ABSTRACT
In spite of Connie Willis’s numerous science fiction awards and her groundbreaking history as a woman in the field, there is a surprising dearth of critical publication surrounding her work. Taking Doomsday Book as its cue, this collection argues that Connie Willis’s most famous novel, along with the rest of her oeuvre, performs science fiction’s task of cognitive estrangement by highlighting our human inability to read the times correctly—and yet also affirming the ethical imperative to attempt to truly observe and record our temporal location. Willis’s fiction emphasizes that doomsdays happen every day, and they risk being forgotten by some, even as their trauma repeats for others. However, disasters also have the potential to upend accepted knowledge and transform the social order for the better, and this collection considers the ways that Willis pairs comic and tragic modes to reflect these uncertainties.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|32 pages
Contagion
chapter 1|12 pages
All This Has Happened Before, and All This Will Happen Again
part II|44 pages
Individual and Collective Trauma
chapter 4|24 pages
Taking It Personally
part III|40 pages
Incarnation and Embodiment
chapter 6|21 pages
Christmas Every Day
part IV|40 pages
Intertextuality
chapter 8|18 pages
Finding Love (and Truth?) in the Midst of Chaos
part V|50 pages
Genre, Gender, and Xenophobia
chapter 9|25 pages
The Mote in the Jester's Eye
chapter 10|23 pages
“Tell All the Truth but Tell It Slant”
part VI|48 pages
Humanist and Posthumanist Witness