REVIEW-ESSAY
Sandra Lindow
Connie Willis’s Quantum Theology—Pandemic to Christmas
Carissa Turner Smith, ed. Connie Willis’s Science Fiction: Doomsday Every Day. Routledge, 2023. 283 pp. $140 hc.
Connie Willis was the first author to win a Nebula in all four categories of science fiction: short story, novelette, novella, and novel. Overall, she has won eleven Hugo and seven Nebula awards, but despite her popularity with fans and writers she has been somewhat neglected by the fluctuating currents of sf scholarship. In Connie Willis’s Science Fiction: Doomsday Every Day, editor Carissa Turner Smith cites “a surprising dearth of critical publication surrounding her work” and offers readers an introduction and twelve essays that provide a critical base for future criticism (np). The essays, divided into six sections, mark an important start in cementing Willis’s place in sf. They include Willis’s prescient approach to pandemic as well as her understanding of trauma, humor, gender, memory, and sacrament. In total, they demonstrate Willis’s potency and currency not only in sf but also in the mainstream of humanist/posthumanist thought.
Smith’s “Introduction” places Willis’s oeuvre firmly within the embrace of contemporary science fiction, describing it as a “meta-scientific” dramatization of “the uncertainty, the trial and error, the ongoing discoveries that are part of the scientific process” (7). Critics who look beyond Willis’s sly humor and well-developed characterization find a body of work that represents the genre as it is defined by such important writers as Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Jo Walton, Eleanor Arnason, and Octavia Butler, all of whom use physical science and time travelmetaphorically to talk about social structures, sexism, and oppression (Larbalestier 153). David Higgins remarks that like many other woman writers, Willis’s work has been regarded as “soft” and falling “outside the core of SF” by focusing on humanist and social science issues (79), while Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint suggest that “hard SF” sometimes reflects a desire to exclude texts that seem to be “drifting away” from core science toward a “leftist and/or feminist political critique” of the technoscience they admire (149). But (Sad Puppies aside) most critics agree that, as Helen Merrick says, “the hard/soft divide is now generally seen ... as fairly meaningless” (227). Higgins says that “Willis’s focus on metaphorical extrapolations, literary craftsmanship, and detailed characterization is a sign of a different category of SF that refuses to privilege scientific extrapolation as the essence of the SF genre” (79). There is wider acknowledgment that scientific authority is fallible and influenced by many outside factors. Indeed, Roger Luckhurst defines contemporary sf as “an ambitious stretch of contextual material ranging from the history of science and technology, via the softer sciences, to the rarefied world of aesthetic and critical theory” (3). The essays in Doomsday Every Day expand this definition to include a Willis universe where quantum theory is indivisible from theology.
An essential characteristic of Willis’s fictional universes involves the flexibility of time and the possible inclusion of divine agency. The essays in this volume suggest that the space/time continuum has a kind of sentience possibly indicating a divine plan that functions subtly on a quantum level. Willis, born in 1945, began reading science fiction in the 1950s, writing that she has loved sf since she first read Heinlein’s Have Space Suit, Will Travel (1958) (“Introduction ... Hugo” 2). During her formative years, few physical concepts were more worthy of serious scientific study than Einstein’s theories on the nature of time and the corresponding possibilities of time travel. Ruminations on time constitute a theoretical center of Willis’s oeuvre, providing a groundbreaking understanding of psychological time that constantly weaves in and out of past, present, and future, the dynamic polychronicity of everyday life. Certainly, it is an issue that must have recurred in lively discussions in her personal life. Her husband, Courtney Willis, is a former professor of physics at the University of Northern Colorado. We see her contemplations of time and the interconnection of memory and history not only in her time travel novels but also in her short stories and in her alternate history Lincoln’s Dreams (1987), in which memories from the past leak into the present. Willis’s work is essentially metafictional, reacting against the genre tropes of earlier speculations on time travel.
