Connie Willis: bland, bad, popular

Andrew Hickey is not subtle in his criticism of Connie Willis and her latest novels Blackout/All Clear, concluding:

This is someone who has apparently had a successful writing career for as long as I’ve been alive. On the evidence of this utter, appalling, piece of shit, this travesty, this disgrace that makes Dan Brown look like a more elegant and refined version of F. Scott Fitzgerald, I can only assume that she has incriminating photos of the head of publishing at Spectra, her publishers, and of the people who choose the Hugo shortlists. In which case, I can only say to let her release the photos – they could hardly do more damage to your reputations than these books do.

I haven’t read these novels, but all the flaws Andrew mentions were also present in her older novels like e.g. To Say Nothing about the Dog. She has a fondness for screwball comedy plotting, where all the problems her protagonists have to deal with are largely caused by them not talking to each other, prefering to run around like headless chickens. She’s not very good at creating believable villains either, for whom cardboard would be a compliment as she just cannot imagine anybody wanting to oppose her characters. Don’t read her novels for their plot. What’s more, despite her genuine Anglophilia, she’s sloppy in her research, her vision of England barely a step above say the Phantom Rasberry Blower of Old London Town, to say nothing of the atrocities she allows her characters to perpetuate on the Queen’s English.

Idiot plotting, bad research, padding and yet Willis is incredibly popular and a perennial Hugo candidate and winner. She must be doing something right and indeed her saving grace is her gift at storytelling. She’s a good read, not too demanding, easily digestable and flatters the reader outrageously by hitting them over the head with her “subtle” allusions — she makes sure you know To Say Nothing about the Dog is a homage to Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat and praises you for getting it.

Connie Willis, like a whole slew of other bland but persistently popular sf writers (Robert J. Sawyer, Allan Steele, Mike Resnick to name three), is popular because she never underestimates her audience. She knows the trick of spoon feeding her readers without being blatant about it, ladling out easily digestable story and complimenting her readers’ ability to swallow. Judging from everything I’ve heard about Blackout/All Clear however, she has now lost that knack and all that remains are the flaws. If she wins the Hugo for it, it would be the final nail in its coffin.