This is the same format Willis prefers for all of her longer works: lots of really great writing and compelling characters, but you have to wade through a bunch of repetitive "funny bits" to get to them, most of which seem to have to do with telephones. Because this is 1/2 of a fantastic book grafted to 250 pages of tiresome running about with no real purpose.
Or look at it this way: Connie Willis really needs an editor.
You'd think that was a pretty good trade-off, right? Well, if you've read a few of Connie Willis' "future historian" time travel books, you know that we're probably better off as we are, because without cell phones, it seems humanity would spend most of its days in fevered attempts to place calls by landline video phone, narrowly missing one another, encountering busy circuits, unable to locate anyone not at his home or office. Somehow, by the year 2053, we'll have invented time travel but lost the use of cell phone technology. Her protagonists are typically beset by single-minded people pursuing illogical agendas, such as attempting to organize a bell-ringing session in the middle of a deadly epidemic ( Doomsday Book), or frustrating efforts to analyze near-death experiences by putting words in the mouths of interviewees ( Passage). Willis tends to the comedy of manners style of writing. These pieces include her Hugo Award-winning novels Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog and the short story "Fire Watch," found in the short story collection of the same name. She has written several pieces involving time travel by history students and faculty of the future University of Oxford. Willis is known for her accessible prose and likable characters. She lives in Greeley, Colorado with her husband Courtney Willis, a professor of physics at the University of Northern Colorado. She was the 2011 recipient of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA). Willis most recently won a Hugo Award for All Seated on the Ground (August 2008). She has won, among other awards, ten Hugo Awards and six Nebula Awards. She is one of the most honored science fiction writers of the 1980s and 1990s. Constance Elaine Trimmer Willis is an American science fiction writer.
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