Report from Santa Fe; Connie Willis

music Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by grants from the members of the National Education Association of New Mexico. An organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future. And by a grant from the Healey Foundation. Tell us New Mexico. Hello, I'm Lorraine Mills and welcome to Report from Santa Fe. Our guest today is one of my favorite writers of all times. Connie Willis, thank you for joining us. Oh, I'm so glad I could be here. Oh, me too. I'm going to have to brag on you a little bit. You're the winner of 11 Hugo Awards. Or maybe more. Yes, now 7 Nebula. More major awards and any other living right there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You are in the science fiction hall of fame. You were inducted in 2009. The science fiction writers of America named you a grand master in 2011.

But you have other skills too. Apparently you are. And I've heard you do this in Portellas. We'll talk about that. You are a stand up superstar at science fiction conventions. They say that having you as MC is like having Billy Crystal back at the Oscars. I appreciate that. I appreciate that a lot. Yes. And so I've heard you perform in lead panels and MC at the Jack Williamson Lectureship in Portellas. I want our audience to know what a treasure we have in Portellas. Can you tell us who is Jack Williamson and why do you go there every year? Yes. I was invited to the Jack Williamson Lectureship a long time ago as their guest of honor and went and then a few years later was invited back and as one of several guests. And at that point I said, you know I love everybody here and I just love coming and I love Jack. And so can I please come and I've gone ever since I've gone every year since.

And Jack Williamson was one of the forefathers of science fiction. People who might not know the names of some of the books and stories that he wrote would definitely know that he invented the terms genetic engineering, Android, artificial intelligence, humanoid, gene mapping. Gene mapping. He just he really invented many of the different kinds of things that we write about in science fiction. And also was as a role model the kindest, loveliest, most gentlemanly person on the planet and one that pretty much shaped the personality of science fiction for many, many years and he was just absolutely beloved. And for a long time at the Lectureship I went to see Jack and then after he was gone we've gone in his memory and we have writers come every year and from all over and it's just it's a wonderful gathering and I highly recommend that anybody who can can get out to Portales which admittedly is four hours from here, five hours from here but it's absolutely worth it. So I'm going to mingle with writers and readers and see the Jack Williamson collection at the

library and it's just a beautiful, wonderful experience. And so the Lectureship takes place in April and I really, the quality of workshops and writers that are there is really inspiring. It is. But also if you can't go in April the Jack Williamson special collection as you mentioned in the library and that is I think the third best science fiction collection. Right. And it's one that's unique and that it's open to the public because many collections are not. And speaking of collections I am so happy that I've got a collection of your work here. Before we get to the latest ones I want to go back to this whole series for which you have devout followers, the Oxford Time Travel series. How did it start? Right. Yeah it started with a story called Firewatch which I didn't intend to turn into a series. But it was, I wanted to tell the story about how St. Paul's Cathedral was saved during World War II by this rag tag band of you know church employees and vergers and choir singers

and so on that put out the incendiary bombs on the roof of St. Paul's. And to tell that story I invented a time traveler who was a student from Oxford who came back and became a member of the Firewatch so that he could observe history at first hand. And then after I did that then I sort of fell in love with the idea of Oxford having time travel and being able to have people do history rather than just read about history. And so I then wrote Doomsday book which was, let me just say this is the current edition. This has won so many awards and I must tell you it is a compelling read. I love this book. Thank you. Yeah. Doomsday book is really grim as you can probably tell from the title. I've said in the Middle Ages and involves the Black Death kind of the dark side of history. And after I wrote it I then decided that I really should tell the rest of the story of history because history isn't all just catastrophes and wars and horrible things happening.

It's also you know voting on the Thames and Tea Parties and falling in love and cats and dogs and all kinds of things. So then I wrote to say nothing of the dog and that was said in Victorian England which is probably my favorite period of history and one that I had an enormous amount of trouble with, enormous amount of fun with because it's a comedy. And then I realized that I wasn't done with the Blitz. Even though I'd done St. Paul's I had the rest of World War II to tell the story of. So there are two Blitz books. The one I have here is Black Out. The other one is all clear. They're really one book. They're really one book. And the second half is part, I mean it's two halves of the same novel in two volumes. And then I got to do Dunkirk and the evacuated children and the Blitz and the shopgirls that somehow got to work every morning on Oxford Street. Even though Oxford Street was on the front lines of the war. And tell the story of all the civilians including Agatha Christie who's one of my favorites.

