The Connie Willis . Net Blog

This April I got to go to the Jack Williamson Lectureship in Portales for the second time since the Pandemic, and it was great. My daughter, who always does a forensics presentation, flew out and drove down with me since my husband couldn’t go–he was helping run an American Association of Physics Teachers meeting–and it took awhile since we stopped at every convenience store along the way to buy cornnuts and burnt peanuts and gummy pillows and red licorice and Reese’s peanut butter cups and soda pop and chips and pretty much every kind of junk food there was. (We were attempting to imitate the “Pig Tour” episode of Designing Woman and we did a pretty good job.)

We went the back way to Portales and were a little bit worried we might get lost and end up at the Grand Canyon like Thelma and Louise, but we didn’t, and got to Portales in time to have dinner at the Cattle Baron with Betty Williamson and Patrice Caldwell, my two sisters-separated-at-birth, who I fell in love with the very first time I attended a Lectureship. Betty is Jack Williamson’s niece and a reporter for the local paper and Patrice was, until this last semester, the President of the College, and between them they’ve been the mainstay of the Lectureship for years.

(A little background: Jack Williamson was one of the forefathers of science fiction, selling his first story in the 1920s and writing all the way through to the 2000s. Along the way, he wrote several classic novels–DARKER THAN YOU THINK, THE HUMANOIDS, and “With Folded Hands”–and his brilliant Hugo-Award-winning autobiography WONDER’S CHILD and coined names for many of the themes of SF, including “psionics,” “terraforming,” and “androids.” He was a Grand Master, had a meteor and a feature on Mars named after him, and served as president of the Science Fiction Writers of America.)

Jack also taught at the university in Portales, Eastern New Mexico University, and endowed a chair for bringing in guest lecturers in science fiction every year, which evolved into the Lectureship and which has hosted an amazing list of lecturers (including six Grand Masters of Science Fiction–seven if you count Jack–and a veritable Who’s Who of Science Fiction and Fantasy–Greg Bear, Harlan Ellison, Fredrik Pohl, James Gunn, Nalo Hopkinson, Walter Jon Williams, George R.R. Martin, Carrie Vaughn, Vic Milan, Jeffe Kennedy, Ian Tregillis, Steven Gould, Melinda Snodgrass, Michael Cassutt, Emily Mah, Edward Bryant, Charles N. Brown, the editor of Locus, and a bunch of others–and many of them have come back again and again.)

This year’s guest of honor was Arkady Martine, and she brought her wife, Vivian Shaw, with her, so we got two guests for one. They were great, and so were the panels, which the Lectureship features. I especially loved the one on Artificial Intelligence, which focused on the new dangers and possibilities of ChatGPT, and one on worldbuilding. I also loved Cordelia’s lecture on a very out-of-the-ordinary experience she had while working at the Santa Clara County Crime lab. Unlike the usual investigation of shoeprints, surveillance tapes, cell phones, etc., she suddenly found herself in a convoy with a SWAT team in L.A., driving a coworker’s car without the lights on in an attempt to arrest a bunch of human traffickers.

On Saturday, I teach a writers’ workshop for the students, although that’s not really accurate because many of the writers come and serve as an expert panel, so it’s really a group effort. This year’s workshop was on story endings, and everybody gave great advice, and then we all adjourned AGAIN to the Do Drop Inn for lunch. (Eating is actually what the Lectureship is all about–we ate at a vineyard and at the Cattle Baron, had a luncheon at the college, ate enchiladas at the house of one of the committee members, had breakfast at the Do Drop Inn, had coffee at the Do Drop Inn, had ice cream at the Do Drop Inn…well, you get the idea.)

It was great! I can’t wait to go next year, and you should come, too. Everybody’s welcome, and it’s so much fun. Since it’s smaller than your normal convention, everybody gets a chance to really know everybody else and the panels and workshop and lectures and speeches are all wonderful! Plus, you can eat the whole way there!

Connie Willis

From Feb 16, 2023;

Penguin Random House official page including and excerpt from the book and an audio excerpt.

It’s Valentine’s Day–again, as Phil would say in GROUNDHOG DAY (a different holiday. On Groundhog Day you of course watch GROUNDHOG DAY and on St. Patrick’s Day you watch LEAP YEAR and on Easter you watch CHOCOLAT, but what do you watch on Valentine’s Day?