Smith’s introduction begins with the COVID-19 pandemic, suggesting that human life on earth is one of “repeated disaster,” constantly impending doomsdays where “each successive catastrophe seems like the end of the world” (2). She explains how Willis combines “comic and tragic modes” to reflect on life’s uncertainties while also providing readers “with resources to cope with the trauma of contagion, loss, and isolation” (3). Thus, Willis’s stories function as (playful or serious) critiques of the role of everyday chaos and subjectivity versus scientific authority and objectivity, an exploration that intersects the realms of “posthumanist ethics and trauma theory” (8). This theme is explored throughout her work, and mediated with humor as she demonstrates that the scientific method is fraught with bumps and failures and that unrecognized forces influence experimentation. Smith suggests that “Sf can engage productively with religious themes in an era of polarizing religious discourse” (11).
Part I,“Contagion,” pairs Joelle Renstrom’s “Doomsday Book and Recurring Pandemics” with Jill Marie Treftz’s “Interpreting Agency and Contagion in Bellwether.” Doomsday (1992), a dark book, and Bellwether (1996), a lighter one, both examine how “virality” occurs both literally and metaphorically (13). Renstrom, a science writer, relates pandemic response throughout history while focusing on Doomsday’s protagonist, Kivrin, who learns, Renstrom concludes, that “There is no immunization for hate or selfishness, no antibiotic for lack of empathy. Our present-day understanding of diseases may be leaps and bounds greater than it was 700 years ago, but can we say the same about humanity’s social institutions?” (36). A specialist in nineteenth-century British literature, Treftz begins with the “nonstop contagions” of 2020, exploring how COVID-19 may have provoked “a real-time explosion of fads and trends that culminated in “armed anti-shutdown and anti-masking protests” and “a perverse spectacle of allegations that threatened the peaceful transfer of power” (39). Treftz sees this same pattern in Bellwether’s portrait of a society that resists “the demands of scientific inquiry” in favor “of faddish forms of knowledge,” and Willis’s depiction appears quite prescient (39).
Part II, “Individual and Collective Trauma,” contains Matthew Newcomb’s “Emergency Unpreparedness: Responses to Connie Willis’s Passage” and Janet Bland’s “Taking it Personally: Private Engagement from World War II to J.F.K.” These essays continue discussion of Willis’s explorations of disaster and demonstrate how her fiction collapses distinctions between public and private trauma. While analyzing public responses to the Titanic, Hindenburg, and Mt. Vesuvius disasters, Newcomb writes, “Disaster is about having company or community, even in death” (61), but the focus of Passage (2001) is on research into near-death experiences (NDEs) and whether these personal experiences provide scientific proof of an afterlife or simply reflect the brain’s need to create a story that makes sense in what seem to be the final moments of a life. Willis provides no easy answers except the implication that human survival supposes “an evolutionary response” to constantly impending disaster, “a reason to continue to struggle rather than escaping to other worlds” such as outer space, bunkers for the rich, or heaven (71). Newcomb concludes, “Disaster management is emotional experience management,” a conclusion that centers Willis’s work, including her comedies (72). Janet Bland’s “Taking it Personally” reads Willis’s Blackout/All Clear (2010) in conversation with Stephen King’s 11/22/63 (2012), both time-traveling responses to public trauma: London during the blitz and the murder of John F. Kennedy. If history is “a systemic and at times sentient force” (78), then, in Willis’s universe, time travel cannot be conducted “without risk or personal engagement” (95). Willis, however, does provide a safety net in the space/time continuum, a kind of matrix consciousness that works to minimize damage, allowing travelers time to correct the inadvertent damage they have done.
