The Best of Connie Willis

2006 WORLDCON GUEST OF HONOR SPEECH

The thing that’s so great about being a guest of honor at Worldcon

is that it gives me the chance

to thank all the people who helped me become a writer:

like my junior high school teacher Mrs. Werner

who read Rumer Godden’s An Episode of Sparrows

out loud to us

and first introduced me to the Blitz

and my high school English teacher

Mrs. Juanita Jones,

who encouraged me in my writing

even though I showed no signs of talent whatsoever,

and I forced her to read my story about how I’d met George

Maharis of the TV series Route 66,

a story which includes deathless lines like,

“His face lit up like a birthday cake.”

And in which the heroine,

while driving in downtown Manhattan, manages to run into a tree—

obviously the tree from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

It also gives me a chance to thank all those people who’ve helped

me keep writing all these years:

—my long-suffering secretary Laura Lewis

—and my even more long-suffering family

—my miracle-working agents: Patrick Delahunt, Ralph Vicinanza, and Vince Gerardis

—my extremely patient editors Anne Groell

and Sheila Williams

and Gardner Dozois

—my EXTREMELY patient readers

—and my friends,

my fellow soldiers in the trenches,

who’ve kept me from getting discouraged

and more than once talked me out of quitting altogether.

All my best moments in science fiction I owe to you guys—

—staying up all night after that first Nebula Awards banquet with John Kessel and Jim Kelly,

eating chocolate chip cookies and red pistachio nuts

and getting red-stained hands that didn’t fade for weeks

—sitting in workshops with Ed Bryant

and Cynthia Felice

and Mike Toman

and George R.R. Martin

—driving to Portales to see Jack Williamson

with Charlie Brown

and Scott Edelman

and Walter Jon Williams

—gossiping with Nancy Kress

and Ellen Datlow

and Eileen Gunn

—laughing at something

Michael Cassutt

or Eileen Gunn

or Howard Waldrop said.

—laughing at something Gardner Dozois said so hard I snorted a piece of lettuce up my nose, nearly killing myself.

You guys are the wittiest, smartest, nicest people in the world, and I would not have lasted five minutes in science fiction without you.

But most important,

I need to thank

Robert Heinlein

and Louisa May Alcott

and Kit Reed

and Damon Runyon

and Sigrid Undset

and Theodore Sturgeon

and Agatha Christie

and Jerome K. Jerome

and Daphne du Maurier

and Philip K. Dick

and Rumer Godden

and L. M. Montgomery

and Ray Bradbury

and Shirley Jackson

and Bob Shaw

and James Herriot

and Mildred Clingerman

and P. G. Wodehouse

and Dorothy L. Sayers

and Daniel Keyes

and J. R. R. Tolkien

and Judith Merril

and Charles Williams

and William Shakespeare.

Which brings me to the subject of this speech.

You’re supposed to talk about something significant in a guest-of-honor speech—

global warming

or the coming Singularity

or space travel

or tougher sentences for parole violators.

Or world peace.

But I want to talk about something completely personal.

I want to talk about books and what they have meant to me.

Which is everything in the world.

I owe books my vocation, my life, even my family.

I’m not kidding.

You probably don’t know this, but I only got married because of a book.

And, no, I’m not talking about love poems.

And, NO, not Lolita.

I got married because of Lord of the Rings.

To quote Kip Russell in Have Space Suit, Will Travel, “How it happened was this way.”

I was flying out to Connecticut

for the express purpose of breaking up with my boyfriend

and I bought this set of three paperbacks to read on the plane

and by the time I got to New Haven

I was so worried about Frodo and Sam

that I said to my boyfriend, “It’s awful. They’re trying to sneak into

Mordor and the Ringwraiths are after them and I don’t trust Gollum and…”

and I completely forgot to break up with him.

And, as of yesterday, we’ve been married thirty-nine years.

I owe my daughter’s name to a book, too. We named her after the good daughter in King Lear

and she has lived up to her name in absolutely every way.

And I owe all the books I’ve written to books.

They taught me how to write.

Agatha Christie taught me plotting

Mary Stewart suspense

Heinlein dialogue

P. G. Wodehouse comedy

Shakespeare irony

and Philip K. Dick how to pull the rug out from under the reader.

Books also gave me all sorts of good advice on how to cope with everything,

from following the rules—

“There are three rules for writing a novel,” W. Somerset Maugham said. “Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

to the stupid questions people ask writers—

Heavens! [Harriet Vane thought.] Here was that awful woman, Muriel Campshott, coming up to claim acquaintance. Campshott had always simpered. She still simpered… She was going to say, “How do you think of all your plots?” She did say it. Curse the woman.

to coping with the pressure to write what your publisher—or your readers—want—

“The only thing you can do,” Dorothy Sayers said, “is write what you want to write and hope for the best.”

to feeling like you’ve made a hideous mistake in your choice of career—

“It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing,”

Robert Benchley told me, “but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was famous.”

They even showed me what to write and how to write it.

