The Connie Willis . Net Blog

THANKS ON THANKSGIVING

Last Thanksgiving my daughter said she was making a list of people she was thankful for.  It wasn’t the usual list of family and friends and mentors and sources of inspiration, though.  Instead, her list was of the people you might not remember to thank, the people who’d maybe done something small, but who’d nonetheless made a difference in your life.
I thought this was a great idea.  Herewith three of those people who changed my life in assorted ways:
1.  Nora Ephron and Meg Ryan.
Until the movie WHEN HARRY MET SALLY came out, I thought you had to choose from the stuff that was there on the menu.  I had no idea you could order food the way you wanted it.  But when Sally ordered her salad dressing on the side and  “the pie heated, and I don’t want the ice cream on top.  I want it on the side.  And I’d like strawberry instead of vanilla if you have it.  If not, then no ice cream, just whipped cream, but only if it’s real.  If it’s out of a can, then nothing,”  it was a revelation.  Ever since then I’ve ordered food exactly the way I wanted it–my Starbucks bacon-gouda sandwich-double cooked, my milk with ice in it, my pizza with chopped garlic.  And it’s been great.  The food’s been delicious!
2.  A seventh-grade teacher.
One of my junior-high teachers–I can’t remember her name or even what she taught except that she wasn’t my English teacher, who made us read JULIUS CAESAR, which I despised, and who told an obnoxious story about her idea of the perfect student, who when asked, “Who’s there?” would answer, “It is I”–stopped me after class one day and said, “You’re a really good student, but your handwriting is terrible.”
That was an understatement.  I had skipped third grade, which is when cursive is (or was) taught, and had been flung without any preparation into fourth grade.  I had learned to write it from that large alphabet that ran along the top of the blackboard (capital letter followed by lower-case), obviously not the best way to learn anything, let alone letters that had to be connected with one another.
“Your bad handwriting’s going to handicap you going forward,” this teacher said, and told me if I was willing to bring my lunch to her room, she’d teach me cursive.  I don’t remember anything else about the lessons–whether she taught me the Palmer Method out of a book or made up her own–or how long the lessons lasted (weeks? months?).  All I know is that I now have clear, easily readable, and even, when I’m not in a hurry, beautiful handwriting, and I owe it all to her.  I’m still stunned by her kindness, reaching out to a student to help and giving up her lunchtimes to do so.

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3.  My eighth-grade teacher, whose name I do remember.
Mrs. Werner was my home-room teacher, and every day after lunch she read aloud to us, one of which was Rumer Godden’s AN EPISODE OF SPARROWS.  This is NOT a children’s book, even though its heroine, Lovejoy, was ten years old.  She was also a thief.  She lived in post-war London, and when she decided she wanted to build a garden in the rubble of a bombed-out church, she not only shoplifted seeds and a trowel, but recruited other kids to steal for her.  She was also thoroughly unpleasant.  Not without reason.  She had a slutty mother with an assortment of nasty boyfriends and was often left with strangers for months at a time.  As I say, not a book for junior-high-schoolers.
I have no idea what anybody else in the class thought about the book, but I loved it AND Lovejoy.  It was my first introduction to Rumer Godden, who I fell in love with, especially her novel about grief, IN THIS HOUSE OF BREDE.  It was also my first introduction  to how you can take a classic and update it (AN EPISODE OF SPARROWS is actually Frances Hodgson Burnett’s THE SECRET GARDEN retold.)
And it was my first introduction to the Blitz, planting a seed which blossomed when I went to St. Paul’s years later and fell in love with the fire watch and the history of London during the war–which had a HUGE impact on my life.
Thank you for reading EPISODE OF SPARROWS to me!  And thank you, Norah and Meg, for making my eating life so much more pleasant.  And THANK YOU, Seventh-Grade Teacher for giving up your lunchtimes to make my handwriting legible.  I’m sorry I don’t remember your name.  And I’m sorry I didn’t thank you before.
Thanks to everyone who’s helped me along the way–I couldn’t have done it without you!  And, to everybody reading this, have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Connie Willis

Website Update 10/12/17 — BLETCHLEY PARK AND ITS UNSUNG HEROES
I just saw an article about a reunion that Bletchley Park held on the seventy-eighth anniversary of Britain’s declaring war on Germany (after Hitler invaded Poland). More than a hundred veterans gathered at their old stomping grounds to commemorate the occasion and their contribution to the war effort.
(http://www.miltonkeynes.co.uk/news/…)

The one hundred men and women had all worked at Bletchley Park as cryptanalysts, translators, mathematicians, file clerks, typists, Typex machine operators, Wrens, traffic analysts, wireless operators, and dispatch riders, indexing, cross-referencing, translating Morse code into letters, sending, receiving, and decoding messages.

