S.F. Masterworks

3 total works

To Say Nothing of the Dog, Or, How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump at Last

by Connie Willis

Published 1 December 1998

From Connie Willis, winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards, comes a comedic romp through an unpredictable world of mystery, love, and time travel...Ned Henry is badly in need of a rest. He's been shuttling between the 21st century and the 1940s searching for a Victorian atrocity called the bishop's bird stump. It's part of a project to restore the famed Coventry Cathedral, destroyed in a Nazi air raid over a hundred years earlier. But then Verity Kindle, a fellow time traveler, inadvertently brings back something from the past. Now Ned must jump back to the Victorian era to help Verity put things right--not only to save the project but to prevent altering history itself. From the Paperback edition.

Doomsday Book

by Connie Willis

Published 1 June 1992

Five years in the writing by one of science fiction's most honored authors, Doomsday Book is a storytelling triumph. Connie Willis draws upon her understanding of the universalities of human nature to explore the ageless issues of evil, suffering and the indomitable will of the human spirit.

For Kivrin, preparing an on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in humanity's history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received.

But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin—barely of age herself—finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history's darkest hours.

Praise for Doomsday Book

“A stunning novel that encompasses both suffering and hope. . . . The best work yet from one of science fiction’s best writers.”—The Denver Post

“Splendid work—brutal, gripping and genuinely harrowing, the product of diligent research, fine writing and well-honed instincts, that should appeal far beyond the normal science-fiction constituency.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“The world of 1348 burns in the mind’s eye, and every character alive that year is a fully recognized being. . . . It becomes possible to feel . . . that Connie Willis did, in fact, over the five years Doomsday Book took her to write, open a window to another world, and that she saw something there.”—The Washington Post Book World

Time is the Fire

by Connie Willis

Published 8 August 2013

This new collection of stories from the multi-award-winning author of DOOMSDAY BOOK and TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG contains:

A Letter from the Clearys
At the Rialto
Death on the Nile
The Soul Selects Her own Society
Fire Watch
Inside Job
Even the Queen
The Winds of Marble Arch
All Seated on the Ground
Last of the Winnebagos

Ten stories - which have all won the HUGO AWARD, the NEBULA AWARD or both - are compulsory reading for the serious science fiction fan.