In spite of Connie Willis’s numerous science fiction awards and her groundbreaking history as a woman in the field, there is a surprising dearth of critical publication surrounding her work. Taking Doomsday Book as its cue, this collection argues that Connie Willis’s most famous novel, along with the rest of her oeuvre, performs science fiction’s task of cognitive estrangement by highlighting our human inability to read the times correctly—and yet also affirming the ethical imperative to attempt to truly observe and record our temporal location. Willis’s fiction emphasizes that doomsdays happen every day, and they risk being forgotten by some, even as their trauma repeats for others. However, disasters also have the potential to upend accepted knowledge and transform the social order for the better, and this collection considers the ways that Willis pairs comic and tragic modes to reflect these uncertainties.
Author(s): Carissa Turner Smith
Series: Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 292
City: New York
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Gender
Meta-science Fiction
Historical Science Fiction Through the Lens of Trauma Studies and Posthumanist Ethics
Religious Themes and Postsecularity
Comedy and Tragedy
Overviews
Notes
Bibliography
Part I Contagion
1 All This Has Happened Before, and All This Will Happen Again: Doomsday Book and Recurring Pandemics
Notes
Bibliography
2 Flip Passes: Interpreting Agency and Contagion in Bellwether
Bellwether and 1990s Models of Contagion
Flip And/as Contagion
The Piper, Or “Pippa After All”
Notes
Bibliography
Part II Individual and Collective Trauma
3 Emergency Unpreparedness: Responses to Disaster in Connie Willis’s Passage
The Individual and the Collective in Disaster
The Truth About Disaster
Disaster Causes and Effects
Ecological Elephant in the Room
The Next Disaster
Notes
Bibliography
4 Taking It Personally: Private Engagement With Public Trauma From World War II to J.F.K.
Attention, Time Travelers! Intentions Matter
Blackout/All Clear: No One Is “Neutral” When It Comes to the Nazis
What’s in a Name?
No Such Thing as an Innocent Bystander
11/22/63: One Move to Change History
Know Your History … Or Not
The Devil, the Details, Et Cetera
Hiding in Plain Sight
Is Everyone Lying?
If You Could Change One Thing …
Endings, Happy and Otherwise
Notes
Bibliography
Part III Incarnation and Embodiment
5 “You Were Here All Along”: Doomsday Book and the Bodies of Christ
Dunworthy
Father Roche
Kivrin
Hands
Notes
Bibliography
6 Christmas Every Day: Incarnational Theology in Connie Willis’s “Inn” and “Epiphany”
Incarnation Every Day
Christmas Time
Recognizing Incarnation
Gazing at Epiphany
Notes
Bibliography
Part IV Intertextuality
7 Bell Speech in John Donne, Richard Wilbur, and Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book
That Bells Might Speak: “The Bells Mark Time”
What Bells Might Say: “The Voice of These Bells”
Fulfilled Time in Doomsday Book
Notes
Bibliography
8 Finding Love (And Truth?) in the Midst of Chaos: The Influence of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Detective Fiction On To Say Nothing of the Dog
Finding Love in the Midst of Chaos
Finding Truth in the Midst of Chaos
Notes
Bibliography
Part V Genre, Gender, and Xenophobia
9 The Mote in the Jester’s Eye: Aspects of Race and Gender in Connie Willis’s Light Short Fiction
Gender in Willis’s Short Light/Comic Fiction
Race in Willis’s Short Comic/Light Fiction
Finale
Notes
Bibliography
10 “Tell All the Truth But Tell It Slant”: Rhetorical Humor in Connie Willis’s Short Fiction
Rhetorical Theory of Humor
Language Generation and Linguistic Enforcement in “Blued Moon”
Capitalism, Commodification, and Neocolonialism in “Spice Pogrom”
Feminism, Personal Sovereignty, and “Even the Queen”
Charlatans, Conspiracy Theories, and Self-Deception in Inside Job
Comedic Slanting
Notes
Bibliography
Part VI Humanist and Posthumanist Witness
11 Messages in a Bottle: The Historian’s Ethic in Connie Willis’s Quantum Universe
Butterflies and Bombs: Historical Entanglement
Historians and Bunburyists: Spies, Lies, and Alibis
Breadcrumbs and the Grand Design
Notes
Bibliography
12 Schrödinger’s Cathedrals: Humanist Memory and Posthumanist Sacramentality in Connie Willis’s Fiction
“Fire Watch” and Humanist Memory
To Say Nothing of the Dog: Sacramental Architecture and Time
Notes
Bibliography
Index