The reunion event, which included a tour of the museum’s displays, media interviews, and photograph-taking, was a far cry from the one at the end of the war, when they burned documents and were re-sworn to secrecy about what they’d done at Bletchley Park and then went home to their families, unable to tell anyone about the critical part they’d played in the war. All they could say was that they’d had “a clerical job” or “worked in the War Office.”

What they’d really done was to win the war. Working in absolute secrecy, they’d intercepted, decoded, and translated Hitler’s (and the Italians’ and the Japanese’s) impossible-to-break Enigma codes and then used that information in dozens of decisive battles. They were responsible for the winning of the Battle of the North Atlantic and the success of D-Day, as well as many other battles, and if it weren’t for them, Rommel would have reached Cairo and the Allies would have lost the North Africa campaign.

But they couldn’t tell anybody, including families and spouses, that for over twenty-five years after the war, even though for some it meant being accused of shirking their military duties. They kept the secret nonetheless, during and after the war–so completely that husbands and wives were unaware the other worked at Bletchley Park, and so were roommates. Mary Every and Betty Webb both worked in Block F, Mary translating intercepted messages between enemy aircraft and Betty paraphrasing those same messages so that if they fell into enemy hands, the Nazis wouldn’t’ be able to figure out their Enigma codes had been broken, but they were unaware they were working within a few yards of each other.

Some of them carried their secret to the grave, and one woman nearly did–she initially refused to have emergency surgery because she was afraid she might blurt out something under the anesthetic.

In 1970, F. W. Winterbotham’s book about the work Bletchley Park did, THE ULTRA SECRET, was finally published, and people were finally able to talk about their experiences. In 1995, while doing research at the Imperial War Museum for my two-volume novel, BLACKOUT and ALL CLEAR, which is partly set at Bletchley Park, I had the unique opportunity of interviewing a group of women who’d worked in World War II as ambulance drivers, fire watchers, and ARP wardens. One woman in the group said very little, and I thought she was probably just shy, but when I asked her what she’d done in the war, she smiled slyly and said, “Well…until a few years ago, I couldn’t tell you.” She had worked at Bletchley Park.

In 2009 the British government announced that Bletchley Park personnel would be recognized by a commemorative badge (which says, in typical understated fashion, “We also served”), and in 2012 Bletchley Park began holding reunions for the staff. At those reunions, Mary Every and Betty Webb found out they’d both worked in the same building and finally got to talk about their experiences in Block F, and many others made similar discoveries. For veterans like them, coming back to Bletchley Park has had a special meaning. As Doris Tuffin, aged 94, a former message transmitter, said, “It’s such a relief to come here because you had to keep the secret so long.”

This year’s event, which included a tour of the mansion, museum, and the new Codebreakers Wall, on which their names are listed, doubtless brought back memories of their time there. Bletchley Park still looks much the same as it did during the war.

I visited Bletchley Park last year–with considerable trepidation. I was terrified I’d find out I’d gotten some detail of my portrayal of it in BLACKOUT and ALL CLEAR wrong. But it looked exactly like it had in photographs taken during the war. Originally a gingerbread-style Victorian estate with extensive grounds just outside the town of Bletchley, the house was transformed into offices, guards were posted at the brick-and-wrought-iron gates, and a score of wooden huts were erected on the grounds to serve the ever-expanding workforce.

The Victorian house looked exactly the same, and so did the pond, which the scientists and Wrens skated on in the winter and swans swam on in the summer, and the beautiful lawn, where people played tennis and sat listening to concerts. The gate through which thousands of workers poured every shift change was still there, and so was the gravel drive.

Some things have changed. The main hall of the mansion now holds a costume display from the movie THE IMITATION GAME, and Hut Four has been turned into a cafeteria for tourists (with much better food than in Bletchley Park’s wartime days of rationing). Block F is gone, demolished in 1987. There’s a visitors’ center and a museum, where you can see the bombes and Enigma machines and put a message into code yourself, and in the huts, you can see life-size holograms of cryptanalysts, Typex typists, and clerks working. But from the outside, when I was there, it looked just like it did in THE IMITATION GAME and ENIGMA, and, I hope, BLACKOUT and ALL CLEAR.

