The Best of Connie Willis

GRAND MASTER BACKUP SPEECH (never delivered)[2]

People keep asking me how I feel now that I’m a Grand Master,

and there are a lot of answers to that.

I feel incredibly honored

and humbled

and awestruck to find myself in such exalted company

as Robert Heinlein

and Joe Haldeman

and Bob Silverberg

and my dear friend Jack Williamson.

(My first thought when I found out about the Grand Master Award was, “He would be so proud of me.”)

I feel all of those things,

plus dismayed to find myself old enough to be made

a Grand Master

and delighted to have been named

and worried that I’ll wake up any moment now

and find that it was all a dream.

In short, I feel like Frodo

and Kip Russell

and Alice.

But mostly,

I feel like Beatrix Potter.

In the middle of World War II,

a reporter interviewed Beatrix Potter.

She was a very old lady by that time—

she would have been eighty-four, I think—

and she was living on a farm in the Lake District,

raising sheep for the army to turn into wool for uniforms,

and dealing with rationing

and food shortages

and fuel shortages.

At that particular moment,

she was dealing with a German plane

that had crashed in one of her fields,

as well as the aches and pains of being eighty-four.

And with the war.

Because Hitler had conquered Europe

and was sinking dozens of convoys

and bombing cities all over England,

and it looked like he might invade any minute.

And if he did, everybody knew what would happen—

conquest and executions and concentration camps.

But when the interviewer asked Beatrix Potter

what her greatest wish was,

she said,

“To live till the end of the war.

I can’t wait to see how it all turns out!”

That’s exactly how I feel.

It’s how I’ve always felt.

It’s why I started reading in the first place:

to find out what happened to Cinderella

and to Peter Pan,

to find out whether the twelve dancing princesses got caught

and whether Peter Rabbit made it out from under

Mr. McGregor’s flowerpot

and whether the prince was able to break the spell.

And it’s still the reason I read,

and I think the reason everybody reads.

Forget subtext

and symbolism

and lofty, existential themes.

We want to know—

what happens to Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy

and Frodo and Sam

and Scout

and the Yearling.

Does Lear get there in time to save Cordelia?

Does Eliza Doolittle come back to Henry Higgins?

Does Orpheus make it all the way back to the surface

without turning around to make sure Eurydice is following him?

We’ve got to know.

A friend of mine said that when she went to see

the Leonardo DiCaprio–Claire Danes version

of Romeo and Juliet,

she saw two young girls come out of the theater crying.

“I didn’t know they died!” one of them sobbed to the other.

I know. I laughed, too.

But what if you didn’t know how Romeo and Juliet ended?

What if you were seeing it for the first time?

How fast did you race through the pages

the first time you read Lord of the Rings?

or “The Cold Equations”?

or The Hunger Games?

Or Rebecca?

Or Les Misérables?

How late did you stay up to finish the book?

When The Old Curiosity Shop was coming out in serial installments,

people in America thronged the docks

and called up to ships arriving from England,

“Did Little Nell die?”

I recently got addicted to Primeval,

a British TV series about dinosaur hunters in modern-day London

and I watched Season One in one fell swoop

and then called my daughter at five in the morning—

and she lives in California, so it was four there—

but she didn’t answer the phone drowsily,

or in a panic because the only reason you get a call at five in the

morning is because something terrible has happened.

Instead, she said calmly, “Hello, Mother. I assume you’ve just watched Episode Six.”

I had indeed.

And then I neglected everything else in my life

to watch Season Two.

And Three.

Both seasons were out on DVD,

but then I had to watch Season Four

as the episodes came out—a week apart—

and then wait six months for Season Five to start—

and it nearly killed me.

Trust me.

If there’d been a ship I could have shouted up to, to ask,

“Do Connor and Abby make it back okay?”

I’d have been down at the docks in a flash—

and I live a thousand miles from the nearest coast.

Why is that such a powerful desire, to know what happened?

And what is it we really want to know?

Is it what’s going to happen to Frodo and Sam?

Or what’s going to happen to us?

Characters in stories grow up

and go off on quests

and fall in love

and find out terrible things about their parents

and even worse things about themselves

and explore strange planets

and travel through time

and lose battles

and win wars

and give way to despair

and solve mysteries

and figure out what matters

and find love

and save the kingdom

and in the process they tell us about ourselves.

They show us what matters

and what doesn’t.

They teach us how to be human.

And tell us how our own stories might turn out.

