Subject: Connie Willis: Impossible Things

From: [email-masked] (Dani Zweig)
Date: Sun, 12 Dec 1993 06:32:00 GMT

Connie Willis's new anthology, "Impossible Things", is preceeded by the 
standard editor's blurb assuring the readers that they're holding one of 
the best anthologies of the last couple of decades.  The odd thing is, for
a wonder, it's the unvarnished truth.

I'm not sure why the stories work as well as they do.  "Good writing",
I suppose, but it seems a copout to leave it at that.  Dozois describes
the stories as having a 'delayed kick', a 'hidden edge', and there's
something to that:  Willis has a knack (exhibited in some of the stories)
for giving a story an ending that casts the entire story in a different
light.  These aren't trick endings; they're endings that cause the emotional
weight of the story to suddenly be redistributed.

In "The Last of the Winnebagos", for example, the extinction of the dogs,
and the changes surrounding it, don't stop being important, but somehow
with the ending, the story becomes a story about the narrator, not just
a story observed through the narrator's eyes.  

"The Last of the Winnebagos" was wasted on me.  I could appreciate
what she was doing without particularly enjoying it.  I preferred her 
comic stories.  Fortunately, this anthology contained some of her best,
including "Even the Queen", her latest Hugo winner.  Willis was saying, 
at Worldcon, that her neighbors think she's strange enough writing sf, 
without her having to explain that she just won a prize for writing a 
story about menstruation -- and that the advice she got from Gardner 
Dozois was "Tell them it's a period piece!" 

Some of the stories didn't work for me.  "Schwartzchild Radius", for
example, or "Chance".  A good enough author -- which Connie Willis is -- 
can manipulate the reader's reactions and sympathies, but there's an
element of bullying in it.  Even those stories are good, though.  The
better stories in the collection are excellent.

-----
Dani Zweig
[email-masked]

   'T is with our judgements as our watches, none
   Go alike, yet each believes his own
		--Alexander Pope