Stellar sci-fi author grounded in Greeley

Mark Graham, Special To The Rocky

Saturday, October 27, 2007

Ask the average reader to name the most honored science fiction writer ever, and odds are Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke would come up. But if the Hugo and the Nebula awards are considered the measuring stick, Connie Willis stands above them all.

The World Science Fiction Society hands out the award named for Hugo Gernsbach, an early 20th-century writer sometimes called the father of science fiction. The Hugos are voted on by sci-fi fans at the society's annual convention; the Nebula Awards are voted on by members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Not only has Willis, 61, won more Hugos (9) and Nebulas (6) than anyone else, she is the only one to have won both awards in all categories: short story, novelette, novella and novel. Add nine Locus awards, voted by readers of the most important science fiction and fantasy magazine, and it's a wonder that her Greeley home hasn't sunk into the ground from the weight of those trophies.

So it makes a sort of cosmic sense that when the World Science Fiction Society began handing out Hugo Awards in 1953, it was also a big year for 8-year-old Connie Willis of Englewood, who was celebrating what she now calls the most important day in her life - the arrival of her first library card.

Willis had just seen Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz and asked the librarian if there was a book version. The lady took her into another room and "there they were, a whole shelf of L. Frank Baum's books about Oz."

"I took out three, because you were only allowed to take three, and I read them that night and came back the next day for three more. In a couple of weeks I read them all. And I knew that I had to be a writer, to write stories like that."

After finishing Englewood High School, Willis attended Colorado State College (now the University of Northern Colorado) and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in elementary education. After college she spent a few years substitute teaching, but was never hired full time. Call it the best job she never got.

"If I had been offered a full-time teaching job, I would have taken it, and all this never would have happened. I would have written an occasional story, but I doubt I ever would have had time to become the writer I am today."

With pen in hand

While it may have taken a while for Willis to become a successful writer, early on she knew what kind of writer she aspired to be. "All I wanted when I was 13 was to be a science fiction writer. When I read Robert Heinlein's Have Spacesuit Will Travel, in fact all of Heinlein's books, I knew that was what I wanted to be."

But her first stories in the 1960s were affairs of the heart: Willis was first published in romance magazines "because my grandmother read them and (the stories) were easy to write."

Santa Titicaca, her first published science fiction story, appeared in the now-defunct Worlds of If in 1971. The awards started coming in 1983, when she won her first Hugo (novelette: Fire Watch) and two Nebulas (novelette: Fire Watch; short story: A Letter from the Clearys).

Some things have surely changed since then, but not her approach to writing. Willis keeps to a fairly strict schedule, working three hours in the morning, three more in the afternoon. But unlike many authors, she doesn't work at home; Willis just finds a quiet corner of the Student Center at UNC or the local coffee shop.

"I can't work at home; the phone rings. But there is no one around at the Student Center except at meals. I can always find a really quiet corner, and I know that I won't be bothered. Then I come home for lunch to do the things that have to be done: the mail and the contracts and the phone calls and walk the dog (Smudge, a bulldog). Then I try to go back."

It's a tightly focused regimen, for a reason.

"My life has to be a pretty solitary life, because if I fill it with lots of people I never get anything done. I like to write at a coffee shop like Margie's or Starbucks because that way I can be a little social. I know the regulars, and they say something to me, but just like five minutes' worth, and then I write.

"By being a part of that, you feel like if you fell off the Earth, somebody would notice, because you didn't come in for a couple of days. And someone would go, 'Where is she?' and they might check on you."

Willis hand-writes her stories on a Big Chief tablet, the kind many of us used in grammar school.

"I prefer to write my first drafts in longhand. And Big Chiefs are the most wonderful tablets, great paper - great to write on, and just the right size. I started out this way and have just always felt that it is right for fiction. People have tried to convert me to working on the computer. But computers' batteries go dead sometimes. If I run out of ink or break a pencil, I can always get another one."

Getting enough Big Chief tablets, Willis says, isn't as easy. "They are really hard to find, but a friend bought several cases on eBay and keeps me and a couple of other authors stocked."

"I do have a secretary, who has worked for me for almost 20 years. She comes in on Saturday and puts the stuff on computer for me and I work from there on the other drafts," says Willis, lest you think she has shunned modern convenience. But she does embrace the old.

"All science fiction writers are really reactionary people. We live in the past; we love books; we love paper; we love pens and ink (and tablets) and things like that."

'Our passions are different'

How important is literature in Willis' life?

