Connie Willis is an internationally known science fiction author and the winner of an unprecedented total of seven Nebula awards and eleven Hugo awards. She is also the first author to have won both the Hugo and Nebula in all four fiction categories. In 2009, she was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, and in 2012 she became a Nebula Grand Master of Science Fiction.
Willis is the author of
Willis’s most recent work is the Nebula and Hugo Award–winning two-volume work entitled
She is currently working on a new novel about iPhones, Facebook, tweeting, and telepathy. It is, of course, a comedy. Visit www.sftv.org/cw for more information.
BARRETT: I’ll have her dog… Octavius.
OCTAVIUS: Sir?
BARRETT: Her dog must be destroyed. At once.
OCTAVIUS: I really d-don’t see what the p-poor little beast has d-done to…
THE FIRST THING MY new roommate did was tell me her life story. Then she tossed up all over my bunk. Welcome to Hell. I know, I know. It was my own fucked fault that I was stuck with the stupid little scut in the first place. Daddy’s darling had let her grades slip till she was back in the freshman dorm and she would stay there until the admin reported she was being a good little girl again. But he didn’t have to put me in the charity ward, with all the little scholarship freshmen from the front colonies—frightened virgies one and all. The richies had usually had their share of jig-jig in boarding school, even if they were mostly edge. And they were willing to learn.
Not this one. She wouldn’t know a bone from a vaj, and wouldn’t know what went into which either. Ugly, too. Her hair was chopped off in an old-fashioned bob I thought nobody, not even front kids, wore anymore. Her name was Zibet and she was from some godspit colony called Marylebone Weep and her mother was dead and she had three sisters and her father hadn’t wanted her to come. She told me all this in a rush of what she probably thought was friendliness before she tossed her supper all over me and my nice new slickspin sheets.
The sheets were the sum total of good things about the vacation Daddy Dear had sent me on over summer break. Being stranded in a forest of slimy slicksa trees and noble natives was supposed to build my character and teach me the hazards of bad grades. But the noble natives were good at more than weaving their precious product with its near frictionless surface. Jig-jig on slickspin is something entirely different, and I was close to being an expert on the subject. I’d bet even Brown didn’t know about this one. I’d be more than glad to teach him.