What it didn’t look like, then or now, was a military intelligence operation. It looked more like a college campus, with its assortment of bookish, pipe-smoking professors and sloppily dressed nerds and pretty girls young enough to be coeds. And a whole array of eccentrics, from Turing, who wore a gas mask while riding his bicycle, to Dilly Knox, who would absentmindedly stick pieces of sandwich instead of tobacco into his pipe, and Alan Ross, who wore a blue knitted snood over his beard, and from physicists and statisticians to Egyptologists, chess players, classics scholars, Morse code experts, and crossword-puzzle whizzes.

They didn’t look much like a crack team of anything. When Winston Churchill saw them, he told Commander Denniston, “I told you to leave no stone unturned, but I had no idea you had taken me literally.” And it’s no wonder there was a local rumor that it was an insane asylum.

To add to it, the place didn’t look anything like a military facility, let alone the site of the most closely held secret of the war. I’ve always felt that one of the reasons Hitler never figured out the Allies had cracked the Enigma code was that if he’d had a place devoted to deciphering messages, it would have had high stone walls topped with barbed-wire, searchlights, dogs, and sentries armed with machine guns, not tennis and concerts. And it would have been staffed with military officers in impeccable uniforms, not pretty young debutantes wearing lipstick and professors in tweeds.
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And it would NEVER have occurred to him that those professors and debutantes would have kept the secret entrusted to them–and not just for the duration of the war, but for years and years afterward–not because they’d been bullied and threatened and terrorized into it, but because they loved their country and the values it stood for.

Bletchley Park is an amazing place, and I highly recommend visiting it. The exhibits are fascinating. But the true wonder of it is the people who worked there, from Turing, who designed the bombe that cracked Enigma and was the father of the modern computer, to Mavis Lever, who cracked the Italian naval Enigma code by realizing that the girlfriends of the Nazi coders could provide a clue to its decoding. From Tommy Flowers, who designed the Colossus computer and broke the Lorenz-encrypted messages between Hitler and his generals, to the thousands of WAAFs and Wrens and debs (many of them only eighteen) who intercepted messages, transcribed them, translated decoded messages into English, and typed, filed, cross-indexed, and saved the world.

I’m delighted they’re finally being honored and given their chance to tell their stories and reminisce about old times.

Shortly after I read the article about this year’s reunion, somebody posted the picture of the staff at the reunion with the caption, “We’ve called you here together today because the Nazis are back.”

It was funny–and yet not really. Especially after Charlottesville and the article I’d just read in the New York Times about the alt-right which quoted alt-right leader Jason Jorjani as bragging, “We will have a Europe, in 2050, where the bank notes have Adolf Hitler, Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great.” And when I read the comments sections of articles about the reunion, the number of pro-Nazi screeds was sickening.

“I thought we’d done away with the Nazis, finished, kaput,” Betty Webb said in an interview in the Independent. But if they come back, she’s ready for it. “I helped defeat the Nazis in 1941, and I’m ready to fight fascism in 2017.”

With her–and the rest of Bletchley Park’s heroes–behind us, I think we’ll be okay. Though they still don’t think of what they did as heroic. Arthur Maddocks, a mathematician who came up with cribs to break the coded messages, said, “It’s rather an exaggeration to be called heroes–the real heroes were the poor buggers doing the fighting.”

To which I say stuff and nonsense. They were–and are–the epitome of heroes!

Connie Willis
_____________________________________________________________

NOTE: If you’re interested in learning more about Bletchley Park and the work they did in World War II, I recommend:

THE ULTRA SECRET by F.W. Winterbotham
ALAN TURING: THE ENIGMA by Andrew Hodges
STATION X: THE CODEBREAKERS OF BLETCHLEY PARK by Michael Smith
THE SECRET LIFE OF BLETCHLEY PARK by Sinclair McKay

CRYPTONOMICON by Neal Stephenson
BLACKOUT and ALL CLEAR by Connie Willis

THE IMITATION GAME
ENIGMA
CODEBREAKER
THE BLETCHLEY CIRCLE, Seasons 1 and 2.

