The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories

  and consolation.

  In the words of Clarence Day, Jr.,

  “The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man.

  Nothing else that he builds ever lasts.

  Monuments fall;

  nations perish;

  civilizations grow old and die out;

  and, after an era of darkness,

  new races build others.

  But in the world of books

  are volumes that have seen this happen again and again

  and yet live on,

  still young,

  still as fresh as the day they were written

  still telling men’s hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead.”

  They are a miracle of rare device.

  I never met Louisa May Alcott

  or Robert Heinlein

  or Rumer Godden or L. Frank Baum or Philip K. Dick

  or Thornton Wilder or Dean Matthews of St. Paul’s,

  but they reached out to me

  across time,

  across space,

  and spoke to me

  encouraged me

  inspired me

  taught me everything I know.

  Saved my life.

  And filled it with wonder.

  And I just wanted to say thank you.

  Being the sort of obsessive neurotic I am, I wasn’t sure exactly what would be required of me when I was given the Grand Master Nebula Award, so I wrote a couple of speeches, “just in cases,” as Aurelia says in Love Actually.

  I only ended up having to give one speech, but here, for your delectation, is the other.

  GRAND MASTER BACKUP SPEECH

  (never delivered)

  People keep asking me how I feel now that I’m a Grand Master,

  and there are a lot of answers to that.

  I feel incredibly honored

  and humbled

  and awestruck to find myself in such exalted company

  as Robert Heinlein

  and Joe Haldeman

  and Bob Silverberg

  and my dear friend Jack Williamson.

  (My first thought when I found out about the Grand Master Award was, “He would be so proud of me.”)

  I feel all of those things,

  plus dismayed to find myself old enough to be made

  a Grand Master

  and delighted to have been named

  and worried that I’ll wake up any moment now

  and find that it was all a dream.

  In short, I feel like Frodo

  and Kip Russell

  and Alice.

  But mostly,

  I feel like Beatrix Potter.

  In the middle of World War II,

  a reporter interviewed Beatrix Potter.

  She was a very old lady by that time—

  she would have been eighty-four, I think—

  and she was living on a farm in the Lake District,

  raising sheep for the army to turn into wool for uniforms,

  and dealing with rationing

  and food shortages

  and fuel shortages.

  At that particular moment,

  she was dealing with a German plane

  that had crashed in one of her fields,

  as well as the aches and pains of being eighty-four.

  And with the war.

  Because Hitler had conquered Europe

  and was sinking dozens of convoys

  and bombing cities all over England,

  and it looked like he might invade any minute.

  And if he did, everybody knew what would happen—

  conquest and executions and concentration camps.

  But when the interviewer asked Beatrix Potter

  what her greatest wish was,

  she said,

  “To live till the end of the war.

  I can’t wait to see how it all turns out!”

  That’s exactly how I feel.

  It’s how I’ve always felt.

  It’s why I started reading in the first place:

  to find out what happened to Cinderella

  and to Peter Pan,

  to find out whether the twelve dancing princesses got caught

  and whether Peter Rabbit made it out from under

  Mr. McGregor’s flowerpot

  and whether the prince was able to break the spell.

  And it’s still the reason I read,

  and I think the reason everybody reads.

  Forget subtext

  and symbolism

  and lofty, existential themes.

  We want to know—

  what happens to Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy

  and Frodo and Sam

  and Scout

  and the Yearling.

  Does Lear get there in time to save Cordelia?

  Does Eliza Doolittle come back to Henry Higgins?

  Does Orpheus make it all the way back to the surface

  without turning around to make sure Eurydice is following him?

  We’ve got to know.

  A friend of mine said that when she went to see

  the Leonardo DiCaprio–Claire Danes version

  of Romeo and Juliet,

  she saw two young girls come out of the theater crying.

  “I didn’t know they died!” one of them sobbed to the other.

  I know. I laughed, too.

  But what if you didn’t know how Romeo and Juliet ended?

  What if you were seeing it for the first time?

  How fast did you race through the pages

  the first time you read Lord of the Rings?

  or “The Cold Equations”?

  or The Hunger Games?

  Or Rebecca?

  Or Les Misérables?

  How late did you stay up to finish the book?

  When The Old Curiosity Shop was coming out in serial installments,

  people in America thronged the docks

  and called up to ships arriving from England,

  “Did Little Nell die?”

  I recently got addicted to Primeval,

  a British TV series about dinosaur hunters in modern-day London

  and I watched Season One in one fell swoop

  and then called my daughter at five in the morning—

  and she lives in California, so it was four there—

  but she didn’t answer the phone drowsily,

  or in a panic because the only reason you get a call at five in the morning is because something terrible has happened.

