Science fiction author Connie Willis has won her seventh Nebula award, this one for Blackout/All Clear, her two-volumes-makes-a-book time travel novel.
Read the news account here. Find out more about the Nebula award by reading the rules provided by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
Connie Willis has written about time travel before, and Blackout/All Clear revisits the Oxford she wrote about in her novels The Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog. Both books won the Hugo Award, in 1993 and 1998, respectively. The Doomsday Book also won a Nebula.
Willis’s other five Nebula awards are for the short works Fire Watch (1983); A Letter from the Clearys (1983); The Last of the Winnebagos (1988); At the Rialto (1990); and Even the Queen (1993).
I haven’t read all of Connie Willis’s books, but I’ve read a few. I loved The Doomsday Book and Lincoln’s Dream, and I liked To Say Nothing of the Dog. I thought Bellwether was clever, but not great, and I got bored with Passage and didn’t finish it (because I don’t finish reading novels that bore me).
Now you know how I feel. I like Connie Willis, but I continue to be a little surprised at how she sweeps up so many of the top awards in science fiction. That won’t stop me from reading her new books, though.
Here’s a video from a couple of years ago, in which Connie Willis explains how because of Lord of the Rings she “accidentally got married” 37 years ago: