Short Science Fiction Review Connie Willis At The Rialto

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Time Is The Fire – The Best Of Connie Willis – Gollancz Press 1989 Spoiler alerts Though in a science fiction collection this is a scientist story with no futuristic invention involved, but it is hugely inventive and entertaining. The narrator is in LA for a science convention on Quantum Mechanics, which she admits she struggles to grasp for its tendency to break the rules of observable research. Molecules have a tendency to behave erratically, light behaves like waves or particles depending how you observe it, and some sub atomica appears in places it just shouldn’t be. Add to that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the Quantum World becomes a realm of chaos underlying our well-ordered reasonable, fully understandable world. So it would seem. The narrator arrives at the convention to find a state of utter confusion. Guests are double booked into hotel rooms, and he herself is not listed as having registered at all, though she has. Attendees have the wrong name tags, people she hopes to see often just leave as she gets near them, and she keeps meeting the same people she wants to avoid over and over again. Some attendees just want to sight-see and take in movies, and ultimately everyone gets together in the right happy place at a cinema instead of the convention centre. What is clear is that the characters have behaved with all the wild, chaotic unpredictable abandon as anything at the sub-atomic quantum level. The message is clearly that the two worlds, material and sub-atomic, are not really that far apart at all. Beautifully written, satirical, and as much a parody of science fiction conventions as attended by Willis a the scientific ones attended by her characters. Arthur Chappell