The Best of Connie Willis

Afterword for “The Last of the Winnebagos”

The End of the World is back in fashion these days, what with the whole Mayan calendar thing, nuclear terrorists in the news, and the ever more dire threat of global warming, but what people forget is that it’s always ending.

Extinction happens on a daily basis: pay phones, soda fountains, carbon paper, LPs, metal merry-go-rounds, Woolworth’s, clothespins, VCRs, swimming caps, dial telephones, ocean liners, linen handkerchiefs, Beeman’s chewing gum. And we never really appreciate any of it till it’s too late, till it’s already gone.

I particularly miss cherry phosphates, drive-in movies, and those great swings with linked-metal chains and wooden seats. And I know, I know, they were dangerous, but you could swing so high on them, all the way out over the landscape and up into the sky. And on the way home from the drive-in, you could lean your head out of the car (which had no air-conditioning) and look up at the moonlit summer clouds and the dark, star-filled sky.

I miss roller coasters—the old-fashioned kind with white-painted wooden frameworks and rackety cars. And passenger trains with Pullman berths and dining cars with white tablecloths, and Green River soda pop, and canvas sneakers.

And soon, I fear, I will also miss books.

Even the stories in this collection are testimony to how quickly things vanish, and not just “The Last of the Winnebagos.” Many were written before the advent of cell phones and the Internet; Egypt and Iraq have changed a lot, film is nearly extinct, and in a few more years the sheet music in “All Seated on the Ground” and the paperbacks and travel guides in “Death on the Nile” will seem oddly quaint. “Why didn’t they just have a Kindle?” readers will ask.

Science fiction seems especially vulnerable to questions like that, since we’re supposed to be predicting the future and all, and it’s tempting to update the stories when they’re reprinted, especially after you’ve just watched a movie in which the actors are all talking on shoebox-sized cell phones. Or are standing in front of the World Trade Center. It’s tempting to change the dates (especially if they’ve already passed) and the technology.

But once you change one thing, you have to change another, and another, and eventually the entire plot. And besides, it’s a little too much like the Egyptian pharaohs chiseling out all mention of the previous Ramses, erasing the past.

So let them stand, reminders of the past we had and the future we thought was coming, and of how ephemeral it all is. And remember what Albert Camus had to say on the subject: “Do not wait upon the Day of Judgment. It happens every day.”