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Loading... Fire Watchby Connie Willis
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. A selection of short stories written by Willis. Interesting and readable but I'm not liking her quite as much as some people I know. ( )A collection of longer stories by Connie Willis, some of them time travel stories set in WWII. A good read, though not as good as "Doomsday Book" or "To Say Nothing of the Dog". I love the Dooms Day Book, I thought it was a remarkable achievement. This book is touted as being in the same universe, so I started it eagerly. It is an anthology with several longish stories, and time travel appears in them, but it's no where near as good as Dooms Day and I did not finish it. I read the first 2 and then just put it down. It never came to life for me. But read Dooms Day book, t hat's a gem. If she never wrote anything else, Willis's reputation can rest on the brilliant "Fire Watch, " a perfect exploration of the power and allure of the past and its effect on those in the present. WWII Anglophile's dream. no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0553260456, Mass Market Paperback)Fire Watch collects 12 stories from one of science fiction's most decorated authors. Although the stories are thematically unrelated, an undercurrent of mortality weights many of the tales with a powerful sense of humanity's frailties. Two of the best pieces are "A Letter from the Clearys" and "The Sidon in the Mirror," both of which show people reacting to death in characteristically odd (and disappointingly human) ways. Fans of Willis's time-travel books, The Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog, will be delighted to find that the title story tells of another hapless Oxford history student sent back to World War II Britain to learn a hard lesson. Just when the book threatens to leave you morose and depressed, Willis reveals her wonderfully absurdist side in "Mail Order Clone" and "Blued Moon." Willis is a master of the novel, but her short stories are superb reading as well. This is a nice collection for a fan's library and a great introduction for those unfamiliar with her work. --Therese Littleton(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:02 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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