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Is it just me, or women do write more fluid dialogs in their SF stories? After reading McCaffrey, and then Bujold, and then finally reading Connie Willis, it came to me that while authors like Theodore Sturgeon, Greg Bear, even Asimov and Clarke, came up with mindblowing plot and intergalactic sweep, dialogs between their characters might seem stilted and perfunctory. Compare them with the dialogs between the characters of McCaffrey's "Pegasus in Flight" for instance, or Bujold's "The Warrior Ap...
Beware the efficiency expert - the modern day version of the Tyrannosaurus RexTeachers threatened with dismissal take on new studies like flying instructors, escape from the predators and leave the university.Enjoy!
`I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. `When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'If there is a raison d'être for genre fiction, it is summarized in the above quote from Through the Looking Glass. But the book "Impossible Things" also rekindles my anger at the fact that things people like Connie Willis write is even classified as anything other than fiction and so shelved away
Actually a very good short story collection, but suffers from an unusual Connie Willis problem: I think the stories are almost all too short. They make their points, and then they just end - without real endings.But they’re almost all interesting, and almost all funny, and sometimes they’re extremely sharp. Sometimes they have hints of what Willis will become, too - the parking! The hotel employee! The space station space crunch! Good stuff.
Connie Willis seems to be a one-trick pony. She does that trick very well (as illustrated by her recent Hugo for Blackout/All Clear), but reading her novels leads one to believe the only story she can write involves attention deficit morons beset by monomaniacal monkeys (usually the protag's friends and associates).But no, there's more. Read Impossible Things. Connie is capable of so much more. Yes, the one-trick pony is still in evidence, but at least one needs only wade through twenty pages of...
An excellent collection of Willis' short fiction, this book gathers together 11 of Willis' short stories, all previously published, however."The Last of the Winnebagos" – Willis' intro says that she has been criticized for this story by people who find it too "sentimental." However, it also won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards, so not everyone agreed with that criticism! The book gives us a future scenario that is similar to that of Bradbury's ‘Fahrenheit 451' in some ways - the highways are
I started this book this morning while waiting for vital laundry to dry. It's a collection of short fiction from the author of the Domesday Book (a personal favorite) so I knew I'd most likely adore it. As if turns out, it was almost entirely love at first read.As an aside, when moving, be sure the bulk of your clean clothes are not left 300 miles away. It gets... untidy.----And now I've finished it. I'm not really sure I can do this one justice with a straight review. I should probably go down
What I learned from this book: I either love or hate Connie Willis short stories. Despite being a big fan of To Say Nothing of the Dog, I am going to have to pass on Willis doing comedy in the future. I'm not sure what aspect of her humorous writing is the most annoying. Candidates are 1. it feels like there is a (pause) at the end of each zinger (and they are very self-consciously zingers) for the benefit of the reader to schedule time to guffaw; 2. her targets are often one of these knee-slapp...
Not being a big fan of humorous SF ( The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was good but the subsequent books got less and less interesting), I found most of the stories in this collection...meh. To be honest, I couldn't even bring myself to finish some of the stories.That said, "Winter's Tale" is a wonderful answer to all the "who was Shakespeare" conspiracy theorists and alone deserves 4 stars.
Some stories are better than others ( as in any collection), some stories are hilarious, others traumatized me for weeks ( Last of the Winnebagos. Very very good. But traumatic).
A collection of short stories by Connie Willis. I thought I'd read more of her short stories than I had, but there was only one story in here that I'd already read. "Even the Queen", which I like. I'm envious of the characters in it.The stories have themes you'll be familiar with if you've read other things by Connie Willis. Time travel, the Blitz, Christianity, hectic goings-on, Hollywood.One type of story she writes that I find uncomfortable is ones in which characters can never seem to sit do...
Highly enjoyable. Some stories were laugh-out-loud funny; others were devastatingly tender. They were all right up my alley.
I had high hopes of enjoying this since I simply adored "To Say Nothing of the Dog" and "Doomsday Book" but I guess Connie Willis' short fiction isn't as appealing to me. The first story "The Last Winnebago" was dated in amusing ways - you know how it is. We can foresee all these future tech advances - her characters have ring tones that identify callers, but their phones are tied to their homes and cars, not carried around. The main character is photographer and has FILM. Actual film. Wow. I fo...
I don't usually enjoy reading short stories and bought this book only because I'm a Connie Willis fan and want to read everything she's ever written:) Surprisingly enough, I found myself enjoying these short stories very much. I especially liked "Spice Pogrom", "Even the Queen" and "Ado". As in Fire Watch (another collection of short stories by Connie Willis, but one I didn't enjoyed much), what I found very interesting is the preamble to each story, in which Willis explains her motivations. It
This one sits between a 2 and a 3 for me, and has the weird distinction of being one of the only books I've dropped as much because of the author commentary as the fiction. The stories themselves were hit and miss for me (which I expect in an anthology, a bit less from a single-author collection). The Last of the Winnebagos and Schwarzchild Radius were solid, slightly unsettling science fiction that will stay with me for a while. Spice Pogrom was an exercise in gritting my teeth to finish someth...
Short story collections can be so hard to rate. Connie Willis is an outstanding writer - there are few better at either farce or building up tension inside a social story - and there are some outstanding examples of that in this collection (Last of the Winnebagos, Even the Queen, Winter's Tale, Jack). Unfortunately to do this she relies on several repeating motifs, and seeing too many of them in a row tends to dilute their impact. It's likely best to read a story and put the book down for a week...
A really good Collection of short stories from the master of long novels.Highlights: "The Last of the Winnebagos" - a bittersweet novel set in a future world where a virus has wiped out all dog's and a journalist (of a sorts) recalls the death of his own dog. "Spice Pogrom" - A hilarious novel about first contact with a kind nod to the classic Hollywood comedy's. "Chance" & "Time Out" - 2 novels about how life could have been and getting a second chance ""Jack" - A story about the people at a f...
I have to stop reading those short story collections that have their authors write little personal blurbs before each story. I did not need to know that Willis is anti-feminist. Frankly listening to her grumbling about how political correctness is going to destroy us all rings so, so bitterly in the year of our Trump 2019 that I did not finish the collection. The stories I read were fine.
Excellent collection of shorter and longer stories. Before I picked this book up at a thrift shop (mostly because of the interesting cover and a little because of the blurb at the back) I had never heard of Connie Willis, but now intend to get my hands on as much of her work as possible. Gardner Dozois was right in his introduction: Willis writes about People, just like Jane Austen, and that is a big part of what makes her stories work so well.
Connie Willis writes amazing novels and, as this collection shows, equally compelling short fiction. The stories in this collection cover a wide variet of stories, although all of them settle some place within science fiction. Willis' characteristic humor and way with words shine in these stories.