Back in the early '60s, she was considering a breakup with her then-fiance. But at the same time, she became so immersed in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings that she forgot to do it. And now she and Courtney Willis, a UNC physics professor, have been married 40 years.

"We met at UNC and never imagined that we would end up living in Greeley," Courtney says. "It was 29 years after I majored in physics here that, after teaching in several other places, we finally ended up back where we started."

While Courtney Willis notes that his wife's writing career made it easy for them to move around as he pursued a teaching career, it's their differences that keep them together.

"One of the reasons we have gotten along so well is that our passions are different. We never compete and always support each other. I was a college gymnast and coached gymnastics early in my career, and Connie, who really didn't have much interest in that, has been to a lot of gymnastics meets and now knows a lot about the sport.

"Most of my reading is nonfiction, especially in the sciences, but I have been to a lot of science fiction conventions and know more about the subject than I ever imagined."

The couple have a daughter, Cordelia, who is a forensic scientist in California: "Just like CSI," the author says, "but without the cool clothes."

While Willis often travels to speak at conventions, in Greeley she's just another neighbor. "I get the best of both worlds. I get to be famous when I go to conventions, and here I can just sing in the choir, live my regular life and be one of those strange eccentric people.

"People are always saying, 'Don't you wish you were like Joanne Rowling?' I would kill myself if I were Joanne Rowling. I can't imagine what her life must be like. She must have to just wall herself off from everything. That's awful.

"She used to really love to write in coffee shops. One of my chief pleasures is to go to Margie's or Starbucks and write. And she can't do that. I know all the kids at Starbucks and Margie's, but they don't know me from my writing. It's a great level of fame."

The coming chapters

Willis has written a Christmas story, set in Denver, for Asimov Magazine's December issue. All Clear, the novel that has taken up most of her time for the past six years, is due out in two volumes from Bantam Spectra next year. But all this success hasn't gone to her head.

"It's so weird. Writers are schizophrenic. I feel like I fail a thousand times a day. When I was 13 and I started reading the Nebula Awards collections . . . the most fabulous thing I could think was to be in one of those collections with some of those famous authors.

"By my 30s I had won two Nebulas, which no one had done, and so I thought, 'What do I do now? I've reached the pinnacle of my fantasy.'

"If you had sat me down, my young self, and said, 'You're going to know Bradbury, and you're going to know Asimov, and you're going to know Harlan Ellison, and you're going to have all these wonderful friends in the field and you are going to win all these awards . . . I would have thought I was the luckiest person alive.

"And yet, it's still a life and it's still grim, and, of course, I have won some of these awards when people I love were dying, and I would give up all of it to have those people back.

"There are limits on any earthly career; you will always fall short of your own expectations. I do feel just tremendously lucky to have had the career I have had."

And Willis has a good sense of perspective, even though she's won the most awards of any science fiction writer and sold scores of books. She wryly notes that as far as authors at the University of Northern Colorado go, she's still behind James Michener.

"He has a library named after him. I just have half a dorm."

Supernatural style

Mark Graham reviews science fiction, horror and supernatural writing for the Rocky. How he describes Willis' style:

? Connie Willis' works are bright, sometimes humorous, relevant and timely. Whether writing a tale of time travelers stuck in the London blitz or telling one of her yearly Christmas stories, her characters are sharply drawn and empathetic, her settings and other details painstakingly researched, her plot twists carefully prepared. Like Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury and most of the other important authors in the genre, she uses science fiction as a metaphor for life. Her works should appeal to mainstream readers as well as science fiction fans.

The definitive Willis

Graham suggests some Willis books:

? The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (collection, Subterranean, 700 pages, 2007). This is the biggest collection ever of her short works and contains most of the ones that have won awards. Willis, who thinks writers should never write introductions, wrote a laugh-out- loud introduction with insights into what makes her a great author.

? Doomsday Book (novel, Bantam Spectra, 442 pages, 1992). Time travelers from late 21st-century Oxford University heading for the Middle Ages accidentally land in Europe in the middle of the Black Plague, a combination of science fiction and history that is unmatched.

? To Say Nothing of the Dog (novel, Bantam Spectra, 434 pages, 1997). The time travelers this time end up in Coventry Cathedral during the Nazi air raids in this intimate look at the courage of the British people.

? Passage (novel, Bantam Spectra, 594 pages, 2001). A sometimes humorous look at near- death experiences and one of the best books about the sinking of the Titanic.

? Bellwether (novel, Bantam Spectra, 243 pages, 1996). This tale of chaos theory and how fads and trends occur is Willis at her humorous best.

Mark Graham is the Rocky's Unreal Worlds critic and lives in Arvada.