The Connie Willis . Net Blog

Wednesday, November 9, 2016
The Day After the Election

My mom died when I was twelve, and one of the things I remember about that day was how strange it felt that the world continued to go on going to work, eating, shopping, laughing, chatting about the weather, and watching TV, as if the world had not catastrophically, irrevocably changed.

I had that same feeling this morning as we walked our dog, amazed that our neighbors had put out their trash, that the students on campus were still blithely talking about term papers and being late to class. “How can you be worried about that?” I wanted to scream at them. “Don’t you understand what’s just happened?”

America, the country I love, has elected a man who supports torture, “even if it doesn’t work,” and who’s promised to deport millions of immigrants, put Muslims under surveillance, require a religious test for citizenship, pull out of NATO and leave Europe at the mercy of Russia, leave Japan and South Korea at the mercy of North Korea, put his political opponent in jail, dismantle freedom of the press, and require everyone to say, “Merry Christmas.”

It’s elected a man who mocks people and calls them names, talks publicly about his own sexual prowess in the most crass way, insults war heroes and Gold Star families, cruelly imitates the disabled, and, by his own admission, sexually assaults women. And then threatens to sue them when they confirm his crimes.

In one fell stroke, Americans have changed forever the way we’ll be seen by the rest of the world, and worse, the way we see ourselves. Nations can survive almost anything (look at England in World War II.) The one thing they can’t survive is their citizens losing faith in what they stand for. And yesterday our nation said it stands for racism, misogyny, homophobia, bullying, the breaking of treaties, and the use of brute force and/or blackmail to get its way, things I could never stand for, never believe in.

It handed the One Ring to Sauron, and now all hell is about to break loose.
So how can the sky still be blue? How can the sun still be shining?

To quote W.H. Auden:

The stars are not wanted now, put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.”

Connie Willis

Thursday.
Two days after the election.

Feeling a little better, not because my assessment of things is any less grim than it was yesterday. but I’ve been remembering World War II and the Blitz and how the Brits held up in the face of certain disaster, and it’s made me a bit more cheerful. I knew all that research for “Fire Watch” and Blackout/All Clear would come in handy someday.

Some insights that might be helpful in our current situation:

–Just because things look bleak, it doesn’t mean you should give up.
Things looked worse than bleak for Britain.. Not only had France been totally occupied, the British Army’s equipment abandoned on the beaches of Dunkirk, the RAF badly decimated, London–and Liverpool and Manchester and Coventry–pounded into dust, but for four and a half years Great Britain lost battle after battle, convoy after convoy, and there was scarcely any good news. But they didn’t give up. And they eventually won the war.

–It’s entirely appropriate to feel kicked in the gut, scared, and despairing right now.
When all this first happened, the British weren’t the “Keep Calm and Carry On” heroes we all know about and admire. After the soldiers were rescued off Dunkirk, they came home exhausted, battle-shocked, and completely demoralized, and at the beginning of the Blitz, Londoners were terrified and close to panic. It took them a few days to pull themselves together, and during that time they were really scared. But then they rallied. And decided to not give up without a fight.

–Don’t think there’s nothing you can do.
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The British never took the attitude of “I’m only one person. What can I possibly do?” Instead, they each did their bit, volunteering to spot fires and drive ambulances, signing up for the Home Guard and the ARP, manning anti-aircraft guns and putting on ENSA revues and passing out tea and sandwiches at canteens.

And they performed miracles. A flotilla of retired sailors and weekend mariners and young kids rescued the entire British Army from Dunkirk right from under Hitler’s nose. A ragtag bunch of choir directors, vergers, and church staff saved St. Paul’s Cathedral. A bevy of naked girls kept the Windmill Theater open. And an eccentric band of mathematicians and college professors and crossword puzzle enthusiasts broke the Enigma code and won the war.

So do your bit. Demonstrate. Protest injustices. Write your senators and congressmen. Donate to the organizations who can fight for the causes which are in danger. Write blogs. Speak out.

–Don’t let this ruin everything in your life.
The British didn’t let Hitler ruin their daily lives or their morale. He may have been raining bombs down on them, but they continued to have Christmas parties in the Underground shelters, continued to go dancing and shopping and to concerts and the movies and church, continued to laugh and fall in love and have children. They continued to read and wrote books, put on plays, work to keep all the things they cared about alive. And in the process, they kept civilization going.