Here’s some of what we watch around here, a short list of romantic comedies, both new and old, that you may never have heard of (I tried not to list the ones you HAVE heard of), but which are guaranteed to make you feel good no matter what your romantic situation:

1. THE DECOY BRIDE (with David Tennant and Kelly Macdonald, two reasons to watch right there)

2. WALK, DON’T RUN (with Jim Hutton, Cary Grant, and Samantha Eggar, or you could watch the original, THE MORE THE MERRIER)

3. PICTURE PERFECT (with Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Bacon, and Jay Mohr)

4. HE SAID/SHE SAID (with Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth Perkins, who both give their version of their sometimes rocky relationship and what really happened…)

5. HOW TO STEAL A MILLION (with Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole.)

6. A LITTLE ROMANCE (the story of two kids (one of whom is a very young Diane Lane) who run off to Venice, helped by Laurence Olivier, of all people)

7. BALL OF FIRE (with Barbara Stanwyck, Gary Cooper, and a bunch of gangsters and absent-minded professors)

And what are WE watching tonight? Preston Sturgess’s THE LADY EVE, also with the incomparable Barbara Stanwyck as a card sharp and her pathetic dupe, Henry Fonda. (Note: If you’ve never seen a Preston Sturges movie, you’re in for a real treat. My husband’s favorite is SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS, and mine is THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN’S CREEK.)

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Connie Willis

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Poor Thanksgiving! It gets short shrift all around. Not only is it completely upstaged by Christmas, but now Black Friday means that Thanksgiving only gets a single day, and in the last few years (interrupted only by the Pandemic), Black Friday starts Thursday afternoon so you don’t even have time to do the dishes before Thanksgiving’s over and it’s on to the Christmas spending frenzy.

The same is true for movies. Hallmark devotes an entire month to Christmas movies and there are dozens of other new and old classics to watch, but there are hardly any Thanksgiving movies, and the ones there are always seem to involve a person who’s terminally ill. (Don’t believe me? How about STEPMOM, FUNNY PEOPLE, and ONE TRUE THING, to say nothing of THE BIG CHILL, in which the person’s already died?) Movies like that are the last thing we need in this Pandemic-That-Never-Seems-To-End.

So here’s a list of some cheerful Thanksgiving movies to watch in the ninety seconds or so between Thanksgiving dinner and Black Friday:

The top four in my family are:

1. PLANES, TRAINS, AND AUTOMOBILES–This is the hands-down best ever Thanksgiving movie, about Steve Martin’s struggles to get home in time for Thanksgiving dinner, against obstacles including flight cancellations, scary motels, cattle trucks, near-death-on-the-highway, and John Candy. We watch it every year.

2. DEAR GOD–For some reason nobody’s ever heard of this movie, even though it was made by Penny Marshall and stars Greg Kinear and a host of crazies who work in the dead-letter office at the Post Office. It starts in the fall and goes all the way to the day before Christmas, and it has a wonderful Thanksgiving scene–at a miniature golf course.

3. YOU’VE GOT MAIL–This remake of THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER (which is definitely a Christmas movie and should be watched then, preferably on Christmas Eve) takes place through the fall, and has not only Thanksgiving get-togethers but the shopping you have to do beforehand, with a very funny scene set in a cash-only lane at the grocery store.

4. ADDAMS FAMILY VALUES–The Addams Family are always great, but this one was made even more special by Wednesday’s participation in a Thanksgiving Pageant at her school.

And these are good, too:

5. HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS–This movie, which stars Holly Hunter and Robert Downey, Jr., is all about coming home for Thanksgiving and dealing with your highly dysfunctional family.

6. SCENT OF A WOMAN–If you want to avoid going home for Thanksgiving, you can always hire out for Thanksgiving weekend to assist a blind man, especially if the blind man is Al Pacino, who is not at all the helpless invalid Chris O’Donnell expects and who has very interesting ideas about what makes a good weekend, many of them involving Gabrielle Anwar.

7. MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET–I know, I know, this is a Christmas movie, but everyone always forgets that it starts with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and Natalie Wood tricking her mother into inviting John Payne to Thanksgiving dinner. (I am of course referring to the black-and-white original version, which is the only one worth watching.)

