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A review by nwhyte
Impossible Things by Connie Willis
2.0
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1424811.html
Connie Willis has won more Hugo awards for fiction than any other writer (and more Nebulas than anyone except Ursula Le Guin), and I'm not entirely sure why. Her best stories have a decent combination of humour and nostalgic mourning; her worst are sentimental glurge. This particular collection includes two of her four joint Hugo/Nebula winning stories - 'The Last of the Winnebagos' and 'Even The Queen', both of which are decent enough; I found some of the others pretty incomprehensible (especially the last in the collection, 'At The Rialto') or shallow. Some of them are OK (best being 'Jack', a story of a vampire during the Blitz), and the collection probably represents Willis at the peak of her powers - for good or ill.
Connie Willis has won more Hugo awards for fiction than any other writer (and more Nebulas than anyone except Ursula Le Guin), and I'm not entirely sure why. Her best stories have a decent combination of humour and nostalgic mourning; her worst are sentimental glurge. This particular collection includes two of her four joint Hugo/Nebula winning stories - 'The Last of the Winnebagos' and 'Even The Queen', both of which are decent enough; I found some of the others pretty incomprehensible (especially the last in the collection, 'At The Rialto') or shallow. Some of them are OK (best being 'Jack', a story of a vampire during the Blitz), and the collection probably represents Willis at the peak of her powers - for good or ill.