WEBSITE UPDATE–KIT REED

I was so sorry to hear last week that Kit Reed had died.  she was one of my favorite authors–and had been since I was thirteen and first read her brilliant short story, “The Wait.”  It was the most frightening story I had ever read.  It left a lasting impression on me, and from that moment on, I was on the lookout for Kit Reed stories. When I found them–stories like “The Judas Bomb,” “Mr. Da V”, and “On Behalf of the Product–they were just as good as “The Wait” and, in their own way, just as frightening.  The fear came not from slasher gore or creepy atmospherics, but from the feeling that she was telling you the truth about the world–and that truth was what you’d been afraid it was.

Kit didn’t use the usual trappings of horror.  She used harmless things like housewives and day care centers and visiting moms, small towns and celebrities and magazine ads to terrify you.  And make you think, really THINK about things you thought you understood.

Like in her novella, “Songs of War,” about an actual war between the sexes, in which the women of the town take to a military encampment up on the hill and prepare to do battle.  It was written at a time when there were lots of women’s rights stories being done, and “Songs of War” has been called a feminist story.  But that doesn’t really cover it.  She was also writing about mixed allegiances (one of the women keeps sneaking back into town to fix dinner for her husband) and misplaced loyalties and  how volunteers (no matter in what conflict for what cause) always think the war’s going to be noble and exciting and easy–till it turns into something else altogether.

Kind of like Kit’s stories.  When you’re reading “The Food Farm” or “Pilots of the Purple Twilight” or “Automatic Tiger,” you think at first it’s about the cult of celebrity or the plight of military wives or the dangers of wish fulfillment.  But Kit always has bigger fish to fry, and, as you read, you realize the story’s also about culpability or grief or losing your soul.  Or something even deeper than that.

Short stories aren’t the only thing Kit did.  She also wrote sardonic, provocative novels like FORT PRIVILEGE and MOTHER’S NOT DEAD, SHE’S ONLY SLEEPING and suspense novels like TWICE BURNED and GONE under the name of Kit Craig, and she was a journalist, winning the New England Newspaperwoman of the Year Award twice as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship, and she taught writing workshops at Wesleyan University.

But her true genius lay in her short stories, which ranged from funny to horrifying to infinitely sad.  My absolute favorite (except for “The Wait” which is in a class by itself) is “Great Escape Tours, Inc.”  It’s about a group of senior citizens who go on a field trip to the past where they’re promised they’ll be young again.  And they are.  But this is not COCOON, and the tour promoters neglected to say how young they would be or what would happen if they missed the bus back.  Only Kit Reed could have written that story–or thought of it.

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Most people never get to meet their heroes.  I was lucky.  In 1998, I was asked to write a foreword for a collection of Kit’s stories called WEIRD WOMEN, WIRED WOMEN.  It was one of the great honors of my life.  And a couple of years later, Sheila Williams, my editor at ASIMOV’S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE, called to tell me Kit wanted to have lunch with me when I was in New York.  “Oh, frabjous day, callou callay!” as Lewis Carroll would say.

“You have to promise me you won’t act like a crazed fan,” Sheila said.  “She thinks of you as a colleague, not a fan.”  Which was ridiculous–she was my hero!–and I wasn’t sure I could keep from gushing all over her, but I promised to keep the fawning to a minimum.
Kit took us to lunch at her elegant club, and I was concentrating so hard on behaving that I don’t remember anything about it except the heavenly macaroons we had for dessert (long before the whole French macaron craze swept New York.)  Nor do I remember anything we talked about except for her saying they were about to lose the macaroons because the chef who made them was leaving, and she didn’t know what she was going to do without them.

But I remember the conversation was delightful and that Kit was exactly as witty and smart and kind as I had thought she would be.

Later on I got to see her at several conventions and discovered she was as big a fan of the BBC series PRIMEVAL  as I was.  We had a number of great conversations about how well-written and cleverly plotted it was, and we also talked about politics and children and everything else.

I wish we’d had the chance to have more conversations and that I’d gotten to know her better.  And been able to communicate (without sounding like a gibbering fan girl) how wonderful I thought she was and how much her stories had inspired me.  To say I’ll miss her and her unique voice as a writer is the understatement of the century.  I don’t know what we’re all going to do without her.

Connie Willis

News about the Christmas story collection by Connie Willis, being published Oct 10 by Del Rey Books.  Updated with a new podcast interview and upcoming appearances where you can see Connie or order a signed copy.

