Dear god, I adore Connie Willis, who writes brilliant sci-fi, alternately charming and chilling, full of literary and historical references. Just the introduction to this huge compilation, in which she discusses some of her influences, was full of things I love (P.G. Wodehouse! Three Men in a Boat!) and gave me a whole slew of additions to my reading list (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the Mapp and Lucia series). As for the stories themselves, I had read some of them before, including “Fire Watch” (set in the same awesome time-travel world as Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog, and to which it appears her new book will return[!!]), the screwball comedy “Blued Moon,” the poignant “Samaritan” (if you want to get me crying, just kill a fictional animal), and the eminently creepy “All My Darling Daughters” (which I flat-out refused to reread and actually paper-clipped the pages together so that I wouldn’t accidentally glance at any of the pages, it’s really that terrifying). But the majority were new to me, my favorites of which included the title story and “Jack,” both of which continue Willis’s obvious obsession with the London Blitz (also seen in “Fire Watch” and her new book, apparently).
Sadly, the book was so poorly copyedited it was rife with typos, and it now appears to be out of print, now only available used for exorbitant prices—two strikes against its publisher, Subterranean Press—so I guess I’ll have to hunt down the stories in other volumes if I want to own them. Anyway, reading these just made me want to sit down and reread Lincoln’s Dreams, Bellwether, Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog, and Passage straight through. If you haven’t read any Connie Willis, I can’t recommend her highly enough. I’ll be eagerly awaiting her next novel, Blackout, due out in February, and will pass the meantime trying to hunt down all the older novels and novellas (Remake, All Seated on the Ground, Uncharted Territory) I may have missed.
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