Upon first reading To Say Nothing of the Dog under duress, I have become a decided Connie Willis fan. In the past six months I have read Uncharted Territory, Passage, and Doomsday Book (taking the latter with me on my honeymoon because I simply had to finish it). In this most recently read novel, Bellwether, I have at last perceived an element of Ms. Willis’s work that gives it so much success.
Pairs of scientists, one male and one female, one a ‘hard’ scientist and one a ‘soft.’ No matter the wide-ranging backdrop for her highly imaginative fiction, two researchers will eventually collaborate to solve the problem, the primary character usually attaining the answer by some form of insight. In Bellwether, Sandy Foster, a sociologist investigating the source of trends and fads – particularly hair-bobbing in the 1920s – hooks up with Bennett O’Reilly, a badly dressed chaos theorist. Numerous chaotic events which occur in the workplace, a scientific research facility called HiTek, debunks the myth that science is orderly.
For those interested, a bellwether is the leader sheep, the director of the ‘herd’ mentality, usually an old ewe who is “the same as any other sheep, only more so. A little hungrier, a little faster, a little greedier. …A bellwether doesn’t even know it’s leading.” If you want to know how sheep are involved in trends and chaos theory, you must read the book.
What puzzles me most, however, about Connie Willis’s books (note that she is hailed as winning the most Hugo and Nebula awards) is that some of them are not really science fiction. True, To Say Nothing of the Dog and Doomsday involve both history and time travel; and I will grant that Uncharted Territory takes place on a foreign planet; but both Passage and Bellwether are set in contemporary times, and aside from an investigation of near-death experiences and what would possess people to chop off their long hair respectively, nothing surreal or even very strange occurs. There is nothing that would particularly qualify these books as science fiction, save that the characters are scientists and the story is fictional.
Insert rant about authors being wrongly pigeonholed into a genre here.
May I refer the reader to the following post, which discusses at length the essential question of science fiction, namely the exploration of “What is human?” What Bellwether isn’t is sci-fi, but it is excellent, humorous, well-researched, intelligent, and entertaining.
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