This new, expanded edition of Miracle and Other Christmas Stories features twelve brilliantly reimagined holiday tales, five of which are collected here for the first time.

Christmas comes but once a year, yet the stories in this dazzling collection are fun to read anytime. They put a speculative spin on the holiday, giving fans of acclaimed author Connie Willis a welcome gift and a dozen reasons to be of good cheer.

Brimming with Willis’s trademark insights and imagination, these heartwarming tales are full of humor, absurdity, human foibles, tragedy, joy, and hope. They both embrace and send up many of the best Christmas traditions, including the holiday newsletter, Secret Santas, office parties, holiday pageants, and Christmas dinners (both elaborate and spare). There are Rockettes, the best and worst Christmas movies, modern-day Magi, Ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Yet to Come—and the triumph of generosity over greed. Like all the timeless classics we return to year after year, these stories affirm our faith in love, magic, and the wonder of the season.

You can read the introduction at the Penguin Random House page for the book

Table of Contents

Introduction

Miracle

All About Emily

Inn

All Seated on the Ground

In Coppelius’s Toyshop

Adaption

deck.halls@boughs/holly

Cat’s Paw

Now Showing

Newsletter

Epiphany

Just Like the Ones We Used to Know

A Final Word on the Subject

An Advent Calendar of Great Christmas Movies to Watch

And a Score of Christmas Stories and Poems to Read After You’ve Gone to Bed

Plus a Half Dozen TV Shows You May Not Have Seen That Haven’t Succumbed to “Very Special Christmas Episode” Syndrome

======================================

Connie Willis Interviewed on The Week in Geek Podcast.
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MY SCHEDULE FOR FALL 2017

October 27-29–
MILEHICON
Denver, Colorado
October 27 to 29
(I’ll be doing an hour-long presentation on Irony and several panels. I’ll be there all three days of the convention.)

Wednesday, November 8
READING FROM A LOT LIKE CHRISTMAS
OLD TOWN LIBRARY
201 Peterson Street
Fort Collins, Colorado
6:00 p.m.

Saturday, November 11
TALK AND READING FROM A LOT LIKE CHRISTMAS
Tattered Cover
2526 E. Colfax Avenue
Denver, Colorado

Saturday, November 18
READING AND SIGNING FROM A LOT LIKE CHRISTMAS
Barnes and Noble
4045 S. College Avenue
Fort Collins, Colorado

Saturday, November 18
TALK AND SIGNING
Broadway Book Mall
200 S. Broadway
Denver, Colorado

Tuesday, November 21
TALK AND SIGNING
Page One Books
5850 Eubank Blvd., Suite B-41
Albuquerque, New Mexico

WEBSITE UPDATE–CHARLOTTESVILLE–8-17-17

ON TRUMP’S PRESS CONFERENCE

“I decline to be impartial between the fire brigade and the fire.”

Winston Churchill

“You had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other that was very violent.”
Donald Trump

Since this is my author website, I try for the most part to post about writing rather than politics, but there are times when remaining silent is not an option.

This is one of those times. Last weekend neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan held a torchlight rally in an American city, a rally bearing a chilling resemblance to both lynch-mob Klan rallies and the Nuremburg rallies:
–A rally at which the participants displayed swastikas, Confederate flags, and Klan paraphernalia and shouted, “Jews will not replace us!” and the Nazi slogan, “Blood and soil!” and “Heil Trump!” while doing the stiff-armed Nazi salute.
–A rally at which people shouted, “F–k you, f—-ts!” and “Go the f–k back to Africa, n—-rs!” and stood, armed with semi-automatic rifles across the street from a synagogue while Nazi websites encouraged them to burn the building.
–A rally during which a woman and two police officers were killed and dozens of other people were injured, including a University of Virginia librarian who was hit in the neck, partially dissecting his carotid artery and causing him to have a stroke.

President Trump said this about that rally on Saturday:

“We condemn this egregious display of hatred, bigotry,
and violence on many sides, on many sides.”

And then, just in case we didn’t understand what he was saying, followed it up on Tuesday with:

“What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right? Do they have any semblance of guilt? Let me ask you this: What about the fact that they came charging, that they came charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs? Do they have any problem? I think they do.”

And:

There “was blame on both sides.”

And:

“You had a lot of people in that group (the Klan and neo- Nazi rally) that were there to innocently protest and very innocently protest…”

And:

“You had a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit and they were very, very violent.”

