08.20.12
Interview: Connie Willis
Connie Willis was kind enough to have a talk with CM Evans, for Marguerite Avenue. She is the author of many wonderful science fiction novels, and a recipient of numerous awards -- in 2012 she was named a Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master, an award bestowed upon a living author for a lifetime’s achievement in science fiction and/or fantasy.
CM Evans: What stories inspire you to write?
Connie Willis: People are always asking me where I get my ideas, to which the answer is, "Are you kidding? They're everywhere!"--from newspaper articles to overheard conversations to billboards I've read wrong. The Murdoch phone-hacking scandal, with its ambitious, scheming Rebekah Brooks, has enough material for several novels, including Vanity Fair (though Thackeray already wrote that. Am I the only person to see a similarity between Rebekah Brooks and Becky Sharpe?)
And I read an article the other day about brides demanding their bridesmaids have breast implants and face lifts "so we'll all match on the wedding day," a story idea if there ever was one. And I've gotten story ideas from TV shows, science lectures, and Greek myths.
But I suspect that what people are really asking is, where do you get the underlying themes of your stories, the ideas with a Capital I, and that's harder to answer, partly because authors aren't always fully aware of the subtext of their stories.
A lot of my stories tend to be about identity and/or about the past haunting the present and impacting it in ways we can't predict. They also tend to be about trying to do the right thing and then dealing with the unintended terrible consequences of that, and many of my stories echo experiences I had in my youth and childhood, but I don't necessarily set out to write about those. It just happens.
Somebody once said that if your father dies, you shouldn't write about your father's death. Instead, you should write about aliens on a distant planet, or people living in the future, or fairies or robots or zebras. And the story will be about your father's death.
I think that's very true. It's as if your conscious mind has one agenda for the story and your subconscious has another, entirely different one, which it will work into the story in spite of you.
That's what's so great about writing fiction, and it's why I don't believe writing to make a statement is a good idea. If you already know what you think about something, you should write an essay. Or a letter to the editor. The purpose of fiction is to explore all those things we don't have answers to, that our subconscious is struggling with--the things that perplex us and worry us and haunt us. All the stuff without easy answers.
And all the things without an either-or, right-or-wrong, View A vs. View B answer. Fiction never says, "This is what's true." It says, "On the one hand, there's this to consider...but on the other hand...and on the other hand...and on the other other hand..." Fiction's about a whole spectrum of possibilities and unanswered (and unanswerable) questions.
Which isn't an answer to your question at all -- and proves my point exactly.
CM: What is an element that makes a piece of writing compelling?
Connie: People read for lots and lots of reasons, but one I think gets overlooked is the need to find out what happens next. Literary theory tends to pooh-pooh this: character's what's important, they say, and style, and subtext. I don't disagree with any of those, but none of them are what drives the reader through hundreds of pages at top speed.
I've just been re-reading The Lord of the Rings for about the thousandth time, but even though I know what's going to happen, I find myself reading faster and faster as Aragorn's army pulls up to the Black Gate, the Mouth of Sauron shows them Frodo's mithril coat, and it looks like he and Sam have been captured.
The first time I read it, I literally flew through the sections involving Merry and Pippin and the Ents and all the Gondor stuff, I was so frantic to find out what was happening to Frodo and Sam.
Over the last couple of years I've watched the British TV series Primeval, a show about dinosaurs in modern-day London and the team that tries to contain them. It's a great show--with humor, irony, wonderful characters and intriguing relationships between them--but it was terrible having to wait between episodes and between seasons to find out what was going to happen, and by the last season I was so emotionally involved with the show I almost couldn't watch. Good old-fashioned plot, with all its twists and reversals and cliffhangers and raising of the stakes, was what kept me on the edge of my seat.
Writers need to remember that.
CM: Is there any genre of science fiction you feel is dead?
Connie: One of the most amazing things about science fiction is how it can take something like robots or first-contact-with-an-alien that's been around forever and that you think is all used up, and do something brand-new with it.
Take, for instance, time travel. The first time-travel stories were pretty much travelogues, with some guy going into the past to see Gettysburg or ancient Rome. And then writers got the idea that by going to the past, they might change it--Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee, Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Distant Thunder," Michael Moorcock's "Behold the Man."
