2024 Book Review #17 – Terra Incognita by Connie Willis

Connie Willis is a name I have heard come up a lot with regard to late 20th century American Science Fiction, but in a slightly odd way. The only thing she’s actually written that I’ve ever heard of is To Say Nothing of the Dog (a delightful-sounding book that tragicall has a multimonth hold list at my library). Instead, I mostly know her from other books’ acknowledgement sections, or semi-mythologized folklore and anecdotes about the culture and community of the era. So I really picked this up as a matter of curiosity, to get a sense of what Willis’ whole deal is.

The book is a collection of three novellas, each basically totally unrelated with only the faintest attempt at a unifying theme to justify bundling the three of them together. Each work is pretty different from the others in everything from length (the longest is something like 3x the length of the shortest), tone, setting and subject matter, the works really. The first is a sort of romcom farce about surveyors charting an alien world that has, well, aged. The second and longest a love letter to classic classic hollywood and movie musicals as told from the POV of a self-hating drunk who pays the bills going through and retroactively editing the studio’s back catalogue to meet the whims of the executive of the day. The third and by far shortest is a lighthearted and very fannish comedy about a teenager getting conscripted to be a space cadet against her own ferocious objections.

The stories are all perfectly modern in, like, structure and pacing, but they still absolutely feel like they were written last century. Part of that is just word choice (the only thing that ages worse that old euphemisms for sex is old attempts to create futuristic slang), but it’s also just a general sensibility. Which is most cringe-iniducing in the first story, both for its portrayal of the native species of the planet being surveyed (directly compared to native americans on a few different times, characterized as relentlessly opportunistic penny-wise but pound-foolish hucksters leaping at the chance to sell their land for cheap imported consumer goods), and also just for a handling of gender and sexuality it’d take more time than I’ve got to really dig into. (I have a sense of where all those tomboy versus girly girl memes ultimately descend from now, though.) The other two more just felt out of time than actually wince-inducing, with the third story especially feeling like an affectionate nod to the fan culture of its time. That said, the second one’s whole horrified preoccupation with a Hollywood that refuses to make anything new instead of just remaking the same sure things from its back catalog forevermore either never stopped or has looped back around to feeling real topical.

Insofar as I’m already reading romances, I admit I do have a real soft spot for the whole ‘idiots compensate for total refusal to communicate feelings or desires with grand romantic gestures and hoping the object of their desires will get the idea. It doesn’t work.’ thing that’s a bit of a recurring beat in two of the novellas though.

Prose and characterization wise, all three were pretty well done – though riffing off tropes and archtypes that I honestly can’t remember the last time I’ve seen played sincerely and unironically, which did always leave me feeling I was missing context on how to read them. Which is pretty much what I was hoping for going in, to be clear – what’s the point of reading older stories, otherwise? Which is nice, because the actual reading experience of going through it was a bit of a slog. The first one was the real trial, but just overall I’d say the book’s more interesting as a cultural artifact than an artistic work. Oh well, c’est la vie.

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Dylan in Severance 1.08-1.09 x Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis

I finally read Connie Willis's 'Doomsday Book' on your recommendation and despite some frustration at the "people in the Middle Ages never washed" cliche and then ended up totally emotionally destroyed by the end (Father Roche was the one that broke my heart the most). I bought "To Say Nothing of the Dog" as soon as I was finished.

Oh, hooray!! Father Roche also breaks my heart, and I love Kivrin and her mentor so much. I hope you enjoy To Say Nothing of the Dog; it is, in my opinion, a romp of the first water.

All of you “humans will pack bond with anything” people need to read Connie Willis’s new book “The Road to Roswell” IMMEDIATELY.

I mean NOW.

Update not only is Connie Willis All Seated On The Ground an excellent spec fic Christmas story so is Epiphany

Time Crossed - complete!