In other words, both sides–the neo-Nazis and KKK people and the people who came out to protest their hateful rally–were morally equivalent. You know, like the Nazis who bombed London and the RAF who tried to stop them. Or the Nazis who ran the death camps and the Allied forces who liberated them. Or the Civil Rights workers in the Sixties who went to Alabama to register voters and the good ole boys who murdered them. Exactly the same. Equally to blame.
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Well, they’re not. And all the spin (the White House sent out talking points today encouraging news outlets to blame both sides) or the parsing of Trump’s words, or the claims that that isn’t what he meant or that he isn’t really a racist down deep, can’t make them the same. As House Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “There are no good neo-Nazis.”

And letting Trump get away with this means we’re okay with a President who sides with the neo-Nazis and white supremacists, one of whom said on TV today, “I’m sorta glad that them people got hit and I’m glad that girl died” (Justin Moore, Grand Dragon for the Loyal Knights of the KKK in Pelham) and another (neo-Nazi Christopher Cantwell) proclaimed, “We’re not nonviolent–we’ll f–king kill these people if we have to.”

It also means we’re okay with what’s likely to happen next as a result of Trump’s emboldening these people. (And just in case you don’t think Trump was doing that, look at what David Duke, the former head of the KKK, and Jason Kessler, the organizer of the rally, tweeted in response to Trump’s comments.)

Their representatives were on TV all day yesterday excitedly planning rallies (nine planned for this weekend), intimidation, and violence, convinced that Trump is on their side. Cantwell predicted “A lot more people are going to die before we’re done here,” and a twenty-three-year-old man was just arrested for attempting to bomb a bank building in Oklahoma City in tribute to Timothy McVeigh.

So what’s next? Another car driven into a crowd of peaceful protesters? Another Murrah Federal Building bombing? Another Kristallnacht?

I don’t know, but, listening all day to reporters say that Republicans are really, really upset with Trump but are afraid to call him out by name for fear of alienating “his base,” I can see exactly how Hitler happened. It was because people refused to speak up until it was too late. Or hoped it would all blow over. Or thought if they kept their heads down, like General Kelly, they’d be okay.

We won’t. We have to speak up.

Thankfully, a lot of people already have:

Charles Krauthammer, conservative columnist: “It was a moral disgrace.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: “It’s a disgrace that we still need to say that neo-Nazis and white supremacists are wrong–as if this is somehow not obvious.”

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumko: “On Tuesday President Trump stood in the lobby of his tower on 5th Avenue in Manhattan and again made excuses for bigotry and terrorism.”

The head of every branch of the military released statements that the military do not tolerate racism.

USA Today is calling for the Congress to censure President Trump.

Senator Patrick Leahy: “Mr. President, Heather Heyer was not murdered by both sides.”

Chuck Todd: “President Trump has likely lost moral authority to speak for the country and the Republican Party.”

J.K. Rowling: “One good thing about that abomination of a speech, it’s now impossible for any Trump supporter to pretend they don’t know what he is.”

And Tony Schwartz tweeted: “The end game is on. Trump goes down or we do. He will blow up the world to prove he matters. We must stand up in opposition every day.”

But it’s not enough. We need to speak up, too. Tweet. Write posts on Facebook. Call your Representatives and Senators. Call somebody else’s Representatives and Senators. Shout it to the rooftops! Tell them there’s no place in America for the KKK or Nazis! Or for a President who makes excuses for them, sides with them, and eggs them on!

Connie Willis

Website update 8-9-17

There’s nothing SF writers hate worse than being proved right. That’s because our predictions that come true hardly ever turn out to be the positive ones.

I should say right off the bat that SF writers aren’t actually in the business of making predictions, which is a good thing. Our record in that department is lousy. True, Heinlein predicted the credit card and the microwave, but he also predicted we’d all be using rolling roads by now and taking our slide rules with us into space. Clarke predicted space elevators and space stations, but had us sinking in fifty feet of sand on the moon. William Gibson may have predicted multi-national computer hackers in NEUROMANCER, but he didn’t see either Facebook or middle-school cyberbullying coming.

That’s because prediction like the psychics claim to do isn’t what we’re doing. Our job is to extrapolate, an entirely different thing, to look at trends and possibilities and say, “If this goes on, here’s what’s liable to happen.” But even though we’re not trying to be John Edward or Jeane Dixon, some of what we write about does come to pass. In my short story, “Samaritan,” I had apes being taught sign language, returning to their zoos, and teaching the rest of the primates to sign, which actually happened a couple of years after the story came out.

