Connie Willis has just been named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, their highest career honour. This seems a good opportunity to look at her career thus far.
I was not the intended audience for her first novel, Lincoln’s Dreams (1987) and in many ways I’m still not. Indeed, when you consider all the things that never get a British edition and that would make sense to UK readers, it’s amazing that Grafton decided to publish this book. It’s about a young woman who is having General Lee’s dreams — not daydreams, dreams. It’s told from the point of view of Jeff, a man who works as a research assistant to a man who writes novels about the American Civil War — always called the Civil War in the text, as if everyone doesn’t know that the Civil War was between Cromwell and the Cavaliers, except for those who know it was between Franco and the Left. That’s part of why I wasn’t the intended audience — Willis assumes a knowledge of the American Civil War that non-Americans just won’t have, even if they’ve already read Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee.
[Read more: dreamlike, terrific, sort of spoilers]