BUBONICON REPORT PART 2

Connie Willis, Mission of Levity

     The week before Worldcon was the Albuquerque Science Fiction Society’s annual convention, Bubonicon.  Bubonicon is named after the Plague, which is prevalent out here.  As you might expect, our mascot is a rat, Perry Rodent, who acquired a girlfriend Terri somewhere along the way.  Because this year’s con moved from the Howard Johnson’s on Hotel Circle to the Wyndham Airport hotel, our official T-shirt showed Perry and Terri at the airport. Perry wore the jodhpurs, goggles, and leather helmet of a World War One flying ace; Terri was dressed in an uncorseted long gown which had the look of an authentic World War One-era dress.

    Our author Guest of Honor was Connie Willis, whose presentation consisted of a discussion of her writing career.  She said she actually began with science fiction and sold nothing, so she started writing for the True Confessions magazines in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, when the genre was flourishing. These are, or were, formula stories with set rules. She characterized one of her successful stories as “I called for help on my CB and got a rapist instead.” From these stories she learned about plot, flashbacks, dialog, foreshadowing, and so on. It’s too bad, say I that the genre is in decline. I used to read them; it’s like watching Oprah, but in fiction.

    Her first published science fiction story appeared in a magazine that folded the following month.  It took her fifteen years to find a copy, but it lost her the Campbell Award for new writers. “Have you ever been published?” they asked. “I don’t think so,” she answered, and explained. Unfortunately, as evanescent as it was, this was a publication. Her next science fiction sale was 8 years later.

    The very worst day in her writing career was the time every one of her manuscripts came back at once. The only thing which kept her from giving up right then and there was her habit of addressing and stamping her envelopes and SASEs for the next submission on the list as soon as she had mailed it off to the current one. She didn’t want to waste all that postage, so with a sigh, she popped the returned manuscripts into their prestamped envelopes
and sent them off.

    When asked about the feeling writers often have that they are making idiots of themselves, she said it never goes away. Another question older writers wonder about is, “Am I all washed up?” She said even Jack Williamson considers himself to be extremely lucky that they’re still accepting his stories!

    Like many writers, she has some stories other people love that she doesn’t really care for, and some stories she loves which nobody else is interested in. She said her favorite short work was “Fire Watch.” She had always loved the great cathedral, and had a lifelong interest in the Blitz. But her true milieu is the screwball comedy. She calls it “timeless and universal” a lot of drama ages rapidly. I might add that the realistic school of writing, or naturalism, becomes a portrait of a bygone era as rapidly as near-future science fiction.

    Asked about her sources of ideas, she named CNN, then Fox News for relief. Then she watches CNN, Discover and reads murder mysteries, Victorian novels, Damon Runyon, Mary Stewart, Dorothy Sayers, Howard Waldrop, and some little-remembered authors of the ‘40s and ‘50s such as John Kessels, Jim Kelly, and Mildred Clingerman. She calls herself an Anglophile. Her favorite movie is a little-known 1940’s flick called “Between Two Worlds.”
 

    She added that pessimism is a luxury for the young; the old need the upbeat works. She noted there’s been a resurgence of ‘30s, style romantic comedies lately, and pointed out that science fiction writer, given a situation, often ask themselves “What can go wrong in this situation?” But another question to ask is “What possibility for comedy is there in this?” And of course, her best-known example is “To Say Nothing Of The Dog,” based on one of her favorite novels, Three Men In A Boat. She expected fans to have read that, since it was mentioned in “Have Spacesuit, Will Travel” as the favorite book of Kip’s father. She considers her leading characters in Dog to be Kip as Peewee grown up.

    Along the lines of screwball comedy, she was asked once what you’d call her short story “Even the Queen.” With a straight face she answered “A period piece.” However, it is no longer science fiction. Pills to suppress the monthly cycle are on the market, and women in demanding jobs are taking them.

    His next novel, set in the same universe as “Fire Watch”, will concern time travelers in World War Two England doing rescue missions. She also has a forthcoming novella in the January, 2005 issue of Asimov’s.

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