ver since nabbing the Campbell Award for Lincoln's Dreams, Connie Willis has been a high-profile, multi-award-winning writer in the field of science fiction and fantasy. Nebula and Hugo award-winning novels and stories such as Doomsday Book, "Firewatch," "A Letter from the Clearys," "At the Rialto," "Even the Queen," To Say Nothing of the Dog and "The Winds of Marble Arch" (last year's Hugo winner for novella) have made Willis one of the most lauded and respected writers of fiction in the genre.
Her latest novel, Passage, due out in May, is a story about researchers in the field of near-death experience who become personally involved with their project--only to learn that the answers they seek aren't what they expected. In a recent interview, Willis took time out to discuss her latest novel, its inspirations, the act of writing and some forthcoming projects.
Your latest novel, Passage, deals with near-death experiences and what might possibly await us beyond death's door. What first drew you to the idea of writing a novel centered around these ideas?
Willis: My mother died when I was 12. She died very suddenly. Since that moment, I have not thought about anything else, basically. It's different. It set me apart. It probably made me a better writer, but I'd give anything for that not to have happened. It gave me a different perspective. I'm not saying it made me clinically depressed, it just made me look at the world differently. The rest of the world--I still find, to my horror--goes blithely along thinking nothing is ever going to go wrong. And they're just shattered when it does. Never for a moment have I believed that. So [death] has always been a concern of mine.
What precipitated the book, particularly, were two things: one was that this friend of mine forced me to read Embraced by the Light, saying "You'll love it!" I loathed it. I thought it was a wicked, wicked book. I felt that--just like the old-fashioned spiritualism--it preys on people's wishes and fears. And that it panders to them in the most shameless way, saying, "Don't worry: not only will you not die, but you'll still be you and your loved ones will be there." [It's saying that] there's nothing terrifying about death. It's all sort of reduced to Hallmark-card level. To me, whatever death brings, it's huge! It's major! It's terrifying! And it's awesome (in the old-fashioned sense of the word). So I went on to read all of the near-death experience books, thinking, "Is there anything out there that's better? Or is it all this awful junk?" Much of it was even worse than Embraced by the Light. It's clear that people see something. It's clear that they're having this experience of some kind.
Hasn't there been a great deal of scientific research into near-death experiences?
Willis: There are a whole bunch of different things they are doing. Putting people in sensory deprivation tanks, doing various drugs. There were several researchers who have used a variety of drugs. There has been a lot of research. I picked my theory, the temporal lobe stimulation, as being the one that covered the most "symptoms" of any one that they tried. The argument that NDE [believers] make is that none of them produce all of the symptoms, and that therefore it must be a spiritual experience. Which is some kind of bizarre logic gap I don't get. Why [they don't think] it could be a number of processes in the body going on at the same time--as the body is frantically going down--I don't know. But it seemed to me that "temporal lobe epilepsy" came the closest to what I wanted. As for some of the other theories--you can't do anoxia and carbon dioxide buildup without some danger to the person. I didn't want to do Frankenstein. That's been done to death in science fiction. I wanted it to look like I was doing Frankenstein.
Was the collision of science and religion something that worked itself out in a fortuitous manner while writing the novel? And did you worry about offending large parts of your audience?
Willis: I told my agent that I thought I might have written the perfect novel: the anti-NDE stuff will irritate the NDE people, and the mystical stuff will irritate the hell out of the scientific community. I could end up making everybody in the United States mad. I would feel successful then, I guess. When you write a book you're trying to tell the truth. Even though you're making up all of this stuff, you're still trying to tell the truth. I felt that writing this book, although I wanted it to have a mystical or fantasy dimension. There are things that I truly believe. And one of those things is that if there is anything after death, there is no proof of it. There is no connection between the living and the dead. Except the emotional connection of it. They live in your heart. But I don't believe in ghosts and I don't believe in Ouija boards. And I really wanted to write a story in which I did not lie to the reader about that.
"The Winds of Marble Arch," which also dealt with death--was that inspired by your work on Passage?
Willis: : I think everything now is inspired by the fact that I'm old and facing death, and thinking a lot about it [laughs]. What inspired the story, originally, was standing in "the tube" [the subway in London] and feeling these strange winds go through. As my husband, the physics teacher, explained to me, they're basically just the vacuum created by the train pulling out or pulling in. Or something. But there are some that don't seem to be tied in any way to a train. If they are, it's a train three levels up and four corridors down. And you'd just be walking along and this sudden blast of air--cold, or smelling different or unusual--would hit you. It struck me how much like the winds of mortality that was. You get glimpses and insights into disaster.
While we were staying in London, we met this woman at our bed and breakfast who was very nice. She chatted with us every morning; so we finally said, "Are you here for a long time?" And she said, "Not by choice. My husband was hit by a train the first day we came, and he's been in hospital ever since." The conjunction of those two things made me think, "In midst of life." And in the meantime, a dear friend, who we went to England with, died of breast cancer. Many of the things I put into that story--the fun things we did, that riot of a first trip--was taken straight from our trip with her. So it was nice to be able to memorialize it in that story. But I promise I'm writing a comic story next. I'm not going to spend the rest of my life writing old-people stories.
Is the tone--or humor--of a story you are writing dictated by the subject or the plot?
Willis: It's totally dictated by how I want to handle the story. What I want to say. I basically have a Shakespearean view of life: comedy and drama are two sides of the same coin. It is all in the handling of the material. Shakespeare did [comedies and tragedies]. He clearly saw that the material was just the raw stuff you start with. Everything has to do with your attitude toward it. In my stories, I can't prevent comedy from leaking in somewhere. There's some comedy in Doomsday Book. And I think a totally serious, totally tragic novel would be claustrophobic. That's not how I see the world, anyway. I once had a laughing fit while picking out the coffin for my grandmother's funeral. I adored my grandmother, but this guy said something funny, and when you're in a high emotional state, things are both sad and funny. So I think that's appropriate in a story.
What's next for you?
Willis: I'm going to write some short stories first. But I'm actually contemplating two different novels. I don't know which one will ripen first. One is the amnesia novel. It will be the third novel set in the "Firewatch" universe. It will have Mr. Dunworthy in it. But I don't know about anybody else for sure. I'm toying with bringing back some older characters. I think Finch will be in it, too. It will be set in the blitz. "Firewatch" was set in the London blitz, but I never got to talk about it in the detail I wanted. It's my favorite period of history.
The other thing I'm thinking about is a comic novel about Roswell and alien abduction. My husband and I spent our anniversary in Roswell last summer. Which is a great place for a wedding anniversary. Talk about a perfect metaphor! And it was, of course, everything I thought it would be. I'm a total true believer. There was just all of this evidence. You would be astonished! Unfortunately, all of it is mislaid or missing or stolen by the government or something. [laughs].
It's just fascinating how they [UFO conspiracy buffs] can expect anyone to believe this! I've never set a novel in the Southwest, and I love the Southwest. I thought it would be fun if my very skeptical heroine was abducted by an alien. I don't mean in a spaceship--in a car! I thought that could be a fun kind of novel. And I love road trip movies, so I figured it's time to do a road trip kind of thing with alien abduction. To my knowledge, no one has done a funny version of this. So it's up to me. It's my job.
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Also in this issue: Stephen Sommers
