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Connie Willis has won many Hugo and Nebula awards for her novels and short stories. Her latest novel is Passage, a May/June 2001 Book Sense 76 pick.* It is set in a Denver Hospital and follows two near death experience (NDE) researchers who, after scrupulously avoiding one another, begin to work together to try and bring a scientific view to a field filled with quacks and fakes. As in all her novels, there are comedic moments in Passage, but it is a serious look at death and the dying process, and deserves to be on the reading list of everyone who reads good fiction.

After a series of (almost) comical emails and phone calls, not too dissimilar to the screwball antics that pervade some of her work, we managed to catch her at home in Colorado and have a cheery talk about life, death, and debunking Uri Geller.

Was Passage an easy book to write?

Yes and no. It got longer than I intended it! I kept working, like Sisyphus, working and working, pushing the ball up the hill, and I just wasn't making any progress and I couldn't understand why. When I finished it and saw how long it was, I thought, "Oh, so this was the problem." I was working under considerable deadline pressure and that was very hard. But I enjoyed working on it. I loved looking up people's last words and thinking about what the process of dying was like, and really trying to think about things that people ordinarily spend a lot of their time avoiding thinking about. In a way it was sort of releasing to have an excuse, a reason, to look directly at it. Usually the only times you look directly at death are when you're going through some awful turmoil over it and then your feelings are all mixed up with what's happening to you and to your friends and relatives. It's not a good time for clear thinking. Here I got to think about it clearly and think, "What do I think?" and "What do I believe?" and try to work some of these things out for myself. So it was a fun book in that way.

People say, "Oh you must have been so depressed when you were working on Doomsday Book," but I was just writing about the plague, I didn't have the plague. It's a totally different thing! I remember in one of Dorothy Sayers books, I think it's Nine Tailors, the little girl says, "Tragedy's fun, isn't it?" I always kind of thought that. It's interesting. I take great comfort in the fact that, when it comes my turn to die, that so many people have died before me and they all somehow managed it. Whether they were smart or dumb, brave or cowardly, people with tremendous educations and people with no education, people who face death for a living, and people who live sheltered lives. They all somehow managed it and that gives me great comfort.

Passage it seemed to be about the process of dying more than death itself. Are you curious about that? Did you find out much about what actually happen to the body and the mind?

Well that is the big sticking point if you want to believe in life after death: the whole process of brain death. Most of what I have my characters researching is the research that I found out about what actually goes on in the brain during death and after. I was so fascinated by the idea that the body doesn't die all at once, that it's very slow. In fact, days later, lying in the morgue, you still have liver cells and bone marrow cells that are alive and that they haven't yet got the message that it's over. The whole idea of the brain not dying in the shattering moment is troubling -- but fascinating too.

We do tend to think of it as a moment.

Right. One of the books I used a lot when I was writing my book was How We Die by Sherwin B. Nuland, excellent book; it won the National Book Award. One of the thinks he talks about is that in a lot of deaths there is a moment where the person stops breathing, of course, but in many of these where it's a stroke, or cancer, really the moment of conscious death for the person has long since passed, and the body is still chugging away but the person is long since gone. I thought that was fascinating,. I've had a lot of deaths in my family and consider it a true mystery. It's just a puzzle how this all works and what's going on and how people face it.

It's always sudden. Even when the person has had cancer. My best friend died of breast cancer several years ago. She had it for eight years. I had eight years to get ready and I still wasn't ready. That's one of the points I try and make in the book; death is always sudden and unexpected. No matter what the circumstances are. Even if you are one hundred and ten and have been ill for years, it's still sudden and unexpected.

There was something I'd read where a survivor of a literary scene was asked about his friends who had lived fast and died young. His response was something like, "I don't get to have breakfast with them, we don't talk, they're dead." I thought that was fantastic because it showed he had actually thought about it whereas the interviewer was just thinking "Oh, sexy! Famous dead people!"

Right. Just because the person dies the relationship doesn't. It lives on and it's almost like the person is abroad and out of touch but you are still intensely involved with them. I know it's true. With my best friend and then my grandmother who raised me, I constantly see things and think, "Oh, I need to tell grandmother." "Oh, Marta would love that!" And then I think, "Oh no, wait, wait, wait, no. It doesn't work anymore." To me the relationship is still alive and still ongoing.

Has there been any reaction yet from the spiritualists and such that you poke fun at in the book?

