clear were written as one novel, but the book was split because the story grew beyond what a single hardcover could handle. I enjoyed Blackout a lot but it ended with a huge cliffhanger so a nine months wait to find out how the story ends was a bit on the long side. In my review of Blackout I said I would read another book by Willis in the mean time. I got so far as to buy a copy but I am afraid it is still on the to read stack. Looks like it is going to be a project for next year. I couldn't resist finding out what happened to the characters in Blackout however, so I started All Clear almost as soon as it arrived. All Clear proved to be a satisfying read although the two books combined left me with the feeling that they were a bit longer than the story needed.

All Clear picks up the story where Blackout ended. Our historians come to realize that their drops are not working and that they are trapped in the past. Despite frantic attempts to find one that works, the space-time continuum seems to conspire against them. The characters find themselves in London during the Blitz or in the south-west of England during the preparations for D-day, with V-1 and V-2 rockets descending around them. Not the most comfortable position to be in, even with knowledge of future events. To make matters worse, some of them have a deadline. It is not possible to visit is time you've already been to. If the historian does not make it back to the 2060s before the time of an earlier visit to the past arrives, the continuum will correct itself by killing the historian.

In twenty-first century Oxford, the historians have realized something is seriously wrong and start pulling their people out. When this proves to be impossible for the historians stuck in WWII England other means of rescuing will have to considered. A search for working drop points and the exact location of the missing historians is started. All across the space-time continuum historians are realizing that their understanding of time travel and the impossibility of altering history may not be complete. Perhaps the answer lies in a new way of looking at the historian's role in making history.

All Clear starts pretty much the same way Blackout ended. The characters trapped in the 1940s are running around trying to find a working drop. Where Willis used this to great comical effect in Blackout, in this book their activity slowly turn nightmarish. The first part of this book read likes one of those recurring dreams where you desperately need to be somewhere on time and you just might make it if not one obstacle after another is thrown in your path. Just when the historians conquer one problem and there still seems to be time to get to where they need to go, something else pops up. A development in the book that reaches a climax with Willis' vivid description of the particularly heavy raids on December 29th 1940. An event I consider to be something of a turning point in the novel.

This pair of books was conceived as one novel and at times I did wonder if it should perhaps have fitted in one volume. The crux of the matter is the way the characters view time travel and that their theory might be flawed. Willis takes a long time to have the characters arrive at this conclusion. By the end of Blackout the reader could have the feeling that the problem lies in this imperfect understanding. The characters take about half of All Clear to catch up with the reader in that respect. By the time we reach the breaking point formed by the raids of the 29th, I did feel Willis was taking too much time. I'm not sure if tightening this section would have made it fit into one volume, the two hardcovers have a combined page count that exceeds 1100, but there does seem to be some room to shed a few pages. On the other hand, and this is going to sound like a contradiction, I loved the way the story turns from comical via desperate to a downright nightmare over the course of the first three hundred pages of All Clear. The author handed her editor a pretty problem here. Perhaps they picked the best solution after all.

Like the first volume, this book is absolutely packed with historical facts from the Blitz and the preparation for the invasion of Normandy. The author points out lots of little things that made a difference in the war and that while none of them individually can be said to have won the war, each contributed to tipping the balance. Again the level of details is overwhelming at times, but in this book it is also more important. The characters are mortally afraid of having fatally altered history, examining each little fact that doesn't match with their knowledge of history for discrepancies and possibly the much dreaded proof that history has indeed been changed. The period Willis covers is the subject of libraries full of books but I still believe that there is a lot in these novels for the WWII history fanatics. The book depicts how all-encompassing the British war effort was and what it took the keep the nation on its feet after the evacuation of Dunkirk a very vivid way. It brings the every day life of those days very close, even for someone who is two generations removed from the actual events.

Blackout and All Clear are quite an investment on the part of the reader but despite the nine month wait and perhaps a few pages more than strictly necessary, I thought All Clear was a very rewarding read. The way in which Willis untangles the mess time travel has created and handles the looming paradoxes the historians are always on the verge of creating very well. Whether you will like this book or not really rests on two things. You need to be able to handle a lot of historical detail and cliffhangers shouldn't bother you. Like the previous book, All Clear is full of them. Willis' most ambitious work to date is not a book that will be universally loved. Despite my quibbles with some aspects of this work, I enjoyed it tremendously.