Part III, “Incarnation and Embodiment,” pairs Chad Schrock’s “You Were Here All Along: Doomsday Book and the Bodies of Christ” with Erin Newcomb’s “Christmas Every Day: Incarnational Theology in Connie Willis’s ‘Inn’ and ‘Epiphany’.” Both essays explore a deeply personal embodiment of humanist and Christian virtues without offering the angel food candy of heavenly immortality. The nature of time travel seems to invite theological discussion. Schrock, a medievalist, asserts that Doomsday Book takes God into “account with bald, bitter clarity” and explores various unsatisfactory ideas of theodicy or vindications of how a “good God” can allow so much evil and suffering in the world (103). He suggests that both Kivrin, who is likened to St. Catherine, and the poorly-educated priest Father Roche function as embodiments of Christ in their dedication to alleviating suffering through their caring presences. Willis’s message is of “authentic, unironic Christian transcendence,” a fuller, more believable theodicy (106, 114). Schrock concludes that Dunworthy spiritually replaces Roche at the end of the novel, their joined hands representing “incarnational entanglement” through mutual embodiment of Christ, a play on quantum entanglement (115). Erin Newcomb’s essay continues theological discussion through the experience of “Christmas Every Day.” She focuses on the “incarnational gaze” that calls upon Christians to see through “the lens of Christ as embodied,” thus determining the way that humans see and treat each other (120). In this way, the work of Christ transcends the boundaries of space and time. Sharon, the protagonist of “Inn” (1993), secretly offers sanctuary in a modern-day church to a hungry and homeless Mary and Joseph, allowing them to stay until after their baby is born, “a practical theology that transcends the temporal and spatial paradox of the incarnation” (126). Her “gaze of faith” allows Sharon to see the “invisible in the visible” while at the same time realizing that leadership in the church may falter. In “Epiphany” (1999), a pastor, seeing through the incarnational gaze, recognizes in his fellow travelers imperfect embodiments of Christ returning in “disguise” (134). Together, they can “see their way forward” (135).
Part IV, “Intertextuality,” pairs two narrowly focused essays that compare Willis’s writing with mainstream literary writers: William Tate’s “Bell Speech in John Donne, Richard Wilbur, and Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book” and Christine A. Colon’s “Finding Love (and Truth?) in the Midst of Chaos: The Influence of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Detective Fiction on To Say Nothing of the Dog.” “Bell Speech” focuses on the recurring motif of bell ringing throughout Doomsday Book, comparing it to John Donne’s Devotions on Emergent Occasions (1624) in showing how bell ringing expresses and establishes community across space and time, and then counters with Richard Wilbur’s suggestion that contemporary “human indifference” has rendered the sound of bells “toothless” and “dumb” (146). Correspondingly, he demonstrates how Doomsday’sconclusionoffers bell speech that is a deeply significant expression of community and personal suffering. In “Finding Love,” Christine Colon explains how Willis structures her novel To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998) via Golden Age detective fiction. She focuses on Dorothy Sayers’s Peter Whimsey novels and demonstrates how Willis’s characters Ned and Verity are similar to Sayers’s Peter and Harriet. Colon suggests that in both cases “pervasive Victorian conceptions of gender roles and marriage ... make navigating relationships more chaotic than they should be” (164). This process depends on dispensing with illusions of stereotypical gender ideals to see each other as real people. Colon cites a 2001 Publisher’s Weekly interview in which “Willis focuses on the search for truth as an essential component of what it means to be human” (169) and suggests that the space-time continuum which Ned and Verity must negotiate offers Willis’s characters more chances to make moral choices that will solve their mystery while preserving the continuum, a “Grand Design” that takes on an historical, theological significance (177-78).
Part V is entitled “Genre, Gender, and Xenophobia” and pairs Sylvia Kelso’s “The Mote in the Jester's Eye: Aspects of Race and Gender in Connie Willis’s Light Short Fiction” with Rosalyn Eves’s “Tell All the Truth but Tell it Slant: Rhetorical Humor in Connie Willis’s Short Fiction.” Although both explore Willis’s use of humor, the tone of these essays is very different. “The Mote in the Jester's Eye” is problematic in its analysis of Willis’s comic short fiction, focusing on identifying Willis’s “blind spots” regarding race and gender (183). Kelso argues that Willis often employs romantic plotlines with Happily Ever After endings featuring a young, white, heterosexual woman as viewpoint character who often has “no female support system, no economic or physical handicaps, no (onstage) sex, and almost no contact with physical violence” (185). Kelso believes that Willis’s reliance on this trope demonstrates difficulty with race and gender. Although Willis’s universe most often reflects the traditional gender binary, Kelso unfairly overstates her case that the lack of “alternate races and sexualities” in Willis’s nostalgic comedies is “a great loss for contemporary science fiction” (202). In “To Tell All the Truth but Tell It Slant,” Rosalyn Eves takes inspiration from Emily Dickinson when analyzing Willis’s comedy, exploring how Willis constructs stories so that difficult truth is told slant and revealed gradually. She asserts that Willis’s comedies are “central to her literary worldview” and of no less critical importance than her serious work. Eves argues that to use comedy as a rhetorical “weapon” is to “tell the truth” for a specific purpose (209). Drawing on the linguistic work of John C. Meyer, Matthew Ramsey, and Thomas Veatch, Eves argues that “Willis uses comedy and perceptual incongruities ... to provoke discomfort with and challenge societal norms (particularly feminine gender norms),” while emphasizing the importance of “friendship, love, and self-determination” (209). Focusing on “Blued Moon” (1984), “Spice Pogrom” (1986), “Even the Queen” (1992), and Inside Job (2005), Eves explains how Willis’s narratives establish a pattern of “worthy” and “unworthy” characters often based on interpersonal honesty and “linguistic clarity” (201). Eves counters and clarifies Kelso’s previous argument by demonstrating that Willis’s comedic satire is not aimed “at feminism as a whole, but at ridiculous arguments and radical forms of feminism that don’t reflect most women’s lived experience” (220).