8. And speaking of the Macy’s Parade, there’s TOWER HEIST, a movie about a bunch of guys (Ben Stiller, Eddie Murphy, Casey Affleck) who’ve lost all their money in a Ponzi scheme planning a heist that will get their money back and get revenge on the guy who stole it. They decide the best time to pull off the heist is during the Macy’s Parade, since everybody’s busy watching the balloons and the bands.

9. PAUL BLART: MALL COP–This movie’s not about Thanksgiving but about Black Friday, which apparently is also a good time to commit a crime, and the only person standing between them and success is Kevin James.

10. SEMI-TOUGH–And if you can’t get through Thanksgiving without watching football, this is probably the best football movie ever made, with Burt Reynolds, Kris Kristofferson, Jill Clayburgh, and an incredible storyline involving the playoffs and an EST-type psychological guru.

11. Or if you’re the sentimental type, you can watch THE BLIND SIDE, a heartwarming true football story about a Southern family who befriended a black kid with no prospects and made him part of their family. It’s funny and sweet and has a great Thanksgiving dinner scene.

I hope you have a happy Thanksgiving and that you have a lot to be grateful for.

I know I do.

Including my family, my friends, and all of you.

Plus great Thanksgiving movies to watch.

Connie Willis

Canterbury Cathedral was part of St. Augustine’s Abbey, a monastery founded in 598 A.D.  It endured Viking raids, William the Conqueror’s invasion, a large fire (in 1168), and the murder of its archbishop, Thomas a Becket, and was finally done in by Henry VIII.  But possibly the most important event in its long history was something happened on a summer night in June in 1178.

That night, “after sunset when the moon was first seen,” five monks were sitting outside looking at the sky and the crescent moon when the upper part of the horn “suddenly split in two.  From the midpoint of this division, a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out fire, hot coals, and sparks.  The body of the moon writhed like a wounded snake.  Afterwards it resumed it proper state.  This phenomenon was repeated a dozen times or more, the flame assuming various twisting shapes at random and then returning to normal.  Then, after these transformations, the Moon, from hook to horn, that is, along the whole length, took on a blackish appearance.”

The five monks told Gervase of Canterbury, the chronicler of the Abbey, what they’d seen, and he wrote it all down, adding that the monks were “prepared to stake their honor on an oath that they have made no addition or falsification in the narrative.”  Unfortunately, they were the only people to have seen it.  According to European chroniclers of the time, the continent was “fogged in” that night, so the five Canterbury monks were the only witnesses, and nobody paid any attention to their account for nearly eight hundred years, at which point geologist Jack B. Hartung proposed a theory for what they might have seen:  a giant asteroid slamming into the moon.

If it had, there should be a crater at the place the monks described the explosion as being, so Hartung went about looking for one–and found a likely candidate:  Crater Giordano Bruno (named after Bruno, the first person martyred for science in 1600.)  The crater was fourteen miles in diameter and on the far side of the moon, but in a place near the edge where the explosion could have been seen.  And it was very young, as determined by the spectacular rays radiating from it.  In the case of older craters, the rays have been hit repeatedly by other, smaller asteroids which throw up dust and obscure the rays.  Crater Giordano Bruno’s rays were sharp, clear, and very long, all of which suggested it was the Moon’s youngest crater.

Hartung deduced that the flames the monks saw were a plume of molton matter rising from the surface and that the illusion of the Moon’s breaking in two could have come from the resultant dust cloud obscuring the Moon.  Hartung also deduced that if the Moon had been hit, it should still have a slow longitudinal wobble like a bell’s ringing (which it did) and an elevated temperature (which it didn’t), but scientists concluded that an asteroid impact on the surface of the Moon was most likely what the monks had seen.

Then in 2001, Paul Withers, a graduate student at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Lab, said an asteroid impact was impossible.  The crater was much older (1 to 10 million years old) and, besides, if an asteroid HAD hit the Moon, it would have thrown up enormous amounts of dirt and rock, and there would have been a giant meteor shower afterwards consisting of up to 50,000 asteroids an hour, which would have lasted for weeks, and no observers had mentioned one.  Withers also argued that if an asteroid had hit the moon that Korean or Chinese astronomers should have seen it (though I don’t think that works because of when the impact occurred.)