Book Details
Title: All Clear
Author: Connie Willis
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Pages: 641
Year: 2010
Language: English
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 978-0-553-80767-7
First published: 2010

Blackout - Connie Willis

Nine years after the appearance of her previous novel Passage a new Connie Willis book has hit the shelves. According to a recent post on the Suvudu blog it took Willis eight years to write the novel. A story that kept growing on her and eventually ended up being split in two parts. The second book All-Clear is scheduled for release in the autumn of 2010. Before you get worried, the second book has been delivered by Willis, there will be no indefinite wait. My only previous encounter with her work is her award-winning novel Doomsday Book, which I read in Dutch translation in 1999. Doomsday Book was a pretty good read but I liked Blackout better.

The story of Blackout revolves around a group of time-travelling Oxford university historians doing research on several aspects of life during de second world war in the UK. It is set in 2060, when time travel technology has been around for a while and the researchers are pretty confident in the laws that govern it. They firmly believe it is not possible for them to influence history by their presence in the past. In fact, it isn't even possible for them to approach the critical points in history. As such, their assignments do not appear to be too dangerous or exciting. One of the historians is on an assignment to see the effects on children being evacuated from London to the countryside to keep them save from bombings. Another is studying the life of Londoners living though the 1940 Blitz and the nightly stays in air raid shelters this involves. A third historian is studying some of the heroic actions performed by ordinary people and ends op in Dover at the time of the Dunkirk evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force.

Business as usual of so it seems. From early on in the book there are signs that all is not as it should be. Time travel schedules are rearranged, greatly upsetting the preparation of the historians. On top of that they also have to deal with slippage, not precisely ending up in time where one intended to go. All manner of little things seem to prevent the characters from completing their assignment. When the drops, points where the historians can travel back to the 2060s, start giving them trouble too, the three realize just how much trouble they are in.

I did not realize this when I bought my copy of Blackout but the novel is related to several other novels and stories in Willis' oeuvre. I recognized a reference to Doomsday Book early on and I suspect there are a couple of references to other books as well. One of the minor characters, professor James Dunworthy will most likely be familiar to people more familiar to Willis' work. It is not necessary to read the previous books first. What you need to know about time travelling is explained in Blackout and the major characters appear to be new creations by Willis. The book is obviously not meant to be a direct sequel to any of the other works in this setting.

Blackout is only half the story and, it will not surprise you, ends on a major cliffhanger. Willis is generous with cliffhanger endings, not only at the end of the book, but at the end of the chapters as well. As such, on its own, it is not a very satisfactory read. We get to know the main characters, their projects and how they go awry. We also get some hints at the trouble they have gotten themselves in but then the story stops abruptly. I think to really say how good this novel is, we're going to have to wait until All-Clear is available.

There is a lot of potential in this story to make it excellent though. Willis' research on the period is meticulous. I don't want to think about how much time it must have cost her to figure out what was bombed when and at what time the various sirens went off. Such knowledge would be vital to a historian studying the period to be reasonably sure not to get killed on the assignment. The characters are acutely aware of these things as well as the main sequence of events. The research shows other details too. From the local slang at the time to the organisation of the war effort in the UK. Willis makes it very clear how ill-prepared the nation really was and how close it came to being defeated. The level of detail shows what a tour de force writing this book must have been.

The book contains a distinct comic element as well. At one point in the novel one of the characters works in a department store of Oxford street. The scenes there invoked all manner of unwanted associations with the sitcom Are you Being Served?, which is set thirty years later and has absolutely noting to do with the book. This is just how my brain works I guess. More often the comedy is intentional, with circumstances conspiring to prevent the character from achieving something they desperately need to do. The characters have to do a fair bit of improvising to make sure they do not arouse suspicion and often completely fail at this. I understand this comical side of the story is not unusual for Willis' writing. For a book that is so dependant on historical setting these scenes provide a good balance to what otherwise could have been a book dragged down by details.

There is an awful lot that I like about this book but the fact remains the story is not done. I can well understand the people who decide to wait until the second book is available before reading Blackout. That being said, it is one of the most enjoyable books I have read in some time so I think I will forgive the publisher for making us wait for the second part. I'm very much looking forward to the release of All-Clear. In the mean time I am considering picking up To Say Nothing of the Dog, a book in the same setting I haven't read yet. As far as I am concerned Blackout is a recommended read but if you are impatient you may want to wait until the second book is released before picking it up.

Book Details
Title: Blackout
Author: Connie Willis
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Pages: 491
Year: 2010
Language: English
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 978-0-553-80319-8
First published: 2010