They did pretty much everything they could with that, and then somebody got the idea of playing with the paradoxes of time travel, and they wrote all kinds of grandfather-paradox and "time worm that eats its own tail" stories--Heinlein's "All You Zombies" and Charles Harness's "Child by Chronos" and Fredric Brown's "The Yehudi Principle." And in between there were time-travel stories about stuff coming back to us from the future--"The Little Black Bag" and C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner's "Mimsy Were the Borogoves"--and humorous stories like Harry Harrison's "The Technicolor Time Travel Machine," Alfred Bester's "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed", and "Me, Myself, I" by William Tenn.
Time travel should have been played out years ago as a science-fiction theme, but it just keeps being reinvented.
When I workshopped "Fire Watch" for the first time, I was told, "This will never sell. The time travel story's dead." But I've been writing it for the last thirty years, and I still keep finding new and interesting things to do with it, and so do lots of other writers.
CM: In many of your novels, like "Fire Watch," Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog, and Blackout/All Clear, you've explored the paradoxes of time travel. Did H.G. Wells have very much influence on your time travel conceptions?
Connie: I came into the field after a period when all kinds of writers had been playing with time travel and writing fascinating stories, as I mentioned in my answer to question 3. Some of them were absolutely brilliant--Heinlein's The Door into Summer, Kit Reed's "Time Tours, Ltd.," Philip K. Dick's "A Little Something for Us Tempunauts," and C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner's "Vintage Season."
They'd explored the effects of the time travel paradoxes, looked at the consequences of going back in time and possibly changing it (or fulfilling it), and examined the possibility of meeting your younger self.
So the challenge really was to find something that hadn't been done--some new historical period to explore (which I found in World War II London) and some new approach to the paradoxes (slippage.)
I was also heavily influenced by Frederik Pohl and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and the whole idea of using technologies we don't really understand and the terrible messes that can get you into.
CM: Are there rules you used to feel obligated to abide by, as a writer, which you have modified, or thrown out entirely?
Connie: There are lots of rules I've acquired over the years, like:
1. Every scene has to serve two purposes, of which one is to move the plot forward.
2. Never put a story in second-person point or view--it's annoying.
And
3. Never put the climactic confrontation of love scene offstage.
But, as I'm always telling my Clarion West students, these are just rules of thumb. There are no actual rules, and every time some author tries to come up with a list, you can name a classic story that breaks every one. (Rule Number 1. was broken to excellent effect by Proust and Tristram Shandy. Number 2. was broken by Jay McInerney in Bright Lights, Big City, and Number 3. was broken by Shakespeare.) So, no unbreakable rules.
No, wait, I take that back. I think there are two absolutely unbreakable rules:
1. Your story has to be internally consistent. You can basically set up any situation you want, but then you have to abide by it--no suddenly giving your hero new and previously unmentioned magical powers on the last page, and no saying, as in Harry Potter, "You lost, but we like you, so you win anyway!"
2. You have to do what you promised the reader you'd do. I've become more and more fascinated by this unspoken contract between the writer and the reader in recent years, partly because most of the time neither party is aware they've entered into it. All they know is that they feel unbelievably let down when the characters don't get together or when they don't find out the answer to the mystery.
The writer sets the terms of the contract with every word he/she writes, but he's often not aware of it either, which is why he gets totally involved in telling you all about Character C and doesn't understand why the readers are so upset he didn't tell them what happened to Characters A and B.
You have to deliver what you promised, whether it's delivering the happy ending or redeeming the character that the readers have so much invested in or just telling us how everything turned out.
You don't necessarily have to do it in the way the reader assumes you will, though. Agatha Christie made a whole career out of upending the reader's assumptions and expectations. But if you promised us Viola and Duke Orsino were going to get together or the Wicked Witch was going to get her comeuppance, you have to deliver.
You have to be especially careful if you're going to do something bad to a character, like kill him, or, even worse, break his heart. Some readers want all happy endings all the time and are going to be upset no matter how carefully you foreshadow it. An angry reader threw The Old Curiosity Shop out the train window when he got to the part where Little Nell died. And I'm absolutely furious at romantic comedies where the couple doesn't get together for no reason other than that the screenwriter wanted to do "something different."
I think a lot about what I've promised my readers and try to fulfill it--and yet surprise them at the same time. --and I hope I succeed. But one thing you can count on is: if I'm writing a romantic comedy, the couple will get together.
CM: Does recognition or awards affect how you go about your writing?
Connie: No. I've heard about writers freezing up because they were so worried about living up to previous successes, but I've never experienced that. When I sit down and try to write, all I think about is, "How do I do this?" (And occasionally "Oh, my God, I'll never be able to do this!") Everything else vanishes.
