Connie Willis is one of my favourite SF authors, but, at least in Australia, she is shamefully under-rated (and therefore not widely available in the bookstores). She’s written short stories, novellas and novels and has Hugos and Nebulas coming out of her ears.

To Say Nothing of the Dog was the first work I read. Aside from it being about my favourite SF plot, time travel, it’s funny, clever and plain all-out charming. Spouting poetry, quoting literature, messing about in boats, Ned and Verity blunder through Victorian England rescuing cats, fleeing scary Duchesses and causing space-time continuum upsets. It was even better once I discovered Lord Peter a little while later.

Doomsday Book was next. It’s set in the same Oxford-based time-travelling for historical research world as To Say Nothing of the Dog but darker as befits its subject matter: plague. The story is divided between following a young research historian in the time of the Black Death, and ‘modern-day’ Oxford (actually near-future Oxford in a world where funding was obviously poured into developing time travel rather than mobile phones and the internet…) as a deadly strain of flu hits. Again, I loved the characters, I loved the story development, I loved the writing. I couldn’t put it down and I even got teary at the end.

I’ve read a handful of the short stories (Fire Watch is another time travel one, set during the Blitz on London, a powerful time period), novellas (The Winds of Marble Arch, Inside Job), and books (Passage, Bellwether). She excels at romantic comedy but does dark and serious too. The best thing is, she’s never let me down and I still have more of her works to track down.

Here’s her official site, with links to some stories and latest news. She’s working on a new time-travel work.