Why is Connie Willis so popular?

I only wish I could write reviews as good as Jonathan McCalmont’s review of the Connie Willis novels Blackout and All Clear:

Clearly based upon extensive and painstaking research, Blackout and All Clear are filled with shops and underground stations that are bombed on particular days, of full moons rising, tides going out, and changes in military procedure occurring in response to precise historical events. It is a novel in which shop-girls read film star magazines, and vicars blush whenever anyone mentions sex, because that’s what shop-girls and vicars genuinely did. These are books obsessed with mundane details and yet, despite an almost religious desire to communicate the facts of 1940s’ British life, the novel’s lack of well-rounded characters and blindness to issues such as class mean that the books amount to little more than images of a dead culture. A culture pickled in the vinegar of the mundane and prominently displayed in a museum filled with well-preserved and carefully labelled dead things. This is partly a reflection of the stereotypical nature of Willis’ secondary characters but it is also due to the fact that her protagonists are eternal outsiders who live in perpetual fear of changing the past. This fear not only distances us from the lives of people in the 1940s, it also encourages a sense of awed submission before history that strikes me as profoundly unhealthy.

[…]

Given that I did not hate everything about this novel, why did I give it the lowest possible mark? The answer is because Willis and her publisher are taking the piss. Cast your eyes to the top of this page and you will see not one but two listed prices for this book. The reason for this is that, despite having been written as a single novel, Blackout and All Clear were issued as two separate books months apart. Spectra did this despite the narrative not stopping at a natural break-point and despite the fact that, combined, the two books are not as long as some of the individual volumes of George R.R. Martin’s A Song Of Fire And Ice.

This is nothing short of the deliberate exploitation of Willis’ fan-base, and Willis is quite obviously complicit in this wretched behaviour. Willis signed off on the deal, Willis accepts the royalty cheques for two books and Willis is the person who turned in a novel so padded with research and bloated with narrative speed-bumps that is at least three times as long as it should have been. That is taking the piss and that is why I have knocked one mark off my score. Genre writing already has a regrettable tendency towards bloat; I see no reason why we should be giving publishers and authors an economic incentive to let the situation get any worse.

On his own blog, Jonathan also goes into the lack of basic research shown in these novels:

P.S. – In my review, I credit Willis with having conducted “extensive and painstaking research”. What this remark referred to was her attention to such historical details as when places were bombed and when certain events took place in the war. However, as someone who has lived his entire life in London, I spent most of my time with the novels scaling the walls of an uncanny valley, painfully aware of the ways in which Willis’s London failed to mesh with my experience of the town.

That “extensive and painstaking research” turns out not to be, as shown here and here.

All of which raises the question of why Connie Willis is so highly rated in America and why Blackout/All Clear ended up on the Locus Recommended Reading list. The flaws pointed out by Jonathan have always been present in her work. Her plots tend to be of the idiot kind and at least for the stories set in the UK, the research seems to have been done by reading a few Wodehouse stories. It’s all a bit sloppy, yet she’s incredible popular with the Hugo Voters, having won it for her novels Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing about the Dog, as well as a whole slew of short stories. So what’s going on?

Leaving aside the idea that the Hugo voters just have awful tastes and only vote for familiar names, Willis must be doing something right, that despite the sloppy research and at times lazy writing and idiot plotting, people like her work enough to vote for it. As Dan Brown’s career has shown, sloppy research has never bothered enough people to be a hindrance to a writer: most of us only notice it when the mistakes are about something we know well and fewer people care about such mistakes even when they are pointed out. Willis certainly isn’t the only sf writer to get her facts terribly, terribly wrong: ask James Nicoll about the Pyms drinking Canadian in Oath of Fealty or Stephen Baxter’s Titan. What’s more important is that Willis gives the appearance of doing her research well, dropping little nuggets for the reader to pick up on and feel clever for having spotted the allusion. In To Say Nothing about the Dog for example she all but nudges you in the ribs to let you spot all the Jerome K. Jerome references.

That’s a trick a lot of the more successful, one step up from Dan Brown or James Patterson bestseller writers have: making the reader feel more intelligent than they actually are. Willis does this by presenting an England in her novels and stories that is familiar to the reader through film and television series an from reading writers like Wodehouse or Sayers, then gives this just enough verisimilitude to make readers not familiar with the real Oxford feel she’s done her homework, as well as a bit clever for recognising this.

Her writing meanwhile, on a sentences and paragraphs level, is certainly not bad and accessible enough for most readers; sometimes a bit bland, but she can be witty and amusing as well. She does good story, which is always an advantage for a group as relatively conservative as the Hugo voters. Connie Willis is a middle of the road writer who few people are rabid fans off, but much more importantly, few people loathe either. In a pinch she’ll do. (In that context it would be interesting to see how many people voted her in first place for each of her Hugo wins, or that she won on the strenght of having more second and lower place prefered votes.)

The American Stephen Baxter in other words.