CM: There are many theories about dreams. Have you ever been conscious of dreaming within a dream? Why do you think this would happen?
I did a lot of research on dreams when I wrote Lincoln's Dreams and came to the conclusion that dreams are nothing more than a data sort-file-and throw away mechanism for processing what's happened to us during the day. The problem is that dreams "feel" so real and so significant that even though we rationally know what's causing them, they nonetheless feel significant.
I do think dreams can give us fascinating insights into what we're thinking about and worrying over, and I think they can be useful to our writing because of the unusual way they combine images, and dreams have been the inspiration for several of my works--most notably "Daisy in the Sun" and Lincoln's Dreams. I actually dreamed the dream Annie has at the beginning of the book, apple tree and dead soldiers in the front yard and all, but no, I didn't (and don't) think I was channeling Robert E. Lee.
CM: Has technological innovation fundamentally changed how you produce work? Do you find the internet and web useful or distracting?
Connie: I still write my novel first drafts longhand (and then put them on the computer.) And I still do most of my research with books, partly because the internet is unreliable, but mostly because you really can't find anything at all on it, even though everybody believes that.
It's true that if you type in just about any subject, it will bring up thousands of entries--the question is, are any of them useful? And do all of them refer you back to the same Wikipedia entry?
When I was researching BLACKOUT/ALL CLEAR, I couldn't remember what damage Selfridge's department store had sustained, so I googled, "Selfridges Blitz"--and got dozens of articles on "Selfridge's Summer Sales Blitz!"
Okay, so I tried, "Selfridge's Bomb Damage" and got a bunch of articles about an IRA bombing in 1974. When I changed it to "Selfridge's Bomb Damage 1940 Blitz," it told me Selfridges had been damaged during the Blitz by bombs, which I already knew. After an hour of messing with the magic "Open Sesame" code which would give me the info I wanted and looking at dozens of sites, many of which had erroneous information about when it was hit, I went and found the info in a book. (BTW, just FYI, the Palm Court Restaurant and the sixth floor were badly damaged.)
This is not to say the internet's not great for some things--like looking up the name of General Patton's dog (Willie.) Or looking up the names of 1940s English airfields that began with B. (You have to read the book to know why.)
And this is not to say that I don't love the net or spend lots of my free time surfing political websites (I'm a political junkie and also addicted to the Sandusky and the Rupert Murdoch phone-hacking scandals) and watching YouTube vides of Andrew Lee Potts from Primeval.
CM: There's a whole cell-phone, portable electronic device generation out there that has no conception of being 'out of contact' during any time of the day. They can message a friend, or look up data at any time. Do you find this compulsion of constant-connectivity disturbing?
Connie: Actually, that's exactly what my new novel's about--our constantly-communicating world which is always looking for new and faster ways to connect but often isn't connecting at all. It's also about telepathy, which everyone is always convinced would be a great idea, but which I think would be a complete disaster. It's called (for the moment--working title only) The Very Thought of You, and I've just started writing it.
I mean, do we really want people to know what we're thinking?
CM: Computers increasingly are able to mimic human behavior. Do you think computer programs will someday be seen as relevant authors, or artists?
Connie: I've just been reading a book about the Turing Test, the annual test that they conduct in which a panel of judges try to determine during the course of a five-minute interview whether they're talking to a person or a computer. Some of the programs the computer-programmers come up with are pretty amazing, so I guess anything is possible.
There might be a computer-Shakespeare someday. But they'd have to figure out a way to program in cliché-avoidance or the computers would end up writing evil-twin and amnesia plots instead of Shakespeare. And they'd have to program in irony, which so far computers don't show a real understanding of. So I'm not worried about my job just yet.
What I found more worrisome in this book about the Turing Test was that one of the easiest ways to fool the judges and convince them you're human is to behave like a complete jerk, contradicting everything the judge says and countering, "Why do you want to know?" and "What makes you so defensive?" every time you don't know the answer.
The fact that being a jerk is instantly recognizable as a human trait is not good news, particularly since the conversations I read of jerk-program vs. judge sounded exactly like comments on the internet and/or those panels on the Sunday talk shows.
CM: What comes next?
Connie: Besides the telepathy novel, I'm also working on a bunch of short stories and a non-fiction book about romantic comedy, which requires me to watch lots of romantic comedies. Including Wimbledon, Love, Actually, Ghost Town, Bringing Up Baby, Father Goose, and Walk, Don't Run. And Primeval.
