hought20's Full Review: Connie Willis - Fire Watch
This is an excellent collection of short stories by Connie Willis, with potentially something for everyone.
Willis has a very clear and precise writing style that works well for short stories. I'll talk about my favorite stories, skipping the ones that don't hold my memory so well. Perhaps I'll come back and edit this after I go re-read the book.
"Fire Watch" is the first story she wrote involving time travel and Oxford (this series is played out more in Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog, which are both excellent books). It's about a historian (all of the time travellers from Oxford are historians) who goes back to a time during WWII to do a project and ends up getting recruited (by someone from his own time) to help solve a mystery at the same time. It's a touching story about getting involved in human lives when you mean to have a detached, scientific demeanour, and the science and mystery of it is pretty compelling. I wanted to know how it was going to end. This story depicts one of the areas where Willis shines: Giving a good sense of history. I've learned a lot from reading her work, and she makes one feel as if they were there, and felt what the people who lived in a certain time felt, just as her time-travelling characters are doing.
"All My Darling Daughters" was painfully heavy-handed and hard to read. It was a story involving -- well, it's about sex, and domination, and it's very, very self-righteous feeling. I may be missing something here, but the sense I came away from this story with was 'Men are horrible!' I see the point of it, and I suppose I can understand the occasional need to be heavy-handed about things, but I'm not sure if this extreme was warranted. I don't know that I've met anybody who read this story and liked it. Maybe that's the point.
I didn't really get "The Sidon in the Mirror." I liked the writing here, and got a great sense of how the main character (a "mirror") was feeling, but I didn't really understand what the character was up to, and all that was happening. I'm not sure this is entirely my fault; the plotline was a little too vague (not her writing, mind you -- the story itself, if that distinction makes any sense).
"Blued Moon" is, utterly and absolutely, my favorite short story ever. This story is what got me hooked on Willis, and this story is why this collection of stories is my second favorite book by her (my favorite is To Say Nothing of the Dog). It's not just because there's a linguist in it, either (I'm a linguist). It's funny, there's an adorable love story happening in it, and the icky guy gets what he deserves. There's also neat, silly language stuff in it, but not being interested in that is no reason not to read this story. It's an excellent experience. The basic story: There's this company, and this nice guy runs it and is having a really, really, bad, klutzy day. This isn't usual for him. Then it starts happening to everyone else -- all of these things that happen 'once in a blue moon' are suddenly happening to everyone, and it's not a very good thing. The corporation owner's daughter shows up, and helps her Dad out, and a lot of the story is seen through her eyes. The rest of the story is from the viewpoint of one of the people working at the company, a linguist who has recently been hired. He lives in a dorm on the campus of the company with a thoroughly despicable fellow who has a plan involving sleeping his way to the top of the company (a nice twist, that). The dialogue throughout this story serves to characterize fully these characters who you only have a short-story's length to get to know. It's well worth a read.
The rest of the stories here were worth reading if not as memorable as the ones I've listed. I'll be coming back to this to review the rest of the stories in this book.
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