But Beatrix Potter already knew how her life had turned out.

She already knew

that you can’t ever tell what’s going to happen next.

She wrote a story for her niece

and became a world-famous author.

She fell in love with her publisher

and got secretly engaged to him against her parents’ wishes,

and he died.

And then,

when all hope seemed lost,

she fell in love again

and found all the things she’d ever dreamed of.

She already knew what had happened in her life.

So what did she mean when she said she wanted to see

how it all turned out?

Was it who won the war?

Or something bigger?

Did she mean did they win the war? Or something else?

In Blackout and All Clear,

the elderly Shakespearean actor Sir Godfrey

asks the time-traveler Polly, “Did we win the war?”

and when she says yes,

meaning far more than just the war they’re in at that moment,

he asks,

“Was it a comedy or a tragedy?”

I think that’s what we really want to know when we read.

And we don’t mean just our own stories,

we mean the whole shebang—

the world

and the war we’re always in

and the whole arc of history—past and future.

Is it a comedy?

Or a tragedy?

Or, horrible thought, a TV show that gets canceled

before it has a chance to wrap things up properly?

Literature is the only thing that can tell us.

History could, maybe,

but we’re not around long enough to find out what it has to say.

Will Ferrell’s character

in Stranger Than Fiction

carries around a notebook and tries to keep track of the clues

to what sort of story he’s in,

but that doesn’t work, either.

So literature’s our only hope.

And no single book

knows the whole answer

No single fictional detective

—not even Miss Marple,

not even Sherlock Holmes—

can solve this mystery.

But each character

each book

each author,

from Graham Greene

to Homer

to P. G. Wodehouse

to Philip K. Dick

to Beatrix Potter

holds a clue.

And every book we read,

every movie

and TV show we watch,

Dr. Who

and Moby Dick

and Nancy Drew

and “The Light of Other Days”

and Lolita

and “One Ordinary Day with Peanuts”

and Oedipus Rex

and Bridget Jones’s Diary

and “The Ugly Duckling”

and Barefoot in the Park

and Gaudy Night

and “Nightfall”

and Our Town

and “The Veldt”

and Le Morte d’Arthur

and Miracle on 34th Street

and even Twilight

has a piece of the answer.

It’s like a giant jigsaw puzzle.

When my husband’s teaching how science figures things out,

he does a science experiment

in which he cuts up a mystery novel

and then passes out random single pages of it to his students,

and they try to figure out what’s going on,

to solve the mystery.

That’s what we do, too.

We’ll never have all the pieces.

But with the help of books

and movies

and even TV shows about dinosaur hunters,

we can get a glimpse of the answer.

That’s why I read

and why I write,

adding my own fragment to the tangle of clues,

and will go on doing both till I can’t anymore.

To find out what happens

To find out what kind of story we’re in.

When Sir Godfrey asks Polly, “Is it a tragedy or a comedy?”

she answers with certainty, “A comedy.”

I think so, too.

Mostly because of clues I’ve found

in Have Space Suit, Will Travel

and Three Men in a Boat

and The Tempest.

I wanted desperately to find out what happened to Kip and Peewee,

but I also wanted them to be okay,

to get home safely.

I think that’s a good sign,

that we not only want happy endings for ourselves,

but for the people we love,

both real and fictional:

for Connor and Abby on Primeval

and Elinor Dashwood and Edward Ferrars,

and Kate and Petruchio,

and Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane.

And I think another good sign is that

J and George and Harris,

the three men in a boat

(to say nothing of the dog Montmorency),

make us laugh out loud a hundred years after they made

their trip up the Thames.

But I think the best clue of all is that

Shakespeare, whom nobody would accuse of being unrealistic

about the human race—

or of always looking “on the bright side of life”—

was a huge fan of happy endings.

He put them in all of his comedies

and even some of his tragedies.

Cordelia’s hanged and Lear dies,

but not before they’re reunited,

not before all their sins against each other are forgiven

and they have a chance to “sing like birds in a cage” together.

And even more significant

is the fact that he went back to comedy

after he’d written the tragedies.

His last word on the subject isn’t Macbeth,

but The Tempest.

The Tempest is a play that’s famous for its elegiac speech:

“Our revels now are ended…

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind.”

But the play doesn’t end with that.

It ends with a reconciliation

And a blessing

And a wedding.

I think it’s definitely a comedy.

I’m not absolutely certain, of course.

But I have hopes.

And, just like Beatrix Potter,

I can’t wait to find out.