CM Evans: What stories inspire you to write?
Connie Willis: People are always asking me where I get my ideas, to which the answer is, "Are you kidding? They're everywhere!"--from newspaper articles to overheard conversations to billboards I've read wrong. The Murdoch phone-hacking scandal, with its ambitious, scheming Rebekah Brooks, has enough material for several novels, including Vanity Fair (though Thackeray already wrote that. Am I the only person to see a similarity between Rebekah Brooks and Becky Sharpe?)
And I read an article the other day about brides demanding their bridesmaids have breast implants and face lifts "so we'll all match on the wedding day," a story idea if there ever was one. And I've gotten story ideas from TV shows, science lectures, and Greek myths.
But I suspect that what people are really asking is, where do you get the underlying themes of your stories, the ideas with a Capital I, and that's harder to answer, partly because authors aren't always fully aware of the subtext of their stories.
A lot of my stories tend to be about identity and/or about the past haunting the present and impacting it in ways we can't predict. They also tend to be about trying to do the right thing and then dealing with the unintended terrible consequences of that, and many of my stories echo experiences I had in my youth and childhood, but I don't necessarily set out to write about those. It just happens.
Somebody once said that if your father dies, you shouldn't write about your father's death. Instead, you should write about aliens on a distant planet, or people living in the future, or fairies or robots or zebras. And the story will be about your father's death.
I think that's very true. It's as if your conscious mind has one agenda for the story and your subconscious has another, entirely different one, which it will work into the story in spite of you.
That's what's so great about writing fiction, and it's why I don't believe writing to make a statement is a good idea. If you already know what you think about something, you should write an essay. Or a letter to the editor. The purpose of fiction is to explore all those things we don't have answers to, that our subconscious is struggling with--the things that perplex us and worry us and haunt us. All the stuff without easy answers.
And all the things without an either-or, right-or-wrong, View A vs. View B answer. Fiction never says, "This is what's true." It says, "On the one hand, there's this to consider...but on the other hand...and on the other hand...and on the other other hand..." Fiction's about a whole spectrum of possibilities and unanswered (and unanswerable) questions.
Which isn't an answer to your question at all -- and proves my point exactly.
CM: What is an element that makes a piece of writing compelling?
Connie: People read for lots and lots of reasons, but one I think gets overlooked is the need to find out what happens next. Literary theory tends to pooh-pooh this: character's what's important, they say, and style, and subtext. I don't disagree with any of those, but none of them are what drives the reader through hundreds of pages at top speed.
I've just been re-reading The Lord of the Rings for about the thousandth time, but even though I know what's going to happen, I find myself reading faster and faster as Aragorn's army pulls up to the Black Gate, the Mouth of Sauron shows them Frodo's mithril coat, and it looks like he and Sam have been captured.
The first time I read it, I literally flew through the sections involving Merry and Pippin and the Ents and all the Gondor stuff, I was so frantic to find out what was happening to Frodo and Sam.
Over the last couple of years I've watched the British TV series Primeval, a show about dinosaurs in modern-day London and the team that tries to contain them. It's a great show--with humor, irony, wonderful characters and intriguing relationships between them--but it was terrible having to wait between episodes and between seasons to find out what was going to happen, and by the last season I was so emotionally involved with the show I almost couldn't watch. Good old-fashioned plot, with all its twists and reversals and cliffhangers and raising of the stakes, was what kept me on the edge of my seat.
Writers need to remember that.
CM: Is there any genre of science fiction you feel is dead?
Connie: One of the most amazing things about science fiction is how it can take something like robots or first-contact-with-an-alien that's been around forever and that you think is all used up, and do something brand-new with it.
Take, for instance, time travel. The first time-travel stories were pretty much travelogues, with some guy going into the past to see Gettysburg or ancient Rome. And then writers got the idea that by going to the past, they might change it--Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee, Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Distant Thunder," Michael Moorcock's "Behold the Man."
They did pretty much everything they could with that, and then somebody got the idea of playing with the paradoxes of time travel, and they wrote all kinds of grandfather-paradox and "time worm that eats its own tail" stories--Heinlein's "All You Zombies" and Charles Harness's "Child by Chronos" and Fredric Brown's "The Yehudi Principle." And in between there were time-travel stories about stuff coming back to us from the future--"The Little Black Bag" and C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner's "Mimsy Were the Borogoves"--and humorous stories like Harry Harrison's "The Technicolor Time Travel Machine," Alfred Bester's "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed", and "Me, Myself, I" by William Tenn.