That’s about the only good thing I’ve ever predicted that came true. Everything else–from over-the-top ridiculous Christmas décor (“deck.halls@boughs/holly”) to duct-tape-fashions (BELLWETHER), has been stuff I’d rather hadn’t have happened.

Especially all the stuff I proposed in REMAKE. When I wrote the book back in 1995, CGI was limited to a few space ships blowing up, but in the years since nearly everything in the book has come to pass, from CGI-constructed stars to resurrecting dead actors. And messing with the classics to suit current sensibilities.

In REMAKE, my hero’s job is the “clean up” classic movies, removing the smoking and drinking and other no longer socially acceptable things from CASABLANCA and NOW, VOYAGER and IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT. And now here’s Sony announcing they’re going to release “clean” versions of movies for viewing by “a wider family audience,” removing graphic violence, offensive language, sexual innuendo, gore, and “adult content,” (whatever the heck that is) from such movies as SPIDERMAN, GHOSTBUSTERS, MONEYBALL, CAPTAIN PHILLIPS, and CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON.

It’s hard to see exactly what that family audience is doing watching CAPTAIN PHILLIPS (you know, the one about the Somali pirates who kidnapped everyone on a ship and began murdering them) or Judd Apatow movies in the first place, which makes me wonder if this wasn’t done more to sell movies to the religious right, who’ve responded enthusiastically to the idea, praising the initiative, which would make watching “high quality films without crude scenes and language” possible and protect them from the “worldly influences” of most films.

But, that aside, there’s still the issue of whether people should be able to mess with someone else’s work of art. The people defending the initiative say movies aren’t works of art, but products, and as such, can be endlessly retooled to appeal to the public, like Coca-Cola and iPhones. As one blog put it, censoring out profanity in a “sometimes disposable diversion like STEP-BROTHERS” is hardly akin to modifying “a historical and timeless work of art.”
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Actually, that’s exactly what it is. Every movie (and book and poem and painting) is some artist’s creation, and the only one with the right to change it (or give permission to change it) is the author.

This is not a new issue. Look at all the attempts to censor and/or bowdlerize everything from Mark Twain’s THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN to Shakespeare’s ROMEO AND JULIET. (The word “bowdlerize,” in fact, comes from Thomas Bowdler, who changed Ophelia’s death to an accidental drowning and changed Lady Macbeth’s “Out, damned spot!” to “Out, crimson spot!”) And it’s not the first time for the movies, either. Even before Sony’s initiative, there were numerous filtering and expurgating programs out there, like VidAngel and Utah’s CleanFlicks and the ClearPlay DVD Player (all currently being sued by the movie industry).

The cleaning up is always done for the best of reasons. When five of Emily Dickinson’s poems were submitted for publication in the local paper, the editor helpfully “fixed” all the punctuation (eliminating those awful dashes!) and changed her “near-rhymes” into real rhymes, completely butchering them. In like manner, groups have cut WHEN HARRY MET SALLY’s famous orgasm scene out, left the main action scene out of THE MATRIX, and made the two women in the award-winning CAROL “just friends.”

Which is the other reason fiddling can’t be allowed. It’s the slipperiest of slopes. I mean, since you’re taking the smoking out of CASABLANCA, why not get rid of the scene where the Nazis shoot Peter Lorre? It’s “graphic violence,” and so is Rick’s shooting the Nazi at the end. And that ending’s such a downer. Let’s fix it so Rick and Ilsa fly off together instead. Only that’ll change that other scene in WHEN HARRY MET SALLY where they discuss CASABLANCA’s ending, too, so that’ll need to be taken out, too, and while we’re at it….

Luckily for those of us who want the movies left alone, the response to Sony’s initiative has been furious. Judd Apatow went ballistic with a decidedly non-clean tweet, followed by Seth Rogan’s slightly less profane message: “Holy sh*t please don’t do this to our movies. Thanks.” Andrew McKay objected and the Directors Guild went to battle, demanding Sony take down the movies already released and get directors’ permission before altering any others, and they’ve now
pulled back, but you can be sure this’ll be tried again, especially since modern tech makes fiddling with film–and books–so easy.

Which was what I was trying to say in REMAKE. And it, by the way, was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not a how-to manual!

Connie Willis

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