When I went to England for the first time,

I remembered that book about the Blitz Mrs. Werner had read out

loud when I was in the eighth grade,

and it made me go to St. Paul’s,

where I found the fire watch and Oxford’s time-traveling historians

and my life’s work.

Above all, they taught me what it meant to be a writer.

“Storytellers make us remember what mankind would have been like had not fear, and the failing will, and the laws of nature tripped up its heels,” William Butler Yeats said.

And books—

Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let me begin at the beginning.

I loved books from the moment I saw them, from before I could even read.

And as soon as I did learn,

I read everything I could get my grubby little hands on.

You couldn’t get a library card till you were eight years old when I was a kid

(These were dark, benighted times)

and you were only allowed to check out three at a time

(Really dark and benighted times).

So the day I got my library card,

I checked out three of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books.

Rita Mae Brown says, “When I got my library card, that’s when my life began.”

Mine, too.

I read all three Oz books that night

and took them back the next day

and checked out three more.

And then I checked out all the other Oz books

and all the Maida’s Little Shop books

and all the Elsie Dinsmore books—

possibly the worst books ever written—

and all the Betsy, Tacy, and Tib books

and the Blue, Green, Yellow, Red, and Violet fairy books.

No one else in my family liked to read,

and they were always telling me to “get my nose out of that book

and go outside to play,”

an order which had no apparent effect on me

because I went right ahead and read

all the Anne of Green Gables books

and all the Nancy Drew books

and all the Mushroom Planet books

and Alice in Wonderland

and A Little Princess

and Cress Delahanty

and The Water Babies.

When I was in sixth grade,

I read Little Women

and decided I wanted to be a writer like Jo March.

When I was in seventh grade,

I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

and decided to read my way straight through the library from A to Z

like Francie does in that book.

When I was in eighth grade,

my teacher Mrs. Werner read us

An Episode of Sparrows by Rumer Godden, a book about an orphan who plants a garden in the bombed-out rubble of a church, and I fell in love with the Blitz.

And then, when I was thirteen,

I read Have Space Suit, Will Travel,

and it was all over.

How it happened was this way.

I was thirteen

and shelving books in the junior high library,

and I picked up a yellow book—I can still see it—

with a guy in a space suit on the cover.

The title was Have Space Suit, Will Travel,

and I opened it and read:

“You see, I had this space suit.

How it happened was this way:

‘Dad,’ I said, ‘I want to go to the Moon.’

‘Certainly,’ he answered and looked back at his book. It was Jerome

K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, which he must know by heart.

I said, ‘Dad, please! I’m serious!’”

There’s a scene at the end of Star Wars.

The Death Star has cleared the planet

and Luke Skywalker is going in for one last run.

Princess Leia is back at command headquarters,

listening intently to the battle.

All the other fighter pilots are dead or out of action

and Darth Vader has Luke clearly in his sights.

And all of a sudden,

Han Solo comes zooming in from left field

to blast Darth Vader

and says,

“Yahoo! You’re all clear, kid. Now let’s blow this thing.”

Now, when he does this,

Princess Leia doesn’t look up from the battle map

or even change her expression,

but my daughter, who was eight years old at the time,

leaned over to me and said, “Oh, she’s hooked, Mother.”

And when I opened that yellow book

and read those first lines of Have Space Suit, Will Travel,

I was hooked.

I raced through Have Space Suit and then—

after a brief detour to read Three Men in a Boat—

I read Citizen of the Galaxy

and Time for the Stars

and The Star Beast

and Double Star

and Tunnel in the Sky

and The Door into Summer

and everything else Heinlein had ever written.

And then Asimov

and Clarke

and The Martian Chronicles

and A Canticle for Leibowitz

and then, oh my God,

I discovered the Year’s Best short story collections

and the world exploded into dazzling possibilities.

Here, side by side, were the most astonishing short stories

and novelettes

and novellas

and poems

“Vintage Season”

and “Lot”

and “The Man Who Lost the Sea”

and “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”

and “Flowers for Algernon”

and “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?”

stories by Kit Reed

and William Tenn

and James Blish

and Fredric Brown

and Zenna Henderson

and Philip K. Dick,

all in one book

nightmarish futures

and high-tech futures

marvelous Shangri-Las

and strange distant planets

aliens

and time travel

and robots

and unicorns

and monsters

tragedies

and adventures

and fantasies

and romances

and comedies

and horrors

“Surface Tension”

“Evening Primrose”

“Day Million”

“Continued on Next Rock”

“When We Went to See the End of the World”

“I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon”

and “One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts,”

stories that in only a few pages,

a few thousand words,

could turn reality upside down and inside out

and make you look at the world,

at the universe,

a whole new way,

could make you laugh,

make you think,

break your heart.

I was beyond hooked.

I was stunned.

I was speechless with wonder,

like Kip and Peewee looking at their own Milky Way from the Magellanic Clouds,

like the two hobos in Ray Bradbury’s “A Miracle of Rare Device,” gazing at the beautiful city in the air.

And I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life reading.

And writing.