And I've just been in love with the time travelers ever since. So now we are here to celebrate your new book. I've waited six years. I've waited six years for this. I'm kind of slow. I'm a slow writer. Oh one thing that came out recently. So for people who are just getting started. Here's a book of your award-winning stories called The Best of Connie Willis. And this is a wonderful way to start their short stories. They go from the ridiculous to the sublime. The profound, the tragic, they were just wonderful stories. Well thank you. I love the short story. It's probably my favorite thing to write. And so I was really excited to have that come out. So Cross Talk. Cross Talk. It is like, or it combines in a way the wit of Nora Efren, someone said. Oh wow, that's high praise. The comedic flair of P.G. Woodhouse. That's even higher praise. And it's set in the social media world of today. This is what's so wonderful.

That we all live in. You have taken a romantic comedy. The basis of which historically is that there are all these misunderstandings but it all turns out. But this is about telepathy. You cannot have misunderstandings. If you're reading each other's mind. Right. What a challenge. Yeah, it was. It was tricky because a lot of the where people don't tell their feelings, you know, where they don't let the other person know they're in love with them and all those things, you know, becomes much trickier if you can read somebody else's mind. But I found that there were still ways to create all kinds of miscommunication. And the book is really about communication. Because we live in this world where we have all these new forms of communication. You know, email and Twitter and Facebook and everything. And yet we don't seem to be communicating any better than we were before. And a lot, we're getting lots of information. We're getting, we're saying a lot to each other. We now, you know, we can, if we want to date, we simply swipe right or swipe left. And we can unfriend people and we can change our relationship status on Facebook and all these things.

But none of it seems to make our relationships go any better. And that was one thing I really wanted to address. Well, we are a watch in the sea of information, Twitter. It's in the way you shove the dark side of too much information. You say that if you're going to have a superpower, telepathy is just about the worst you could have. It is. I've had people say, oh, telepathy. Well, that would be so cool to be able to read people's minds. I'm like, you have not thought this through. Telepathy would be a terrible idea. I, for one, I have only managed to survive because people do not know what I'm thinking at any given moment. And I'm sure that's true of everybody else. You just, I think no marriage could survive for more than 15 minutes if you actually knew every single thought that flitted through your head or your partner's head. I just don't see how it, you know, I think a lot of murderous thoughts about my husband and we've been married for almost 50 years. So partly because I don't think, because we don't know what the other one is thinking for sure.

We can probably guess, but we don't know for sure. So you have combined some really interesting traditions, the romantic comedy tradition and the screwball comedies and all these. But there is a tradition of telepathy in science fiction. There is usually a darker, darker color. Much darker, yes. Very few lighthearted stories about telepathy. Usually it takes the form of world domination. You know, somebody who can read minds and uses it to like become a dictator or somebody who can hear all these thoughts and becomes mad and by them, you know, because there's this endless input of either horrible thoughts or just too much, you know, and the person can't survive it. So nobody had really tackled the humor, so they're a romantic side of the situation. There had been that one movie with Mel Gibson that what women want. Yeah. And it was a terrible movie. And that isn't what women want.

And so I thought, well, so I thought I would try to tell you a little bit more about what would really happen if you could read somebody's mind. The whole issue of privacy and having personal space, all of that, you do. So this is set in the kind of not too distant future. Right. Right. A lot of the ideas are about Apple's new phone and the communication. All of this is very relatable. We all understand. But you also, the scientists, sort of one of the protagonists, comes up with some ideas that please patent them and do them. One was a sanctuary for them. Yes. And the SOS. Yes. Tell us what you... Well, some of the things he comes up with, sometimes in fun, he's coming, sometimes just being sarcastic and sometimes he's serious. Coming up with the whole idea of you could send, you could make it so you didn't have to ever answer your phone that you were immediately, you know, it always rang as busy. Also, that you could, if it was someone you really didn't like, you could transfer them to a horrible phone menu somewhere where they were stuck forever waiting to press one.

If you want to talk to someone who knows something about this, press two. If you don't, if you don't care how long you remain on this, press three of you want to hear horrible music, etc. So all the things that we all put up with, and he thought of just all kinds of ways where you could, could convince people that you were not there and that you were... So you wouldn't have to be at everyone's back and call at every single second. And so, those are things that I personally would like, so I had him invent them. And the SOS, you're on a blind date with someone that's not going anywhere. Right, the SOS, and it's not going well, and you get this call that you have to leave immediately. And your phone automatically rings and gives you an excuse for why you have to be somewhere else. And people do varieties of that themselves anyway, but yes, this would be where the phone was actively helping you to get out of a bad situation. You know, one of the things we're speaking today with Connie Willis about her wonderful new book, Cross Talk.