Epilogue

The warmest thank you to pandamug, who is an absolute STAR of a beta. Thank you for all your kind words and your sharp eye over so many years, and this story in particular. I’m so grateful for your friendship, my buddy. You should go read her Oxford Time Travel story, To Say Nothing of the Kitten. I reread it every time I finish rereading To Say Nothing of the Dog. 

To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis

you can always trust connie willis to end on a message that what we do has meaning and even our smallest positive acts matter because they have to, and they always did

Has been a real hot minute since I've read something that uses a first person POV to hide the fact that the protagonist is a woman until halfway through, though.

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👋 for the book reader asks: 3, 7, and 12?

3. What’s something you read recently and wanted to argue with (either with the book or the author or the fans)?

Maybe the Library at Mount Char - I liked it a lot, but I have a whole collection of books I call “Books about Libraries that are really Private Archives”. LaMC is only the most recent addition that I’ve read.

And it’s true, for a long long time up to the very recent past, libraries were usually private collections of resources which were only available to small affiliated groups. The Public Library is recent idea and the huge swathe of public social services the average (American) Public Library provides shouldn’t fall entirely on this one underfunded organization that can have insufficient training in social work etc. See this excellent Vocational Awe article for more info.

But I still want to read a book with a magical library that’s open to the public, that provides services and educational events, that supports its community, but isn’t hard to find. I really love a lot of these magical private library books, but the ubiquity of access is really important to the modern library (in some places anyway), and I’d love to read something that shows that someday.

5. What book do you love but usually not recommend because it’s weird or intense, etc?

I utterly adore Katherine Addison’s The Witness for the Dead, but it’s so hard to describe (and, as a result, to recommend) - the setting is so lush and the characters are such a product of their setting and life-experiences. It’s a non-violent crime novel. It’s very religious and spiritual. There might be werewolves. There are murderous ghouls. There’s opera and air-ships. It’s a detective novel. It’s a political thriller. It’s slow-moving and deeply kind. The protagonist is having a very long week. It’s only 232 pages long.

12. What book have you re-read most often?

I pick up Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog whenever I need a break from other things in life, so probably every few months on the outside 😹 I love that if I ever don’t understand what’s happening, the protagonist understands even less than I do. He’s overtired and overworked, and it’s made him into a soppy romantic who keeps mishearing people but is too polite to ask for clarification. I relate.

Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword and Tamora Piece’s In The Hand of the Goddess are two other comfort rereads that I have as audiobooks, so they probably are the stories I’ve read/heard the most often by sheer numbers.

I saw your book recommendations and came here to say: I love The Doomsday Book. I also have similar mixed feelings re: Willis, but that book is incredible and makes me cry every time. I had to reread it in 2021 for my grad degree because I had chosen it on my booklist, and suffice it to say I found that very disturbing to read in the middle of a pandemic of my own!

I also saw your tag about a Crosstalk AU for Fitzsimmons, and oh my goodness, be still my heart! 😍 That would be utter perfection. Indeed the whole “I have ESP but not with the person I expect” thing has preyed on me since I first read that book (in the best way). I’ve thought about a similar AU for Alison and Declan (from Sanditon). But I have a love/hate relationship with that book… I am obsessed with some parts, and I get really fired up about others. Why do think it gets to us so much?

Did you ever read Willis’s book To Say Nothing of the Dog? I tried, but I couldn’t get very far… I’m afraid I love her *and* sometimes she very much gets under my skin.

Okay, last thought… have you ever read her novels Fire Watch? I think of it as a love story for history lovers and it never fails to make me cry.

Sorry this got so long!!! Love reading your thoughts either way.

The Doomsday Book makes me cry every time I read it too, even though I *know* what’s coming (good and bad). I love love love the mix of triumph and tragedy all tangled up together at the end - so beautifully done. The first time I read it, I started it at around midnight on a work night because I couldn’t sleep, intending to read a chapter or two until I nodded off. Instead I read it through in a single sitting and then somehow had to go to work, even though a) I’d been awake that night and b) I had been weeping copiously through most of the final 100 pages. I couldn’t bring myself to read it during the worst of lockdown - I am impressed you managed it!