  Instead, she said calmly, “Hello, Mother. I assume you’ve just

  watched Episode Six.”

  I had indeed.

  And then I neglected everything else in my life

  to watch Season Two.

  And Three.

  Both seasons were out on DVD,

  but then I had to watch Season Four

  as the episodes came out—a week apart—

  and then wait six months for Season Five to start—

  and it nearly killed me.

  Trust me.

  If there’d been a ship I could have shouted up to, to ask,

  “Do Connor and Abby make it back okay?”

  I’d have been down at the docks in a flash—

  and I live a thousand miles from the nearest coast.

  Why is that such a powerful desire, to know what happened?

  And what is it we really want to know?

  Is it what’s going to happen to Frodo and Sam?

  Or what’s going to happen to us?

  Characters in stories grow up

  and go off on quests

  and fall in love

  and find out terrible things about their parents

  and even worse things about themselves

  and explore strange planets

  and travel through time

  and lose battles

  and win wars

  and give way to despair

  and solve mysteries


  and figure out what matters

  and find love

  and save the kingdom

  and in the process they tell us about ourselves.

  They show us what matters

  and what doesn’t.

  They teach us how to be human.

  And tell us how our own stories might turn out.

  But Beatrix Potter already knew how her life had turned out.

  She already knew

  that you can’t ever tell what’s going to happen next.

  She wrote a story for her niece

  and became a world-famous author.

  She fell in love with her publisher

  and got secretly engaged to him against her parents’ wishes,

  and he died.

  And then,

  when all hope seemed lost,

  she fell in love again

  and found all the things she’d ever dreamed of.

  She already knew what had happened in her life.

  So what did she mean when she said she wanted to see

  how it all turned out?

  Was it who won the war?

  Or something bigger?

  Did she mean did they win the war? Or something else?

  In Blackout and All Clear,

  the elderly Shakespearean actor Sir Godfrey

  asks the time-traveler Polly, “Did we win the war?”

  and when she says yes,

  meaning far more than just the war they’re in at that moment,

  he asks,

  “Was it a comedy or a tragedy?”

  I think that’s what we really want to know when we read.

  And we don’t mean just our own stories,

  we mean the whole shebang—

  the world

  and the war we’re always in

  and the whole arc of history—past and future.

  Is it a comedy?

  Or a tragedy?

  Or, horrible thought, a TV show that gets canceled

  before it has a chance to wrap things up properly?

  Literature is the only thing that can tell us.

  History could, maybe,

  but we’re not around long enough to find out what it has to say.

  Will Ferrell’s character

  in Stranger Than Fiction

  carries around a notebook and tries to keep track of the clues

  to what sort of story he’s in,

  but that doesn’t work, either.

  So literature’s our only hope.

  And no single book

  knows the whole answer

  No single fictional detective

  —not even Miss Marple,

  not even Sherlock Holmes—

  can solve this mystery.

  But each character

  each book

  each author,

  from Graham Greene

  to Homer

  to P. G. Wodehouse

  to Philip K. Dick

  to Beatrix Potter

  holds a clue.

  And every book we read,

  every movie

  and TV show we watch,

  Dr. Who

  and Moby Dick

  and Nancy Drew

  and “The Light of Other Days”

  and Lolita

  and “One Ordinary Day with Peanuts”

  and Oedipus Rex

  and Bridget Jones’s Diary

  and “The Ugly Duckling”

  and Barefoot in the Park

  and Gaudy Night

  and “Nightfall”

  and Our Town

  and “The Veldt”

  and Le Morte d’Arthur

  and Miracle on 34th Street

  and even Twilight

  has a piece of the answer.

  It’s like a giant jigsaw puzzle.

  When my husband’s teaching how science figures things out,

  he does a science experiment

  in which he cuts up a mystery novel

  and then passes out random single pages of it to his students,

  and they try to figure out what’s going on,

  to solve the mystery.

  That’s what we do, too.

  We’ll never have all the pieces.

  But with the help of books

  and movies

  and even TV shows about dinosaur hunters,

  we can get a glimpse of the answer.

  That’s why I read

  and why I write,

  adding my own fragment to the tangle of clues,

  and will go on doing both till I can’t anymore.

  To find out what happens

  To find out what kind of story we’re in.

  When Sir Godfrey asks Polly, “Is it a tragedy or a comedy?”

  she answers with certainty, “A comedy.”

  I think so, too.

  Mostly because of clues I’ve found

  in Have Space Suit, Will Travel

  and Three Men in a Boat

  and The Tempest.

  I wanted desperately to find out what happened to Kip and Peewee,

  but I also wanted them to be okay,

  to get home safely.

  I think that’s a good sign,

  that we not only want happy endings for ourselves,

  but for the people we love,

  both real and fictional:

  for Connor and Abby on Primeval

  and Elinor Dashwood and Edward Ferrars,

  and Kate and Petruchio,

  and Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane.

  And I think another good sign is that

  J and George and Harris,

  the three men in a boat

  (to say nothing of the dog Montmorency),

  make us laugh out loud a hundred years after they made

  their trip up the Thames.

  But I think the best clue of all is that

  Shakespeare, whom nobody would accuse of being unrealistic about the human race—

  or of always looking “on the bright side of life”—

  was a huge fan of happy endings.

  He put them in all of his comedies

  and even some of his tragedies.

  Cordelia’s hanged and Lear dies,

  but not before they’re reunited,

  not before all their sins against each other are forgiven

  and they have a chance to “sing like birds in a cage” together.

  And even more significant

  is the fact that he went back to comedy

  after he’d written the tragedies.

  His last word on the subject isn’t Macbeth,

  but The Tempest.

  The Tempest is a play that’s famous for its elegiac speech:

  “Our revels now are ended . . .

  And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

  The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

  Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

  And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

  Leave not a rack behind.”

  But the play doesn’t end with that.

  It ends with a reconciliation

  And a blessing

  And a wedding.

  I think it’s definitely a comedy.

  I’m not absolutely certain, of course.

  But I have hopes.

  And, just like Beatrix Potter,

  I can’t wait to find out.

  GRAND MASTER ACCEPTANCE SPEECH

  (Given by Connie Willis at the Nebula Awards Banquet in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, May 19, 2012)

  As Barbra Streisand said when she won the Oscar, “Hello, Gorgeous!”

  Those of you who know me

  know that I faithfully watch the Oscars,

  mostly for the clothes—

  like that awful pink thing Gwyneth Paltrow wore a couple of years ago

  and that thing with the giant red bow that Emma Stone wore this year,
>
  but I also watch for the acceptance speeches

  Like when Jack Palance dropped to the floor and started doing push-ups.

  Or when Sally Field kept hugging her Oscar to her and saying,

  “You like me, you really like me!”

  No, we didn’t.

  Or when James Cameron shouted, “I’m king of the world!”

  And Richard Attenborough compared himself to Gandhi and

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  All this research came in handy the last couple of weeks.

  No, not to show me how to give a bad speech.

  To show me how to do a good one.

  Meryl Streep did it.

  She gave a great one this year

  when she won Best Actress for Iron Lady.

  Emma Thompson did it.

  John Wayne did it.

  The guy from Flight of the Conchords did it, for heaven’s sake.

  How hard can it be?

  But it must be fairly hard

  because there have been lots of bad speeches.

  Now, when I say bad speeches,

  I’m not talking about people being rambling and incoherent.

  That’s to be expected.

  They’re excited.

  And I don’t mind if they get all choked up.

  Crying is fine.

  And so is putting on their reading glasses,

  pulling out a list,

  and thanking everybody they’ve ever known,

  including the third-grade teacher

  who cast them as the pumpkin in their school production of Cinderella.

  I totally get that,

  especially the part about the third-grade teacher,

  although in my case

  it was my sixth-grade teacher, who introduced me to Little Women,

  and my eighth-grade teacher, who introduced me to the Blitz,

  and my high school English teacher,

  who took me to meet Lenora Mattingly Weber.

  I wouldn’t be here without them.

  And I wouldn’t be here without my BFFs—truly my Best Friends Forever

  Jim Kelly

  and Sheila Williams

  and Cynthia Felice

  and Michael Cassutt

  and Melinda Snodgrass

  and John Kessel

  and Nancy Kress

  and without my BHE—Best Husband Ever, Courtney

  and my DTD—Dearer than Daughter, Cordelia.

  Without my WWCIA—Writer’s Workshop Comrades in Arms

  Ed Bryant

  and John Stith

  and Mike Toman

  and Walter Jon Williams

  and my LSEs—Long-Suffering Editors

  Anne Groell

  and Gardner Dozois

  and Ellen Datlow

  and Liza Trombi

  and Shawna McCarthy

  and my FWAGMs—Friends Who Are Grand Masters (is that cool, or what?)

  Robert Silverberg

  and Joe Haldeman

  and Fred Pohl