Not yet. If the book captures general public attention, that might be a problem. Bantam is trying very hard to market this as a crossover or mainstream book so who knows what the Mr. Mandrakes [a non-scientific researcher] of the world will think. I started out the book by reading all the near death experience (NDE) books and was appalled and angry with them because I feel they prey on people's wishes and their fears in a very callous way. I think the NDE phenomenon has a great deal in common with the old spiritualist movement -- the same idea of being in contact with people from beyond the grave and scientific proof of the afterlife. The spiritualists did the same thing, they preyed on people who were very vulnerable because they were grieving and sad and lonely and wanted to be in touch with their loved ones. I think this does a real disservice to them because death is just a huge and shattering experience, whether you believe in the afterlife or not. To reduce it to a touchy-feely, dumb, shallow, "everything-is-just-fine, fuzzy-and-warm, big-hug," kind of thing is reprehensible. It's a way of lying about death that in the end leaves people more alone and more vulnerable than they were before.

Are you tempted to become the Harry Houdini of the NDE movement?

You know, if I were not a writer, I think that would be my career. If I had any dexterity -- which I clearly don't -- so that I could become a magician . . . I admire Houdini and the Amazing Randi tremendously. There is so much of a need for skepticism in the world. People will believe anything! It just drives me crazy! James Randi has sort of taken on Houdini's job now of debunking and he works very hard. He is basically the debunker for Uri Geller -- although Johnny Carson also participated in that. I was so proud of Johnny Carson. You can't fool an old magician. Johnny Carson started out as a magician so when Uri Geller was on the "Tonight Show" he just totally saw right through Geller's tricks and announced it on the show. It was great! People are so gullible. Then you add the intensity of them wanting to believe -- [the afterlife] would be a very pleasant thing to believe in -- so these people get away with murder.

I think it hurts [research] because nobody's going to do serious research on the NDE -- like the kind of research I have my characters doing -- because they're so afraid that they'll be classified as . . . who's going to give them a government grant for something that has been basically pseudo-science and makes them look foolish? It's too bad because I think the NDE is a real phenomenon and we need to find out as much as we can about every aspect. Why does it happen? Why when you're in an accident does time slow down? Why does your life flash before your eyes? People not at all involved in the NDE field have stated those experiences. That's been documented for years. Then the voice and the light and the tunnel -- all those things seem to be very well documented. I really do think there is such a thing as the NDE, I'm just not sure that it means the interpretation the NDE books give it.

Have your thoughts or opinions on death changed since writing Passage?

No. [Laughs] I've thought a lot about it. My thoughts and feelings and opinions about death have evolved over a long, long period of time, mostly through personal experience, which culminated in the writing of this book. So this book was a confirmation of it rather than a radically life-changing experience. I'm a practicing Christian, I do believe in the idea of life after death, but, boy, it's really pushing it when you have to deal with the idea of brain death and the whole idea that with things like Alzheimer's people can't even hang on to their personality, memory and identity during life, so how can it possibly survive after death? It's just one of those things for Christians that have to be accepted on faith and to say, "Well, we have no idea how this is going to work and we don't understand it anymore than the seed going into the ground can possibly understand that it might be a flower someday, so we'll leave it at that." When my grandmother died, she was very elderly but a real pistol and a lovely, lovely person, she took the opportunity of knowing she was going to die to grant peace and beauty to everybody around her. It was like she got an A+ in dying. She was just a gem, so brave. But then when she actually died, it was so interesting, because it wasn't a fearful or terrible moment, it was like someone letting go and falling into water -- but not to drown. It was just a peaceful beautiful moment, and, boy, that was the total mystery to me. "What is it?" "Is it something we've been afraid of all along that maybe we shouldn't have been afraid of at all?" I certainly did not solve that mystery writing the book but I hope I thought about it and looked at it directly and other people will think about it too. I guess that's the most I can hope for.

M grandmother and her friends will talk about whether someone had a 'good' death or not -- which is an idea generally foreign to my generation.

Right. "How can this be a good death?" "How can any death be a good death?" There does seem to be such a thing. I've seen, also, the reverse of that, when it didn't bring any peace and it was frightening and you wonder, "What is it?" "Is it something we should � not welcome, but accept? Is it something as natural as being born and we've overlaid it with fear that really doesn't belong to it? I don't know. It is a mystery.

Something else that came through from the book was a focus on regret and people hoping for second chances. Are you worried about missed chances?

Oh always. That's one of the themes of my life. You make these decisions and they're irrevocable and you don't know that at the time. That's the worst of it. You're very rarely in a position where you're going, "If I do this, I'll be selling my soul. If I don't I will be . . ." We don't even recognize these as irrevocable until they're over and done with and long-past and then you think, "Oh man, that isn't what I should have done at all! I had no idea it would lead here." That is a central dilemma. We do the best we can. My characters in all my books are trying to do the best they can and they never have sufficient information to make the decisions they need to make, but they have to make them anyway. Which I perceive as the human condition. It can be comic or it can be tragic and it can, I think, be both both.

You are very sympathetic to your characters . . .

I love my characters. I feel so sorry for them . . .

. . . but yet, you don't flinch when something harsh happens to them.