You have an extraordinary gift for dialogue. I've been particularly your book, Bellweather, that I love so much. It was just like, does she hang her coffee shops and colleges with her ear to the next day? I do, I usually draw shamelessly on people. And I love people's conversations. I have always loved writing dialogue. And probably the best conversation I overheard, you overhear some amazing things. One was a woman who was saying, I don't know why my mother doesn't like him. His parole is up in like three months, which I thought was a classic lie. But the best one ever, I overheard, I was in the hot pool at Glenwood Springs, which if you know that place at all, you know it has this wonderful place where you just, it's like a gigantic hot tub where everyone sits around the edges and just soaks and gets, or you can drift slowly through the middle. And these two guys were drifting slowly through the middle and one said to the other.

And it also, the hot water magnifies the sound so you can hear everyone very clearly. And he said, so did the people you were house sitting for get back from Europe? And the other one said, yeah, he said so like, were they bombed? Yeah, I told him, houses burned down. And then they drifted off out of sight. And I was like, wait, wait, wait, I need to know the rest of the story. Oh my goodness. I've never heard the rest of it. But it has convinced me that eavesdropping is in fact a very profitable thing to do. Yes indeed, yes indeed. But beyond eavesdropping, we have this barrage of noise and data. And I just love that Oxford's dictionary word of the year was post-true. And when you think of all the misinformation and how tired our brain gets from discriminating truth from why? And how do you know and you constantly come up against people who believe things that are plainly not true.

And you say, that's not true. But they refuse to accept any standard, there's no standard for telling the truth anymore. Apparently. And that's a whole other issue. When you can't share the reality, what do you do then? That's a very tricky problem. And a major problem that we have I think. But there's the oversharing of the misinformation reality and the fact that there's no object, there's no truth anymore, it's post-truth. Right, right. I was frightened to see that that was the OED's word of the year. Yeah, I was frightened. I was like, oh, that's not goodness. And one of the subjects you go into is brain surgery because these two perhaps intended the male and female protagonist have this popular celebrity-driven new brain surgery. Right. It's a bit see tiny brain surgery. It helps them understand each other. They can read each other's thoughts.

They can read each other's emotions. Emotions. That's all it's promised. There's a problem. There's complications. Of course. So is this honor or horizon? People will do anything. I mean, they will do anything if celebrities do it, which always just astonishes me. The fact that somebody said, when my editor was talking to me about it, she said, do you really think people could be talked into doing brain surgery? Well, they've been talked into putting deadly venom into their faces. That is venom. That's going in there. If they can be talked into putting snake venom into their faces, they can be talked into anything. And I do see, unfortunately, people doing all kinds of things. And on the basis of very little, very little rational thought and very little, you know, they just don't have to be talked into it if a celebrity does it. They're willing to do it, which I also find very frightening.

You did mention that the brain is like the last frontier. Oh, it is. And the whole idea of how we think and what we think about. And there is a new MRI that supposedly can see, like, you think about a bird and then they get an image of a bird on the screen. But we're still so far from knowing what the actual thought was that you had. I mean, you could have been thinking about, you know, you saw a bird flying by, or you could be thinking about your pet bird, or that you'd like to have a pet bird. Or you could be thinking about, say, an eagle, which is a car, you know, or you could be thinking about the Philadelphia Eagles, which is a football team. How do you distinguish what the actual thought is versus what the images are? And so far, I don't think anywhere close to people being actually able to read our minds, which thank goodness. Because at that point, all bets are off. Yes. One of the reasons I love your work so much is that you are such a creative artist and you have invented plausible futures and probable pasts. And you create worlds. And I would like you to address the present.

Oh, gosh. I have been trying for the last however many days it's been since the election two weeks. Since the election and find myself totally not able to predict. I just, I don't know where we're going. I mean, I can set up various scenarios. You know, science fiction writers don't actually predict the future. They extrapolate possible. They look at trends and they go, okay, if this goes on in this direction, then we'll be here. On the other hand, if this goes on, then we'll be over here. They don't actually try to predict in the sense that like Jean Dixon used to predict, you know, that somebody was going to die during the year or something. And, but even in terms of extrapolation, I'm not sure what the present is yet. And if you don't know what the present is, is so much in flux, you know, which way, and every reading the New York Times today about Trump's latest visit with the Times and what he said about climate change and what he said about various topics. I'm just like, I have no idea. I have no idea which direction we're going.

We are in sort of a post-truth era here. And that combined with the fact that nothing, everything is in flux. I just, I have no idea. You know, I, I vacillate wildly between various dystopic futures, which I can easily imagine coming out of what's happened recently. And then on the other hand, not so dystopic futures, not because I distrust the trend lines, but because, because history has a way of veering, it doesn't, it doesn't go in straight lines. And it can only really, the, the straight lines can only be detected after the fact. And so we always end up being surprised by what happened. You know, we can look back at the assassination of, you know, of the archduke, archduke Ferdinand and what it caused afterwards. But going in, we can't. Nobody saw that coming and nobody could see which direction it was going to go. And so that's the advantage of being a story and you get to go and look back at things. But moving forward, it tends to veer.

