Renowned science fiction author and Greeley resident, Connie Willis, sees ‘Doomsday Book’ come to life amid pandemic
Connie Willis poses in front of a stack of books. Courtesy photo.
By Dan England
Connie Willis researched the Black Death of the mid-1340s and the Spanish Flu of 1918. But she already knew, for the most part, how her characters would respond to the pandemic she invents in “Doomsday Book.”
You may not have heard of her, because she hasn’t sold as many books as Stephen King or even one of her heroes, Philip Dick.
Even so, Willis, 75, who lives in Greeley, has quite a niche as one of the world’s best science fiction writers, if you believe people who hand out awards specifically for science fiction writers. She was, for instance, inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2009 and the Science Fiction Writers of America named her its 28th SFWA Grand Master in 2011.
"Among seasoned readers of science fiction, Connie Willis needs no introduction,” said Joe Cunningham, Barnes and Noble’s science fiction blogger. “Toss a baseball through one of her windows, and chances are good it’s going to knock over a (prestigious) Hugo Award or two.”
The funny thing is, she loves history, even more than science fiction. As a result, she’s read shelves of books. That’s why, in “Doomsday Book,” you have an assistant in modern times who worries about the college running out of orange juice as people come down with a mysterious and deadly infection, and an old woman in the 1300s who believes the plague is a punishment from God, and a group of bell ringers from America who are more worried about their rights to perform being taken away under a quarantine than keeping others safe.
Does all this sound familiar?
People, in other words, worry about dumb things as the world collapses around them, Willis said. There are many examples of that in “Doomsday Book,” even though she wrote the book in 1992, when people would think “pandemic” was the name of yet another grunge band inspired by Nirvana.
In reading “Doomsday Book,” it feels as if Willis used the same time machine her characters use to travel to the time of the plague and yet, she didn’t need it: She had everything she needed from history. Past performance doesn’t necessarily indicate future results, and yet, when it came to the coronavirus, it sure as heck seems that way. Studying all that history, and watching people for 75 years, and the natural cynicism all science fiction writers have about human beings, gives her enough authority to make an observation.
“People don’t change,” Willis said in an interview. “The world changes, but people don’t change. Human nature doesn’t change. I’m always interested in the pettiness and preoccupation with details that people have.”
As Willis watched from her home last year, with her husband, she realized, sadly, that she knew more than she thought.
“It’s really upsetting to me,” Willis said, “that I predicted so many things correctly.”
She really did, even the toilet paper shortage, which made her proud except that she also found herself short when the coronavirus broke out and people rushed the stores: “Apparently I didn’t learn anything,” she said.
But she didn’t see one thing coming.
“I couldn’t believe the mask thing,” she said. “I NEVER predicted people would refuse to wear a mask. I’m still so furious over that. It was even worse than I thought.”
Knowing the rules, but refusing to play by them
Willis’ love of history would have led her to become a historical fiction writer, except, well, that means you have to stick to the rules, and Willis prefers to let her characters be the persnickety ones.
“You could do so many different things with sci fi,” she said. “I’ve never found anything I couldn’t write about in sci fi.”
You could create a space western, like Star Wars, she said. You could create a Dystopian world, or you could bend reality, much like Dick does in his writing, or you could be funny, which is why Willis fell in love with sci fi in the first place. When she was 13, she stumbled across “Have Space Suit, Will Travel,” by Robert Heinlein, a novel with a funny, smart-ass teenager, and she loved it so much she sought out other books like it. Science fiction didn’t have a category back then, so she looked for books with spaceships on them in her library and eventually found Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov and a series of books featuring the year’s best science fiction stories.
She was already a veteran when she wrote “Doomsday Book,” considered to be one of her best. Now that she looks back on it, she wrote it for the same reason she fell in love with science fiction. The best stories, she said, weren’t written to predict anything, even if, like “Doomsday Book,” many were set in the future. They put their characters in a situation and wrote, in sometimes painful detail, how they got out of it: Did they become downright evil, or did they simply explore all options to survive, even the terrible ones? Or did they unexpectedly rise to the occasion and show the kind of heart and bravery no one, including the readers, thought they had? Science fiction isn’t about pandemics, Willis said. It’s about people.
“They’re really more interested in explaining how people react if this happened or if that happened,” Willis said.
Generally, Willis said, science fiction writers believe most humans will disappoint you, either by focusing on things that don’t matter, letting their haughty egos get in the way or looking out for themselves. They did that during the plague, she said, and they did that during the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918.
