Paul could mistakenly be sent back in time to St.Paul’s Cathedral during the blitz is borderline ridiculous, but Willis isn’t that kind of writer. Looking at ‘Fire Watch’ from a rational, traditional SF position the premise that a historian who studied St. It is also one of the annoyances, as Willis then frequently creates implausible setups for them. Sometimes these quirky quests are personal obsessions, but sometimes (because these are science fiction stories) the fate of the whole world may hinge on the timely discovery of the right clue by one bright yet basically powerless person.įor me that is one of the charms of the best of these stories, that Willis’ characters aren’t omnicompetent superheroes but closer to ‘ordinary’ people. Worrying that they’ve misunderstood something important, and consumed by the certainty that there is little time left to get it right. Lisa Tuttle has a go in her introduction, identifying a number of Willis protagonists on quixotic quests: What makes it so good? Are there recurrent themes that explain Willis’ huge popularity? So this is a collection subtitled ‘The Best Of Connie Willis’, although qualified (sub-subtitled, as it were) on the cover as ‘The Hugo and Nebula Award-Winning Short Fiction’.

Eight of them won the Hugo Award, the other two were amongst the five that picked up Nebulas. The novels of Connie Willis are popular enough that maybe I don’t need to tell you about them, but how about her short fiction? Time Is The Fire is the first UK collection of Willis’ shorter fiction and features ten stories originally published between 19.

Fire Watch by Connie Willis