I stopped reading my way through the library from A to Z

and started reading all the books I could find

with the little atom and rocketship symbol on their spines.

I had only gotten as far as the Ds on my plan to read my way

through the alphabet when I stopped,

but, as it turned out,

it was a good thing I’d gotten that far.

Because when I was twelve,

my mother died suddenly and shatteringly,

and my world fell apart,

and I had nobody to turn to but books.

They saved my life.

I know what you’re thinking,

that books provided an escape for me.

And it’s certainly true books can offer refuge from worries and despair—

As Leigh Hunt says, “I entrench myself in books equally against sorrow and the weather.”

I remember particularly

a night in the hospital at my five-year-old daughter’s bedside

waiting for tests to show if she had appendicitis

or something worse,

clinging to James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small

like it was a life raft.

During the Blitz,

in the makeshift libraries set up in the tube shelters,

the most popular books were Agatha Christie’s mysteries,

in which the murderer’s always caught and punished,

justice always triumphs,

and the world makes sense.

And when I’m anxious about things, I reread Agatha Christie, too.

And Mary Stewart.

And Lenora Mattingly Weber’s Beany Malone books.

Books can help you get through

long nights and long trips

the wait for the phone call

and the judge’s verdict

and the doctor’s diagnosis

can switch off your squirrel-caging mind,

can make you forget your own troubles in the troubles of

Kip and Peewee

and Frodo

and Viola

and Harry

and Charlie

and Huck.

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 sagely, “The good die young”—

not exactly a motivation to behave yourself—

and more than one person telling me, “It’s all part of God’s plan.”

I remember thinking, even at age twelve,

What kind of moron is God?

I could come up with a better plan than this.

And the worst lie of all, “It’s for the best.”

Everybody lied—relatives, clergymen, friends.

So it was a good thing I’d reached the Ds because I had

Margery Allingham

and James Agee’s A Death in the Family

and Peter Beagle’s A Fine and Private Place

and Peter De Vries’s The Blood of the Lamb to tell me the truth.

“Time heals nothing,” Peter De Vries said.

And Margery Allingham said, “Mourning is not forgetting. It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied, and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the knot.”

And when I discovered science fiction a year later,

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’s “Snow”

and Tom Godwin

taught me everything there is to know about death

and memory

and the cold equations.

But there were also hopeful messages in those books.

“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead,” Thornton Wilder said, “and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

And Dorothy, in The Patchwork Girl of Oz, said, “Never give up…. No one ever knows what’s going to happen next.”

“If you look for truth,” C. S. Lewis wrote, “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 with, 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.

Francie and the public library and books saved my life.

And taught me the most important lesson books have to teach.

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” James Baldwin says, “but then you read. It was[books that] taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.”

And the narrator in the movie Matilda says it even better:

“Matilda read all kinds of books and was nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships onto the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: ‘You are not alone.’”

I told you about falling in love with books

that day I got my library card,

that day I opened Have Space Suit and read that first page,

that day I discovered the Year’s Best collections,

but it wasn’t just that I fell in love with books,

with science fiction.

It wasn’t just that they were there when I needed them.

It was that when I found them,

I also found,

like one of Zenna Henderson’s People,

or the Ugly Duckling

or Anne of Green Gables

or Harry Potter,

my true family,

my “kindred spirits,” as Anne calls them,

my own kind.

And, finding them,

for the first time I knew,

like Ozma released from the witch’s spell,

like Deckard in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

like Bethie and Jemmy and Valancy,

who I really was.

I had escaped,

but it was not from the real world.

It was from exile.

I had come home.

Just like in a story.

And I lived happily ever after.

Books are an amazing thing.

Anyone who thinks of them as an escape from reality

or as something you should get your nose out of and go outside

and play

as merely a distraction

or an amusement

or a waste of time

is dead wrong.

Books are the most important

the most powerful

the most beautiful thing

humans have ever created.

When Kip and Peewee find themselves on trial for earth

and trying to defend it against the charge

that it’s a danger which should be destroyed, Kip says,

“Have you heard our poetry?”

And what better defense of us could you come up with?

Books can reach out across space

and time

and language

and culture

and customs,

gender

and age

and even death

and speak to someone they never met,

to someone who wasn’t even born when they were written

and give them help

and advice

and companionship

and consolation.

In the words of Clarence Day, Jr.,

“The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man.

Nothing else that he builds ever lasts.

Monuments fall;

nations perish;

civilizations grow old and die out;

and, after an era of darkness,

new races build others.

But in the world of books

are volumes that have seen this happen again and again

and yet live on,

still young,

still as fresh as the day they were written

still telling men’s hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead.”

They are a miracle of rare device.

I never met Louisa May Alcott

or Robert Heinlein

or Rumer Godden or L. Frank Baum or Philip K. Dick

or Thornton Wilder or Dean Matthews of St. Paul’s,

but they reached out to me

across time,

across space,

and spoke to me

encouraged me

inspired me

taught me everything I know.

Saved my life.

And filled it with wonder.

And I just wanted to say thank you.