I love the basic premise of Crosstalk *so* much, but likewise I have a love/hate relationship with it. I think the characters in Willis’ books can often be extremely stupid for the sake of furthering the plot. I think that’s one of the things that most frustrates me about her work, because she’s capable of such great character work and then throws it all away. Would any adult really be daft enough to get experimental brain surgery at the insistence of her extremely demanding and needy new boyfriend, without even looking at the side effects? It’s very difficult to believe it! But by the end of the book I was won over in spite of myself.

I have a theory that The Doomsday Book was such a runaway success that she’s no longer being edited properly (aka the Late Career Agatha Christie Problem), because a lot of the problems with Crosstalk (and Blackout/All Clear) could be fixed by better editing. I think that’s part of why her work frustrates me, because the good stuff is *so* good and I feel almost like she’s being let down by a wider team.

I do really like Crosstalk as a basic premise for a Fitzsimmons story, though - if I can ever bring myself to get through a reread! I would probably try to start it with them in the emotional equivalent of early s2 - best friends, estranged following a traumatic accident that led to traumatic brain injury for Fitz. Jemma’s so keen to help him that she agrees to experimental neurosurgery with Milton because the findings of the EED study might help people with TBI - so Fitz feels like she thinks he’s so useless that she’s literally willing to undergo brain surgery rather than accept him as he is, while she of course feels guilty that she’s “fine” and badly wants to help relieve his pain. It feels like it would make for a good angsty set up! Can’t you just see Fitz as grumpy CB hiding in the basement of a building with pictures of Hedy Lamarr everywhere?

I really enjoyed To Say Nothing of the Dog, but I was in exactly the right mood for a silly romcom caper when I read it. I also really love that light, frothy late Victorian/early Edwardian comic writing style that she was trying to ape, and I think she (mostly) did it successfully. If I’d been in a different mood, I would have found all the random side characters walking on stage just to opine about the nature of history very annoying.

I haven’t read Fire Watch - thank you for the recommendation, I will give it a try!

Oh and Sanditon is on my list of programmes to try this autumn/winter, because it’s finally made it to a streaming service I actually have. I’m looking forward to it!

Hi! I was wondering if you had any recs for fiction and non-fiction about the Black Death?

Hello! Do I ever!

Fiction: Connie Willis, Doomsday Book. In the near future, when time travel is discovered, it is put in the hands of the historians of Oxford University. This is 1) perfectly rational 2) gloriously doomed to suffer the fate of any large-scale project put in the hands of a tweedy and aggressively unworldly professor and a handful of ambitious postgraduate students. Also, the technologies of time travel are in their infancy. So our bright-eyed young historian gets sent to the middle of the fourteenth century by mistake, and her aggressively unworldly, intensely loyal supervisor is not going to let her fall victim to one of history's greatest crises. I love them.

Fictionalized history: John Hatcher, The Black Death: An Intimate History. Hatcher wrote this after having spent over half his life immersed in the records of medieval England, and it shows. Using the surviving documentation of villages and manors, he constructs a hypothesized case study of how one set of people might have responded to the pandemic. It's poignant and interesting, I think.

Non-fiction: this gets a bit trickier because Black Death studies have been moving at a dizzying speed for the last decade or so, and rapidly for the past 15 years. I have had to revise my teaching on it every. single. time. I have taught, just to keep up with the scholarship. (I'm not mad about it; I'm just tired.) Anyway: the 2014 issue of The Medieval Globe has a collection of very valuable and interesting essays, and if you poke around a bit, you might still find them open-access on the authors' respective webpages. I really like Bruce M.S. Campbell's The Great Transition: Climate, Disease, and Society in the Late-Medieval World (2016.) There's also this webinar you can access free of charge: