Connie Willis - The Best of Connie Willis

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 D s 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.