Time travel should have been played out years ago as a science-fiction theme, but it just keeps being reinvented.
When I workshopped "Fire Watch" for the first time, I was told, "This will never sell. The time travel story's dead." But I've been writing it for the last thirty years, and I still keep finding new and interesting things to do with it, and so do lots of other writers.
CM: In many of your novels, like "Fire Watch," Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog, and Blackout/All Clear, you've explored the paradoxes of time travel. Did H.G. Wells have very much influence on your time travel conceptions?
Connie: I came into the field after a period when all kinds of writers had been playing with time travel and writing fascinating stories, as I mentioned in my answer to question 3. Some of them were absolutely brilliant--Heinlein's The Door into Summer, Kit Reed's "Time Tours, Ltd.," Philip K. Dick's "A Little Something for Us Tempunauts," and C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner's "Vintage Season."
They'd explored the effects of the time travel paradoxes, looked at the consequences of going back in time and possibly changing it (or fulfilling it), and examined the possibility of meeting your younger self.
So the challenge really was to find something that hadn't been done--some new historical period to explore (which I found in World War II London) and some new approach to the paradoxes (slippage.)
I was also heavily influenced by Frederik Pohl and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and the whole idea of using technologies we don't really understand and the terrible messes that can get you into.
CM: Are there rules you used to feel obligated to abide by, as a writer, which you have modified, or thrown out entirely?
Connie: There are lots of rules I've acquired over the years, like:
1. Every scene has to serve two purposes, of which one is to move the plot forward.
2. Never put a story in second-person point or view--it's annoying.
And
3. Never put the climactic confrontation of love scene offstage.
But, as I'm always telling my Clarion West students, these are just rules of thumb. There are no actual rules, and every time some author tries to come up with a list, you can name a classic story that breaks every one. (Rule Number 1. was broken to excellent effect by Proust and Tristram Shandy. Number 2. was broken by Jay McInerney in Bright Lights, Big City, and Number 3. was broken by Shakespeare.) So, no unbreakable rules.
No, wait, I take that back. I think there are two absolutely unbreakable rules:
1. Your story has to be internally consistent. You can basically set up any situation you want, but then you have to abide by it--no suddenly giving your hero new and previously unmentioned magical powers on the last page, and no saying, as in Harry Potter, "You lost, but we like you, so you win anyway!"
2. You have to do what you promised the reader you'd do. I've become more and more fascinated by this unspoken contract between the writer and the reader in recent years, partly because most of the time neither party is aware they've entered into it. All they know is that they feel unbelievably let down when the characters don't get together or when they don't find out the answer to the mystery.
The writer sets the terms of the contract with every word he/she writes, but he's often not aware of it either, which is why he gets totally involved in telling you all about Character C and doesn't understand why the readers are so upset he didn't tell them what happened to Characters A and B.
You have to deliver what you promised, whether it's delivering the happy ending or redeeming the character that the readers have so much invested in or just telling us how everything turned out.
You don't necessarily have to do it in the way the reader assumes you will, though. Agatha Christie made a whole career out of upending the reader's assumptions and expectations. But if you promised us Viola and Duke Orsino were going to get together or the Wicked Witch was going to get her comeuppance, you have to deliver.
You have to be especially careful if you're going to do something bad to a character, like kill him, or, even worse, break his heart. Some readers want all happy endings all the time and are going to be upset no matter how carefully you foreshadow it. An angry reader threw The Old Curiosity Shop out the train window when he got to the part where Little Nell died. And I'm absolutely furious at romantic comedies where the couple doesn't get together for no reason other than that the screenwriter wanted to do "something different."
I think a lot about what I've promised my readers and try to fulfill it--and yet surprise them at the same time. --and I hope I succeed. But one thing you can count on is: if I'm writing a romantic comedy, the couple will get together.
CM: Does recognition or awards affect how you go about your writing?
Connie: No. I've heard about writers freezing up because they were so worried about living up to previous successes, but I've never experienced that. When I sit down and try to write, all I think about is, "How do I do this?" (And occasionally "Oh, my God, I'll never be able to do this!") Everything else vanishes.
CM: There are many theories about dreams. Have you ever been conscious of dreaming within a dream? Why do you think this would happen?
I did a lot of research on dreams when I wrote Lincoln's Dreams and came to the conclusion that dreams are nothing more than a data sort-file-and throw away mechanism for processing what's happened to us during the day. The problem is that dreams "feel" so real and so significant that even though we rationally know what's causing them, they nonetheless feel significant.