You know, we, we don't sometimes things that were convinced will work out hideously, work out better than we think they would. And then other times they work out far worse. And but the thing that we dreaded the most doesn't happen, but something even worse over here that we weren't even considering happens. And it's really, it's really tricky. I read when I was writing Doomsday Book, which is about the Black Death. I looked at a lot of stuff that was said in 1913, 1947, the year before the Black Death hit England. And people were worried about the shortage of labor in various things. They were worried about overthrowing the crown. You know, they were worried about all these different things, which of course were all canceled out because the real danger was coming from over here, which nobody saw coming. So I, you know, yeah, I have indulged in an awful lot of, oh my gosh, in four years we're all going to be in the camps kind of thinking, which I still don't think is beyond the realm of possibility, unfortunately. I'm very frightened by the rise of white supremacist and the idea of scapegoating various groups to account for problems that we can't solve.

And yeah, it could definitely lead that way. On the other hand, we are also forewarned by that. So it's not going to, history doesn't repeat itself. I remember who said it, but they said history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Yes. And so, and I think that is true. So we won't get exactly what happened in the past. And because we know about the past, we may not allow some of those things to happen. On the other hand, we don't know what's coming. I'm, I'm lost. Well, I'll tell you what, I'd like to, I would like to meet with you again, maybe when you come to Pro Palace and we will continue this. Well, I think maybe I'll know a little bit more by then. Yes, we all know right now. It's very gelatinous. There's one other thing I'd like to mention. In 2006, you gave the most wonderful speech at the World Con in 2006. And it was about reading. One of the things you'd said that you lost your mother and said to say it at an early age.

And that nobody would just, would tell you the truth. And when you read books, they would just tell you the truth. They didn't say it's fine. It all works out. Right. The books tell you the truth. And so I've asked if you wouldn't mind read a novel of that speech. No, I would be happy to. Okay. Yeah, that I was talking about books and all the many things that they could do. Books can help you get through long nights and long trips, through the wait for the phone call and the judges verdict and the doctors diagnosis. Books can switch off your school caging mind and can make you forget your own troubles. In the troubles of the characters that you read about. But it wasn't escape I needed when my mother died. It was the truth. And I couldn't get anyone to tell it to me. Instead they said things like there's a reason this happened. And you'll get over this. And God never sends us more than we can bear. Lies. All lies. I remember an aunt saying sage Lee the good die young.

Not exactly a motivation to behave myself. And more than one person telling me it's all part of God's plan. I remember thinking even at age 12 what kind of moron is God? I could come up with a better plan than this. And of course the worst lie of all. It's all for the best. Everybody lied. Relatives, clergymen, friends. So it was a good thing that I had read so many books. Because I had James A. G's a death in the family. And Peter beagles a fine and private place. And Peter de Vries is the blood of the lamb to tell me the truth. Time heals nothing. Peter de Vries said. And Marjorie Allingham said morning is not forgetting. It is an undoing. Every minute has to be untied. And something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the past. When I discovered science fiction a year later after my mom died, Robert Sheckley said, never try to explain to yourselves why some things happen and why other things don't happen. Don't ask and don't imagine that an explanation exists.

Get it? And Bob Shaw's The Light of Other Days and John Crowley Snow and Tom Godwin taught me that everything there is to know about death and memory and the cold equations. But there were also hopeful messages in the books I read. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, Thornton Wilder said. And the bridges love the only survival, the only meaning. And Dorothy and the patchwork girl of Oz said, never give up. You never know what's going to happen next. And C.S. Lewis said, if you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end. If you look for comfort, you will not get either comfort or truth, only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin and in the end despair. I found what I was looking for, what I needed, what I wanted, what I loved in books, when I couldn't find it anywhere else. The public library and books saved my life and taught me the most important lesson that books have to teach.

Wonderful. Thank you. I think that your writing is such a gift to us and I want to remind our audience if you're just starting on Connie, the best of Connie Willis. And if you want a delightful laugh and charming view of our information saturated society, go for crosstalk, our guest today is Connie Willis. Thank you so much for joining us. Well, thank you. This has been a pleasure. Me too. And I'd like to thank your audience for being with us today on Report from Santa Fe. We'll see you next week. Past archival programs of Report from Santa Fe are available at the website report from Santa Fe dot com. If you have questions or comments, please email info at report from Santa Fe dot com. Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by Grant Strong, the members of the National Education Association of New Mexico, an organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future.

And by a grant from the Healey Foundation, Taos, New Mexico. Thank you so much.