Part VI, “Humanist and Posthumanist Witness,” couples “Messages in a Bottle: The Historian’s Ethic in Connie Willis’s Quantum Universe” by Kathryn McDaniel with “Schrödinger’s Cathedral: Humanist Memory and Posthumanist Sacramentality in Connie Willis’s Fiction” by Carissa Turner Smith. Regarding the Oxford Historians series (1982-2010), McDaniel describes the difficulties of historical observation and interpretation for time travelers who become trapped in “a limbo that is past and future yet neither past nor future” (235). McDaniel argues that Willis “defines an ethical approach to the past:” “a historical consciousness” where “consolation” is “a moral imperative” during “times of collective trauma” (234). The continuum allows time travelers to act with compassion and ease suffering because a phenomenon called “slippage” keeps them from places and times where their presence would disrupt the flow of major events (235). All Clear (2010), the final novel in the series, suggests a more orderly and unified (and less fragile) stream of events, what McDaniel describes as “a complex network of individual decisions and actions that ultimately play out as the universe intends,” than is depicted in the earlier works (250). All in all, historical “causation is complex, entangled, hidden, and perhaps unknowable” (241). McDaniel concludes that Willis’s narratives focus on truth by countering attempts to create “simplistic narratives used to shore up nationalist or racial identities and neofascist agendas, which are widely appealing in an age of uncertainty” (248). Smith’s final chapter focuses on the function of cathedrals, particularly in “Fire Watch” (1986) and To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998). She begins by wondering whether the recently rebuilt Notre Dame Cathedral is “a place embodying—in ways beyond words—the inbreaking of the divine” or simply “a museum where ‘history’ can be preserved in unchanging form” (256). Smith suggests that for Willis, cathedrals represent a sacramental reality where a communicant “participates in sacred history” and “sacramental architecture” (257, 265). In posthumanist terms, cathedrals themselves have “agency” and are “dynamic participants” in memory and in “meaning-making:” “in us, saved forever” even when they have been destroyed (269, 263, 257, 261).
This collection makes clear how responses to theology have always been a part of sf. In science-centered stories, theological thought may be backgrounded, which may have been part of the reason that some critics have not seen Willis as an sf writer. Nevertheless, science and theology are not necessarily mutually exclusive. It is only a small interdimensional step sideways to envision a space/time continuum with an inherent sentience and agency, and Willis takes that step decisively. For the most part, these are well-written and accessible essays that make a powerful argument for the creative brilliance of Willis’s thought experiments, not only in her serious fiction but also in her screwball romantic comedies, fiction that demonstrates the compatibility of spirit and observation. Doomsday Every Day is a coherent beginning for further discussion. There is more work to be done.
WORKS CITED
Bould, Mark, and Sherryl Vint. The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction. Routledge, 2011.
Higgins, David M. “Science Fiction, 1960-2005: Novels and Short Fiction.” Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Ed. Robin A. Reid. Greenwood, 2009. 73-83.
Larbalestier, Justine. The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction. Wesleyan UP, 2002.
Luckhurst, Roger. Science Fiction. Polity, 2005.
Merrick, Helen. The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms. Aquaduct, 2009.
Willis, Connie. “Introduction.” The New Hugo Winners, Volume III. Baen, 1994. 1-3.
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