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Time is the Fire (SF) - Connie Willis *****

I've been reading science fiction since the 1960s, but I can still come across a writer that's new to me who has been in the business for decades - and that happened recently with Connie Willis' Time is the Fire. This remarkable collection is of stories, published between the 70s and the 90s, that have all won either Hugos or Nebulas - the big US awards for SF writing. I suspect one reason they are new to me is that they are all from US science fiction magazines, which I've never regularly read.

There's certainly plenty of quality in this collection. Willis is a brilliant storyteller in the gentle narrative style, giving us stories that are strongly imbued with either humour or longing and sadness. If you haven't come across her writing, Ray Bradbury most directly came to mind as a parallel, though here the folksiness is joined by an enthusiasm for some non-US settings, notably in London, St Paul's Cathedral and the Underground. To pick out a few favourites, we kick off with A Letter from the Clearys, which delivers a punch to the gut with a very small scale view of a post-apocalyptic America.

Fire Watch is a great time travel story set in London during the Blitz, which has a poignant twist. (With a typical Willis touch of humour, the time traveller has spent years research St Paul before his trip, only to discover that he is actually to visit St Paul's.) Despite the moan below, I loved the way All Seated on the Ground pulled together an alien visit and choirs. And although it faces the usual problems of near-future SF writing, Willis's circa 2008-set The Last of the Winnebagos brilliantly intertwines environmental decline (including the extinction of dogs) with RVs being rendered illegal and the way two people's lives have been changed by an accident in the past involving a dog. The technology (and, thankfully, the state of the world) is all wrong - but just as this doesn't really matter with Blade Runner's ludicrous portrayal of 2019, it's also not a problem here.

I admit there are a couple of stories that don't seem to reach the heights the awards they received suggest. Death on the Nile is a great story, but it's fantasy, not SF (as is The Winds of Marble Arch). At the Rialto is less successful: its humour is very heavy handed, while its setting verges on the ludicrous. (Heavy-handed humour is also a bit of problem in the pseudo-academic paper The Soul Selects her own Society - though the premise, linking Emily Dickinson and the world of H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds is brilliant.) At the Rialto is supposed to feature a conference for quantum physicists, but the topics discussed are at the most basic popular science level. It's just inconceivable that quantum physicists in the 1980s would be shocked and confused as they appear to be by, for example, tunnelling. The response to this one on both its humour and its science was to groan.

My only other complaint is that a couple of the stories - The Winds of Marble Arch and All Seated on the Ground are too long. It may be the cynic in me, but given stories are paid by the word I do wonder if this had something to do with how lengthy they are. It's not that they're bad stories. All Seated on the Ground particularly takes an absolutely brilliant (and light-hearted) approach to dealing with the problems of communicating with aliens. But both these stories feature an obsessive trying many different variations on theme to try to work something out, and after a while they get a touch repetitive.

However, the majority of the stories were excellent - and I don't think I've ever read a collection that was uniformly brilliant. The short story is a format where science fiction writers excel - and Willis shows why. Her style a cross between Bradbury and Aldiss, with the former’s lyricism and poignancy, and the latter’s sharpness. 

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

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