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Withers argued that what the monks had actually seen was a very large asteroid entering Earth’s atmosphere that had burst into flames as it did, “fizzing and bubbling and sputtering,” and that it just happened to be aligned with the Moon so that it looked like the Moon was exploding.  (Personally, I find the chances of that exact alignment with the monks’ line of sight happening even more unlikely than their happening to see an asteroid hit the Moon.)

Other scientists weighed in, saying they couldn’t possibly have seen the Moon because it would have been invisible at sunset from Canterbury on the eighteenth of June (I’d like to point out that Gervase never said “just after sunset,” he said, “after sunset when the moon was first seen,” which is an entirely different thing,) and others claimed the monks had made the whole thing up and were just talking about Islam being defeated in the Crusades, since Islam’s symbol is the crescent moon, even though the monks never said a word about Islam OR the Crusades, and this was the only thing like this that the reported seeing.

In 2008 the Japanese satellite SELENE took high-resolution photos of the crater, which scientists used to attempt to date the crater by counting the smaller craters in it.  They came up with a probable age of one million to ten million years and concluded the chances of its being a mere eight hundred years old were .1 per cent.

The only way to definitely prove whether those monks saw an asteroid hit the Moon is by going to Crater Giordano Bruno, collecting rock samples, and carbon-dating them, but in the meantime there have been several asteroid impacts recorded on the Moon that were visible to the naked eye–one on March 17, 2013,  another on February 24, 2014, and, most recently, one on June 21, 2019 during a total lunar eclipse,  all of which produced a blinding flash.  “It was so bright!” Bill Cook of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office said.  None of these were even close to the size of the asteroid that created Giordano Bruno.  The largest was fifteen meters across, and Bruno is fourteen MILES across, and yet they were easily visible from earth, which makes the monks’ story more plausible.

Stay tuned.  Personally, I’m rooting for the monks, but we shall see…

Connie Willis

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NEBULAS SERVICE AWARD SPEECH
Thank you, Jim, for that great introduction
and thanks to all of you for this lovely award.

I don’t really deserve it.
In the first place, if the service was emceeing the Nebulas,
that was really fun

In the second place, if it was teaching at Clarion and Clarion West,
I loved doing that,
and I’ve been rewarded every day 
by the wonderful things my students have accomplished
and the awards they’ve won.
You Clarion people are great!

In the third place, if my service was being a committee member, 
I’ve been writing for YEARS about the horrors of committees,
how they constantly get off-topic
and spend hours on pointless minutiae
and squabble over things that DO NOT MATTER.

I even wrote a story
about the worst committee of all time
the one where archangels were put in charge of planning the Apocalypse,
and how they spent hours deciding who the Antichrist should be

and fighting over what the heavenly choirs should sing--
"I mean, the Hallelujah Chorus has been done to death!"--

and whether that pale horse of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
was white or gray or a palomino or what.

As you might expect, the planning didn’t work out,
and the story was called "Why The World Didn’t End Last Tuesday,"

So I figured my ending up on SFWA committees 
was my punishment for that story
and all the other stuff I’d written
and said
and thought.

But the thing is, it worked out great.

I got to work with terrific people.

Sane and sensible and intelligent 
people like
Jack Williamson,
Jeff Carver,
Chuck von Rospach,
Kevin O’Donnell,
Terra LeMay,
and James Patrick Kelly
on the Nebula Rules Committee

and deeply dedicated and caring people like
Lou Berger,
Robert Silverberg,
Anatoly Belikovsky,
Jerry Pournelle,
James Patrick Kelly,
and Oz Drummond
on the Emergency Medical Fund Committee

Plus Cat Rambo
and Mary Robinette Kowal
and countless other officers and members through the years.

Every one of them has worked much harder
and deserves this award more than I do.

AND they’re only a small segment
of all the people who have worked
and continue to work to make SFWA such a vital and thriving organization.

This award should go to all of them.

But I’m very grateful that you decided to give it to me.

Oh, and I’d like to apologize for all the mean things I’ve said about committees.

Mostly.

This award is a wonderful honor. Thank you so much.

Connie Willis