Connie Willis - Bellwether

Praise for Connie Williss
HUGO AND NEBULA AWARD-WINNING

DOOMSDAY BOOK

A TOUR DE FORCE. The New York Times Book Review

SPLENDID WORKBRUTAL, GRIPPING, AND GENUINELY HARROWING. THE PRODUCT OF DILIGENT RESEARCH, FINE WRITING, AND WELL-HONED INSTINCTS, THAT SHOULD APPEAL FAR BEYOND THE USUAL SCIENCE-FICTION CONSTITUENCY. Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

THE WORLD OF 1348 BURNS IN THE MINDS EYE. IT BECOMES POSSIBLE TO FEEL THAT CONNIE WILLIS DID, OVER THE FIVE YEARS DOOMSDAY BOOK TOOK HER TO WRITE, OPEN A WINDOW TO ANOTHER WORLD, AND THAT SHE SAW SOMETHING THERE. The Washington Post Book World

LINCOLNS DREAMS

A LOVE STORY ON MORE THAN ONE LEVEL, AND MS. WILLIS DOES JUSTICE TO THEM ALL. IT WAS ONLY TOWARD THE END OF THE BOOK THAT I REALIZED HOW MUCH TENSION HAD BEEN GENERATED, HOW ENGROSSED I WAS IN THE CHARACTERS, HOW MUCH I CARED ABOUT THEIR FATES. The New York Times Book Review

A TANTALIZING MIX OF HISTORY AND SCIENTIFIC SPECULATION WILLIS TELLS THIS TALE WITH CLARITY AND ASSURANCE. IMPECCABLE. San Francisco Chronicle

FULFILLS ALL THE EXPECTATIONS OF THOSE WHO HAVE ADMIRED HER AWARD-WINNING SHORT FICTION. Los Angeles Times

LINCOLNS DREAMS IS A NOVEL OF CLASSICAL PROPORTIONS AND VIRTUES HUMANE AND MOVING. The Washington Post Rook World

LINCOLNS DREAMS IS NOT SO MUCH WRITTEN AS SCULPTED [A] TALE OF LOVE AND WAR AS MOVING AS A DISTANT ROLL OF DRUMS. NO ONE HAS REPRODUCED THE PAST THAT HAUNTS THE PRESENT ANY BETTER THAN CONNIE WILLIS. The Christian Science Monitor

REMAKE

ANOTHER BRILLIANT WORK BY AN AUTHOR DESERVING OF ALL THE PRAISE AND AWARDS HEAPED ON HER. Des Moines Sunday Register

WILLISS WRITING IS FRESH, SUBTLE, AND DEEPLY MOVING.New York Times Book Review

A LSO BY C ONNIE W ILLIS

Fire Watch
Lincolns Dreams
Doomsday Book
Impossible Things
Uncharted Territory
Remake
To Say Nothing of the Dog
Passage
Miracle and Other Christmas Stories

To John
From Abigail

Yoursyoursyours

Special thanks to the girls at Margies Java Joint, who make the best caffe latte and conversation in the world, and without whom I wouldnt have made it through the last months of this novel!

Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives
Followed the Piper for their lives.
From street to street he piped advancing,
And step by step they followed dancing.

robert browning

hula hoop (march 1958june 1959) The prototype for all merchandising fads and one whose phenomenal success has never been repeated. Originally a wooden exercise hoop used in Australian gym classes, the Hula Hoop was redesigned in gaudy plastic by Wham-O and sold for $1.98 to adults and kids alike. Nuns, Red Skelton, geishas, Jane Russell, and the Queen of Jordan rotated them on their hips, and lesser beings dislocated hips, sprained necks, and slipped disks. Russia and China banned them as capitalist, a team of Belgian explorers took twenty of them along to the South Pole (to give the penguins?), and over fifty million were sold worldwide. Died out as quickly as it had spread.

Its almost impossible to pinpoint the beginning of a fad. By the time it starts to look like one, its origins are far in the past, and trying to trace them back is exponentially harder than, say, looking for the source of the Nile.

In the first place, theres probably more than one source, and in the second, youre dealing with human behavior. All Speke and Burton had to deal with were crocodiles, rapids, and the tsetse fly. In the third, we know something about how rivers work, like, they flow downhill. Fads seem to spring full-blown out of nowhere and for no good reason. Witness bungee-jumping. And Lava lamps.

Scientific discoveries are the same way. People like to think of science as rational and reasonable, following step by step from hypothesis to experiment to conclusion. Dr. Chin, last years winner of the Niebnitz Grant, wrote, The process of scientific discovery is the logical extension of observation by experimentation.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The process is exactly like any other human endeavormessy, haphazard, misdirected, and heavily influenced by chance. Look at Alexander Fleming who discovered penicillin when a spore drifted in the window of his lab and contaminated one of his cultures.

Or Roentgen. He was working with a cathode-ray tube surrounded by sheets of black cardboard when he caught a glimpse of light from the other side of his lab. A sheet of paper coated with barium platinocyanide was fluorescing, even though it was shut off from the tube. Curious, he stuck his hand between the tube and the screen. And saw the shadow of the bones of his hand.

Look at Galvani, who was studying the nervous systems of frogs when he discovered electrical currents. Or Messier. He wasnt looking for galaxies when he discovered them. He was looking for comets. He only mapped them because he was trying to get rid of a nuisance.

None of which makes Dr. Chin any the less deserving of the Niebnitz Grants million-dollar endowment. It isnt necessary to understand how something works to do it. Take driving. And starting fads. And falling in love.

What was I talking about? Oh, yes, how scientific discoveries come about. Usually the chain of events leading up to them, like that leading up to a fad, follows a course too convoluted and chaotic to follow. But I know exactly where one started and who started it.

It was in October. Monday the second. Nine oclock in the morning. I was in the stats lab at HiTek, struggling with a box of clippings on hair-bobbing. Im Sandra Foster, by the way, and I work in R&D at HiTek. I had spent all weekend going through yellowed newspapers and 1920s copies of The Saturday Evening Post and The Delineator, trudging upstream to the beginnings of the fad of hair-bobbing, looking for what had caused every woman in America to suddenly chop off her crowning glory, despite social pressure, threatening sermons, and four thousand years of long hair.

I had clipped endless news items; highlighted references, magazine articles, and advertisements; dated them; and organized them into categories. Flip had stolen my stapler, I had run out of paper clips, and Desiderata hadnt been able to find any more, so I had had to settle for stacking them, in order, in the box, which I was now trying to maneuver into my lab.

The box was heavy and had been made by the same people who manufacture paper sacks at the supermarket, so when Id dumped it just outside the lab so I could unlock the door, it had developed a major rip down one side. I was half-wrestling, half-dragging it over next to one of the lab tables so I could lift the stacks of clippings out when the whole side started to give way.

An avalanche of magazine pages and newspaper stories began to spill out through the side before I could get it pushed back in place, and I grabbed for them and the box as Flip opened the door and slouched in, looking disgusted. She was wearing black lipstick, a black halter, and a black leather micro-skirt and was carrying a box about the size of mine.