“I have read a lot of history, and generally, it’s a vast laboratory of human behavior and how horribly they act to each other,” Willis said.
Her characters do that in “Doomsday Book,” some of them to the degree that made us cringe in 2020, and really, that didn’t take much research, at least not the kind that allows her to talk about the Black Death in the 1300s write in great detail how it ravaged whole villages and individual bodies.
“Just talking to human beings is enough,” Willis said. “I think I have a very low opinion of humankind, and they always surprise me by sinking even lower than I could have imagined.”
Like the mask thing?
“Yes,” she said. “But then again, I spend most of my time in a blind rage. That’s why I write.”
Yes, that sounds cynical, but Willis insists that she isn’t as bad as many of her fellow sci-fi writers. And that’s because of her grandmother.
Good, and evil, resides in everyone
Stephen King, in his much darker pandemic book, “The Stand,” uses a superflu to kill off the 99 percent of the population to force his characters to choose a side, Good or Evil, and fight each other, led by an elderly grandmother in Boulder and the Walking Dude in Las Vegas.
But Willis does not like to write villains into her stories, at least not the blatant ones like the Walking Dude. Her villains, she said, are those human traits that challenge us all, and the worst of times to bring them out.
“I have ordinary people who can’t control what happens and don’t know how to fix it,” Willis said.
They never see the problems they need to fix until it’s too late. They are stuck in those times without the benefit of hindsight or a world view to help them see the real danger, Willis said. This happens to all people in all times, she said, not just now. A book she read that was written in the 1300s mentions problems with the king and land management and a caste society. It never mentions the plague.
“You guys!” Willis said as if she was speaking to the people in 1340. “Something horrible is coming!”
Willis tried to keep this in mind when she watched us fall under the grip of the coronavirus. At times, she found that difficult.
She was no fan of President Trump and the arrogant way he tried to dismiss the virus — she set aside a week to watch the impeachment hearings with glee, even if they didn’t turn out the way she wanted them to — and she does remain frustrated at the “mental gymnastics” humans can go through to convince themselves that it’s OK to put others in danger, something she saw many times during this pandemic or, really, any pandemic, even her made-up ones. When the holidays rolled around, she rolled her eyes at the families who traveled across the country to see their loved ones. She has one child with her husband, a retired UNC physics professor. Her daughter lives in California. Willis loves her. She wanted to see her.
“But I couldn’t live with the fact that I killed her,” Willis said.
Willis was tempted many times to go to Starbucks, just once, to write and enjoy those inevitable five-minute breaks with people waiting for coffee. She misses those. Instead, she stayed away because, as a writer, she’d already considered the possibilities of what could happen. When it’s your job to write about characters who refuse to face reality, you recognize it when you see it in real life.
Willis herself tries to keep more of a world view, both on the world and on herself. She has a friend and a writer, James Patrick Kelly, and they have a pact: Once they stop making sense, they will tell each other, and then it’s time for retirement. Wills hasn’t reached that point yet.
We can be heroes
Willis may not have many villains in her stories, but she does have heroes.
Some of them are the main characters, of course, but others surprise you, as they will in “Doomsday Book.” Willis has her own personal hero, and this person saved her in the same way her characters save the world.
Willis’ mother died when she was 12. Her grandmother raised her. She was a Dust-Bowl farmer, a time when a punishing drought turned soil to powder. Her only son was killed in World War II. And then, of course, her only daughter, Connie’s mother, died too young too. But this is not a roadmap that leads to Willis’ cynicism.
“My grandmother was the most cheerful, optimistic, fun-loving person I’ve ever met,” she said.
When she was 92, she loved the Broncos and quilting and current events. One time, the news told her about a molasses spill in Loveland, and she wanted to go see it.
“She was interested in life until the very end,” Willis said, “and, well, if she can do that, my God, I should too.”
Her grandmother, therefore, helped Willis enjoy people for all their faults, and Willis continues to have what she calls an “optimistic pessimism toward the human race.”
“Mark Twain got SO bitter at the end,” Willis said. “That hasn’t happened to me.”
That’s why, instead of just focusing on Trump during an interview, she talked at length about the heroes of the coronavirus. Musicians did free concerts online. Comedians made hilarious memes on the Internet, she said. Dolly Parton donated $1 million to develop a key vaccine.
“I’ve been really impressed,” Willis said. “People have really come through. And, you know, a lot of people actually did wear their masks.”