Connie Willis - The Best of Connie Willis

Katie had left the print of Mrs. Ambler on the couch. I picked it up and looked at it a minute and then fed it into the developer. “Recycle,” I said.

I picked up the eisenstadt from the table by the couch and took the film cartridge out. I started to pull the film out to expose it, and then shoved it into the developer instead and turned it on. “Positives, one two three order, five seconds.”

I had apparently set the camera on its activator again—there were ten shots or so of the backseat of the Hitori. Vehicles and people. The pictures of Katie were all in shadow. There was a Still Life of Kool-Aid Pitcher with Whale Glass and another one of Jana’s toy cars, and some near-black frames that meant Katie had laid the eisenstadt facedown when she brought it to me.

“Two seconds,” I said, and waited for the developer to flash the last shots so I could make sure there wasn’t anything else on the cartridge and then expose it before the Society got here. All but the last frame was of the darkness that was all the eisenstadt could see lying on its face.

The last one was of me.

The trick in getting good pictures is to make people forget they’re being photographed. Distract them. Get them talking about something they care about.

“Stop,” I said, and the image froze.

Aberfan was a great dog. He loved to play in the snow, and after I had murdered him, he lifted his head off my lap and tried to lick my hand.

The Society would be here any minute to take the longshot film and destroy it, and this one would have to go, too, along with the rest of the cartridge. I couldn’t risk Hunter’s being reminded of Katie. Or Segura taking a notion to do a print-fix and peel on Jana’s toy cars.

It was too bad. The eisenstadt takes great pictures. “Even you’ll forget it’s a camera,” Ramirez had said in her spiel, and that was certainly true. I was looking straight into the lens.

And it was all there, Misha and Taco and Perdita and the look he gave me on the way to the vet’s while I stroked his poor head and told him it would be all right, that look of love and pity I had been trying to capture all these years. The picture of Aberfan.

The Society would be here any minute. “Eject,” I said, and cracked the cartridge open, and exposed it to the light.

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.”

Connie Willis is known not only for her amazing fiction—some of which is on dazzling display in this volume, and much of which is still out there for you to discover, if you have not done so already—but also for her signature speeches at various events and conventions. These speeches are moving and funny and so very quintessentially Connie that you can’t help falling in love with her not only as a writer, but as an incredible human being.

So, as a special added bonus, we are publishing three of her speeches here, for your reading pleasure. Two have been delivered before—one at the 2006 Worldcon, where Connie was Guest of Honor, and one at the 2012 Nebula Awards, where Connie received the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award. The third was never delivered.

I know the reading experience can’t quite replicate Connie’s expert delivery (although the format of the speeches will give you some insight into how they are meant to be read), but I still found myself smiling and with tears in my eyes at the end of each one.

Enjoy! And thank you, Connie, for everything you do.

—Anne Lesley Groell

Executive Editor

(and LSE: Long-Suffering Editor* [1])

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