–Follow Virginia Woolf’s example described below.
Virginia was working in the garden, and her husband Leonard called out for her to come inside, that Hitler was just about to speak on the radio.
Virginia refused. “I am planting irises,” she said, “and they will be here long after Hitler is gone.”

And they are. You can go see the irises at their house, still blooming.

Connie Willis

Oh, and one other thing.

To all you people who voted for Trump:

I’m already hearing a lot of talk about how liberals brought this on by living in a bubble or not understanding Trump’s supporters’ point of view or not realizing how much white men have been hurting, etc. So let me get this straight. Because we foolishly thought this was a country that was kinder and more enlightened than it actually is, because we foolishly thought all Americans believed in the same principles of freedom and fairness we did, you were forced to elect a bullying, arrogant, lying, anti-gay, anti-women, anti-immigrant, cruel, authoritarian narcissist to the position of the most powerful person in the world.
I’m not buying it. This is the kind of thing abusers say to justify their crimes–“You forced me to hit you. If you hadn’t made me mad, it would never have happened.”

But that’s a lie. And an excuse. The truth is: I didn’t do this, and neither did the left or the Democrats or anybody who voted for Hillary. You did this, and we have no intention of taking the blame for it.

I’ve spent the last two years obsessively following Trump’s campaign, becoming more and more alarmed, and telling anyone who would listen how dangerous he is. I worked Hillary’s campaign, donated money, helped get the vote out, and voted for her. *I* wasn’t the one who voted for someone racist who abused women and mocked the disabled and advocated torture “even if it doesn’t work,” and neither were the Democrats or the left. You  were.

You set us on a course that will lead us relentlessly not just into the past, but into the dark, ugly past we’ve fought so hard to come out of. It’s a course which is likely to spin out of control and take us places we can’t even imagine. And whatever happens, whatever damage he does, whatever whirlwind we end up reaping, it will be your fault and nobody else’s.

We’re all going to suffer for what you’ve done, but we’re jolly well not going to take the fall for this, too. The blame is squarely on you and only you.

Connie Willis

*Please note, Connie sends her updates to be posted here, but she is not personally on this blog and I (the webmaster) usually have comments turned off.

Crosstalk by Connie Willis is being published by Del Rey on October 4th, 2016.

Part romantic comedy and part social satire, here one of science fiction’s most lauded authors examines the consequences of having too much connectivity, and what happens in a world where, suddenly, nothing is private.

One of science fiction’s premiere humorists turns her eagle eye to the crushing societal implications of telepathy. In a not-too-distant future, a simple outpatient procedure that has been promised to increase empathy between romantic partners has become all the rage. So when Briddey Flannigan’s fiancé proposes that he and Briddey undergo the procedure, she is delighted! Only…the results aren’t quite as expected. Instead of gaining an increased empathetic link with her fiancé, Briddey finds herself hearing the actual thoughts of one of the nerdiest techs in her office. And that’s the least of her problems.

For more information, visit the GoodReads page for Crosstalk
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The U.K. edition is being published in paperback by Gollancz on September 15, 2016.

NOTES FROM WALES I:
BUCKLAND AND WESTMARCH AND ELVES, OH MY!

My family and I just got back from England, where we spent two weeks touring Cornwall and Wales. We saw Doc Martin’s village, Tintagel Castle, Dartmoor, Tintern Abbey, the shop of the Tailor of Gloucester, and lots of other fascinating things, which I hope to be writing posts about in coming weeks.

None of us had ever been to Wales and we weren’t sure what to expect. My husband’s ancestors came from Wales. They settled in Colorado, probably drawn there by mining, either the gold and silver being dug out of the mountains or the coal being mined around Louisville, but that was all we knew about them.

Or about Wales, for that matter. Our knowledge was pretty much limited to How Green Was My Valley and The Man Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain, and we had vague notions of coal mines, castles, and mountain valleys (all of which we saw.)