I do flinch. I do care. Things don't always turn out well for my characters but I do care.

It's what makes the books rich and readable: if bad things don't happen, they're just pap.

Right. If you know that only the redshirts will die -- this is not good! Because that isn't the way life really is. I will be interested to see what the response to this book is. I still get people talking to me about Doomsday Book and they say, "How could you kill ------?" And I say, "Well, you know, the plague did that, the Black Death did that. It really didn't pick and choose and only kill the people you don't care about, it isn't like that, and I was trying to show you what it was like."

As a writer you have an obligation not to let you reader relax. I'm watching "Bonanza" on TV and I know that somebody's going to get killed before the end of the episode, but I also know it's not going to be Hoss, or Little Joe, or the other one. It can't be them because they need to come back the following week. I think that really hurts drama. You need to make your reader feel like this is real life they are experiencing, and in real life you never know what's going to happen. You feel like nobody's safe because in real life nobody's safe. If you're writing a book about death, that's got to be one of the themes.

But I alternate my books. I do comedies and tragedies simply because people get so mad at me for killing off everybody. I want to point that out in To Say Nothing of the Dog no one dies! That's very important because I want to show both sides of life and I can't always do it in the same book.

Do you have any recommendations for people who want to read further on the subject?

Absolutely! Sherwin Nuland's How We Die. The two fictional works that were my inspiration and bible for this book were All Hallow's Eve by Charles Williams -- the third of the Inklings along with J.R.R.Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, his books are all wonderful, but All Hallow's Eve is my favorite. I constantly run back to him to see how he solved his problems, what he did, and how he dealt with this subject. The other one is a movie, "Between Two Worlds" which was made in the 1940s. It was actually a remake of the play "Outward Bound." But it's better than the play -- or the previous movie version! I was going for that kind of feel to my book. These two were my heavy inspirations. As far as nonfiction, Susan Blackmore (Dying to Live) has written very intelligently about the NDE, what it might be physically, what the research is, and so on. Raising Lazarus by Robert John Pensack, which was about a man in a coma for a long time. He recounts his experiences of what he remembers from that comatose and semi-comatose state -- which is not at all what you might think. I read lots about brain function, neurochemicals in the brain, sleep, and how this all works. Boy, the brain! We just know nothing. We're just setting out on this amazing adventure. We are going to find out so much about how we function.

Is there anyone you'd like to collaborate with?

I've collaborated with Cynthia Felice on three novels. We'd like to do another one but our schedules just get so complicated. James Patrick Kelly (Think Like a Dinosaur) and I talked about doing a short story together one time but we couldn't get our schedules to work for one lousy short story. He's one of my favorite short story writers in science fiction. It would probably be really fun but maddening to collaborate with Howard Waldrop (Going Home Again). He's wonderful but I'd have to go and live in Oregon with him and catch fish for a living -- and I don't like fish. So I guess that's out. Gardner Dozois -- he'll die if I say that! He's not only one of my favorite writers in science fiction, he knows more about science fiction and loves science fiction more than anybody else I know. People who see him at conventions think he is a great raconteur and tells jokes and is endlessly funny and he is. But he's also very serious and his love of the field is greater than anybody else's. It would be a wonderful experience to collaborate with him.

What publication or award has meant the most to you?

All the awards. People say, "I bet you're tired of winning. I bet you don't care any more. I bet it gets boring." No! It never gets boring! You're always worried, you're always thinking, "Oh my gosh, those other awards were just a fluke. Really, I'm just a flash in the pan." Somebody had told me at the beginning of my career, "Oh yeah, you've won, but you're just the flavor of the month." For years I've worried about just being the flavor of the month. "Ok, how long do I have to publish before I'm no longer the flavor of the month?" So writers are always extremely insecure. Every award is a new validation that gives you confidence in your own work for, oh, ten or fifteen minutes and then you're back to being insecure again! The Nebulas and the Hugos both mean so much to me. When I was a kid I was reading The Year's Best Science Fiction and the Nebula Award collections and it would say, "This person is a Hugo award-winner." My total fantasy was not to win one of those awards. That was beyond imagining. My fantasy was that some day I would get to be in one of those Year's Best collections alongside of Hugo and Nebula winners. So for me to have actually won these awards myself is so far beyond anywhere I thought I'd be, it's just amazing. I love them. I'm so proud of them and I secretly want to win more. I'm so proud of the fact that I was the first person to win in all four categories of the Nebula and in all four writing categories of the Hugo. That's like the different kinds of baseball records -- this one can't be broken. Other people may win more than me, or go on and do other things, but that's a record nobody can break. I'm very proud of that because I love science fiction.

What is your audience like?