I do think dreams can give us fascinating insights into what we're thinking about and worrying over, and I think they can be useful to our writing because of the unusual way they combine images, and dreams have been the inspiration for several of my works--most notably "Daisy in the Sun" and Lincoln's Dreams. I actually dreamed the dream Annie has at the beginning of the book, apple tree and dead soldiers in the front yard and all, but no, I didn't (and don't) think I was channeling Robert E. Lee.
CM: Has technological innovation fundamentally changed how you produce work? Do you find the internet and web useful or distracting?
Connie: I still write my novel first drafts longhand (and then put them on the computer.) And I still do most of my research with books, partly because the internet is unreliable, but mostly because you really can't find anything at all on it, even though everybody believes that.
It's true that if you type in just about any subject, it will bring up thousands of entries--the question is, are any of them useful? And do all of them refer you back to the same Wikipedia entry?
When I was researching BLACKOUT/ALL CLEAR, I couldn't remember what damage Selfridge's department store had sustained, so I googled, "Selfridges Blitz"--and got dozens of articles on "Selfridge's Summer Sales Blitz!"
Okay, so I tried, "Selfridge's Bomb Damage" and got a bunch of articles about an IRA bombing in 1974. When I changed it to "Selfridge's Bomb Damage 1940 Blitz," it told me Selfridges had been damaged during the Blitz by bombs, which I already knew. After an hour of messing with the magic "Open Sesame" code which would give me the info I wanted and looking at dozens of sites, many of which had erroneous information about when it was hit, I went and found the info in a book. (BTW, just FYI, the Palm Court Restaurant and the sixth floor were badly damaged.)
This is not to say the internet's not great for some things--like looking up the name of General Patton's dog (Willie.) Or looking up the names of 1940s English airfields that began with B. (You have to read the book to know why.)
And this is not to say that I don't love the net or spend lots of my free time surfing political websites (I'm a political junkie and also addicted to the Sandusky and the Rupert Murdoch phone-hacking scandals) and watching YouTube vides of Andrew Lee Potts from Primeval.
CM: There's a whole cell-phone, portable electronic device generation out there that has no conception of being 'out of contact' during any time of the day. They can message a friend, or look up data at any time. Do you find this compulsion of constant-connectivity disturbing?
Connie: Actually, that's exactly what my new novel's about--our constantly-communicating world which is always looking for new and faster ways to connect but often isn't connecting at all. It's also about telepathy, which everyone is always convinced would be a great idea, but which I think would be a complete disaster. It's called (for the moment--working title only) The Very Thought of You, and I've just started writing it.
I mean, do we really want people to know what we're thinking?
CM: Computers increasingly are able to mimic human behavior. Do you think computer programs will someday be seen as relevant authors, or artists?
Connie: I've just been reading a book about the Turing Test, the annual test that they conduct in which a panel of judges try to determine during the course of a five-minute interview whether they're talking to a person or a computer. Some of the programs the computer-programmers come up with are pretty amazing, so I guess anything is possible.
There might be a computer-Shakespeare someday. But they'd have to figure out a way to program in cliché-avoidance or the computers would end up writing evil-twin and amnesia plots instead of Shakespeare. And they'd have to program in irony, which so far computers don't show a real understanding of. So I'm not worried about my job just yet.
What I found more worrisome in this book about the Turing Test was that one of the easiest ways to fool the judges and convince them you're human is to behave like a complete jerk, contradicting everything the judge says and countering, "Why do you want to know?" and "What makes you so defensive?" every time you don't know the answer.
The fact that being a jerk is instantly recognizable as a human trait is not good news, particularly since the conversations I read of jerk-program vs. judge sounded exactly like comments on the internet and/or those panels on the Sunday talk shows.
CM: What comes next?
Connie: Besides the telepathy novel, I'm also working on a bunch of short stories and a non-fiction book about romantic comedy, which requires me to watch lots of romantic comedies. Including Wimbledon, Love, Actually, Ghost Town, Bringing Up Baby, Father Goose, and Walk, Don't Run. And Primeval.
About the Author:
Connie Willis is an American science fiction writer. She has won eleven Hugo Awards and seven Nebula Awards. Willis recently won a Hugo Award for Blackout/All Clear (August 2011), in 2012 she was named a Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master. She was inducted to the Science Fiction Museum and Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2009.
Photograph by G. Mark Lewis
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