I was also aware of some of the literary connections–Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey; Portmerion, where The Prisoner was filmed; Llandudno, where the real Alice in Wonderland spent her summers; Doctor Who; and, of course, Dylan Thomas.

But the literary connection I hadn’t expected to find was that of J.R.R. Tolkien–I hadn’t even realized he’d been to Wales. But its influence on The Lord of the Rings was everywhere in the names–the Border Marches, Buckland, Dinas Bran, Dwimmerlaik, the Hillmen, Olwen, Elidir–and in the woods and rushing streams and dells, the mountains and mines and the promise of the sea beyond.

Standing on the battlements of Conwy Castle, looking out across the estuary, I felt like Pippin in Minas Tirith. I kept expecting the black-sailed ships of the Corsairs of Umbar to come sailing up from the sea. Picking our way along a stony path over tangles of exposed roots to get to a waterfall you could walk behind, we might have been Frodo and Sam being led by Faramir to the Window of the West. And one night of pouring rain we ate in a warm, smoky old pub that was a dead ringer for the inn at Bree.

We saw wide rushing rivers that were the image of the Bruinen that Glorfindel carried Frodo across, stone houses perched high up on the side of a mountain like Rivendell, dark, ominous tarns like the one that lay just outside the gates of Moria, and ugly slag heaps straight out of Mordor.

And listen to this description from a Victorian guidebook of the view from a peak in Snowdonia:
“…to the west and north, the mountains of Gwynedd, including Snowdon, home of the 4 eagles…to the southwest, a line of serrated hills, running far into the sea, forms the promontory of Eivion and Lleyn, land of gigantic fortresses and weird, lonely peaks, to the east…the iron and lead hills of Flint, shading into the distant vale of Maelor, to the south the upper waters of the holy Dee and the Berwyn ranges: Aran, Cader Idris, Cader Vronwen…to the east, the hills of Powys fade away into the dim, distant lowlands of England…”

Doesn’t that sound exactly like Tolkien? I know he said the attempted ascent of Caradhras was inspired by a trip to the Alps, but it’s obvious Wales’s mountains had an influence on him, too.

And so did Wales’s history. Everything we learned about it reminded us of Lord of the Rings, too, from the Red Book of Hergest (the inspiration for the Red Book of Westmarch?) to Legolas’s longbow. The Welsh invented the longbow and were deadly at it, and when they joined the English at Crecy and Agincourt, they were unstoppable. Reading about the battles, I couldn’t help thinking of the army of elves, marching in with their longbows to fight with Aragorn at Helm’s Deep.

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And when I read about Owen Glendower, a hero with royal blood who was forced to live the life of an outlaw in the wilderness, waiting to regain his birthright, it was impossible not to think of Aragorn. Especially when Glendower appeared out of nowhere to save the day, unfurling his banner as he rode–a white banner with a golden dragon on it.

When I got home, I did some research on Wales and Tolkien and discovered that not only had he taught medieval Welsh at the University of Leeds from 1920 to 1925, but that he’d written part of The Lord of the Rings while staying in Talybout-on-Usk, only a few miles from the Buckland Estate. But when I looked up “Wales’ Influence on Tolkien,” I could only find essays on the elves’ language and their singing. Wales’s influence on them can’t be denied. The Welsh are famous for their choirs and their beautiful voices, from Ivor Novello to Charlotte Church. And the origin of Elvish is obvious. As one elderly native speaker said of the elves when she saw the movie, “Why, they’re speaking Welsh!”

But it’s clear to me after having been in Wales, that its influence on The Lord of the Rings was much broader. Everywhere you look, you are of reminded of Mirkwood and Minas Tirith, of old wars and rings of power and abandoned mines. And elves. And dragons. “I love Wales, and especially the Welsh language,” Tolkien once said, and that was obvious everywhere we went. Wales is definitely Tolkien country!

Conwy Castle, or the walls of Minas Tirith

Brecon Beacons, or Faramir’s path

Snowdonia, or the Misty Mountains

  Sgwd Isaf Clwn-gwyn (White Meadow Falls), or Window of the West

Swallow Falls near Betws-y-Coed, or Bruinen

The mining slag heaps at Blaeunau Ffestiniog, or Mordor

Photos courtesy of Cordelia Willis