Well, science fiction writers actually know a little more about their audience because they meet them at conventions all the time. Although I'm a big fan of H.L. Mencken, I think he's totally wrong about the idea that "nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." I think the readers out there are so much more intelligent than anyone gives them credit for. It infuriates me that a lot of movies and a lot of books go for that lowest common denominator. "They don't like complicated plots, they won't get something with a lot of witty allusions to literature." Time and time again I have people coming up to me saying that's what they love about the books. Then a movie like "Shakespeare in Love" will come out and people will respond tremendously to it. They'll read junk and popcorn stuff if nothing else is available, I do too. But I love it if there's really nifty stuff out there. When I'm writing I have to assume my readers are really, really intelligent: if I give them a clue on page 86, which does not pay off until page 395, that they will hold it in their little hot hands that whole time and be able to pick it up. If I use irony and other complex things they'll get them. 'Cause they do. People are really smart. Your don't have to spell it out for them three or four times, they'll get it. I think there's a whole public out there that wants not to be fed pabulum.

What are you reading?

I'm reading a book called Death in the Blackout right now, a hideously-written mystery, but it was written during the [London] Blitz. I'm researching a new book about the Blitz so I'm reading anything and everything I can get my hands on.

What else are you working on?

I want to do another time-travel novel set in the same Oxford universe (as To Say Nothing of the Dog and Doomsday Book). My books don't ever have the same characters -- Mr. Dunworthy is the only ongoing character. I'm contemplating two books set in that universe, one is definitely about the Blitz, but I'm also thinking of doing another comedy, this one set partly in Hollywood -- I love Hollywood, so that would be fun. One of the things I set up in To Say Nothing of the Dog is that if things are destroyed in our time they can be retrieved and brought to the future without destroying the historical framework. One of the things that has been lost and lost and lost is so many of those films that were done on the original celluloid. Not only did they all turn to goo in the cans, but there were several big fires in the 1920s that destroyed so many silent classics. It seems to me an ideal thing for Mr. Dunworthy and/or Lady Shrapnel to send somebody to Hollywood to retrieve some of those silent classics. Of course you can get into so much trouble in Hollywood in the 1920s -- I just can't even imagine it! I'm also working on a UFO novel, a comedy set in Roswell. Nobody has done a comedy about Roswell, in fact, all the books about Roswell are very unfunny. It'll be set now, but with an explanation of what happened in '47 and explanations of all the UFO phenomenon. So I'm reading all that stuff which is almost worse than reading the near-death stuff, because people will believe anything! It's just so irritating that they just don't use simple logic skills to figure out that this is all a crock. My job is to be out there debunking like crazy. Because nobody is! I was telling my publisher what I really should do is a Whitley Strieber-kind of thing, go out and say, "Oh yes, I was abducted," and add a few details and everybody would just fall over themselves! As opposed to when you say, "No, no, no. There are no aliens in Roswell." No one will listen to you. But somebody ought to do it. I'm not constitutionally able to do the Whitley Strieber thing, so I will do the other, the Harry Houdini thing. Harry still has his fans. I'm a big fan.

I just finished reading this wonderful book, called Forever Leisl by Charmain Carr. It's by the girl who played Leisal in "The Sound of Music." It's one of these great memoirs about how they made the movie and how it became such a hit and all this great insider stuff that's just so fun. It's not a Mommy Dearest-kind of expose -- "Julie Andrews was actually cruel!" -- or anything like that. It's a very nice book, just charming! I'm also reading some Dorothy Parker, she's my hero.

Any chance of you writing movies?

No. I love the movies, I would love to go to Hollywood and write screwball comedies if they'd let me do that, but they wouldn't -- you know they wouldn't! The whole process is different, it would drive me crazy. My theory is that they killed Fitzgerald and drove Faulkner to drink so what makes me think I could do any better? As it is, I'm happy to sell my stuff to the movies and let them do what they will with it. I'll just keep writing.

I've heard you say that you're a CNN junkie. Is there any story you're following at the moment?

I'm still keeping up with the Jon-Benet Ramsey case. The good news is that the Ramsey's just filed a civil suit against the policeman who wrote a book (Steve Thomas with Don Davis, JonBenet: Inside the Murder Investigation) about them and he has just hired Daniel Petrocelli. I think that's very good news, I'm looking forward to the developments in that case. Petrocelli did the O.J. [Simpson] civil case and he did such a brilliant job on that. He's a man who learns the whole case. He really is a very serious lawyer. In a civil case because your life is not in danger they can't claim the Fifth Amendment. It could get very interesting, very soon. My daughter is a forensic scientist, even if she weren't, I'd still be interested in these things, and she can give me all these inside stuff about how the evidence works and it adds to my interest tremendously.

Do you have a good local bookshop near you?

We have an independent called the Book Stop and I live near Denver, which has the Tattered Cover, which is a great and very famous independent bookstore.