Customer Reviews

Fire Watch

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I love Willis' work, and this collection of short stories is perhaps the best intro. She writes with a laser sharp clarity that can devastate you. The language is flowing and easy and basic in some of her stories, and so complicated and playfully perverse in others that I couldn't help but think that this is a writer that loves language and its manipulation.

"All My Darling Daughters" and "Sidon in the Mirror" are searing. There is no other words for these stories. The first time I read "Daughters" I was in a mild daze for hours afterwards. It's about the nature of sex and sadism and abuse. And the way that people like to give pain, to hurt others. The words Willis uses in the story are slangy and musical in a terrible way. "Sidon" is about genetic future, love and revenge and horrific uncertainty and identity confusion. The main character's pain made me want to cry -- reading it was like watching a child feel pain, all unknowing and ignorant of what was causing it.

Showing her lighter side are "Mail-Order Clone" and "Blued Moon." The first is about a man who orders a clone in a catalog and doesn't realize what he's gotten. "Blued Moon" is a romantic comedy about language, coincidences and the connection between understanding and love. It's a little like a Hollywood screwball comedy.

"A Letter from the Clearys" and "Fire Watch" are calm stories about the world ending and how unrelieved despair makes people a little shell-shocked. "Fire Watch" disappointed me somewhat because I guessed the ending almost first thing into the story. "Clearys" feels a little conventional. "Daisy, in the Sun" is a dreamy little story about growing up in a strange time and environment, and a little bit confusing. Dreamy and surreal. "Lost and Found" is about the end of the world coming, and really, what is there to do but wait for Heaven.

All in all, one of the best single-author short story collections out there.

I was so pleased to see Bantam re-release Fire Watch. I feel it is the definitive Connie Willis. It features the first of her Oxford Time Travel universe stories (Fire Watch), which ranks up there with the best time travel stories ever. But what really impresses me about this collection is the wide variety of the stories. They range from the poignant (A Letter from the Clearys) to the comic (the brilliant Blued Moon) to the profoundly disturbing (All My Darling Daughters). I worry that most readers will limit themselves to Willis's novels, and miss out on the short stories, which I believe are Willis's forte.

A much darker set of short stories than "Impossible Things". Some of these stories are almost horror, and (almost) all of them are shot through with regret, grief, remorse, anger, or fear. Yet all in all, I enjoyed this collection much more than I did "Impossible Things." For one, it's more consistent in tone. Sure, that tone is dark as hell, but at least you're not being plunged into despair after just reading an absurdist comedy. The stories feel much less dated, and are more sci-fi oriented.

The title story is set in the same universe as Willis' popular "Doomsday Book", which I haven't read yet. It's a great advertisement for that book, raising questions about the nature of history that this history major couldn't resist. Others, like "Daisy, in the Sun" or "Father of the Bride", seem more sketches than fully fleshed-out stories, but at least they're interesting sketches. You just wish she had spent a little more time with them. "Sidon in the Mirror" and "All My Darling Daughters" are so dark they're practically horror stories, despite their sci-fi settings (a burned-out star mine and an L5 orbital college, respectively). These sent delicious chills down my back, and were my favorite out of the whole collection, sticking in my memory long after I was finished.

"Fire Watch" restored my faith in Willis, and made me once again eager to seek out more of her full-length novels. Readers turned off by "Impossible Things" should give this collection a shot, as it displays Willis' considerable talent much more favorably.

Wonderful, fabulous stories. Willis never disappoints. I wish the same could be said of the Kindle store version of this otherwise amazing collection: the amount of typos and errors are beyond belief. Makes for an extremely distracting read... The works of this talented author deserve better. I'm very disappointed an Amazon for this sloppy work.

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Update: The situation was made worse by the idiotic response email that came from Amazon in response to my complaint - which made it clear that the customer "service" representative didn't actually read my email. Just adds insult to injury. Thanks so much.

Connie is one of the best sf writers today, and these stories show why, from the moving (and award-winning) title story to the humorous "Blued Moon" (where an incineration project results in a permanent blue moon and a rash of coincidences) that show an elegance and range of writing styles and a depth of personal understanding. Sometimes I read something and think I can do just as well. I NEVER think that of Connie Willis.

This wide-ranging story collection is THE gift I give to friends when they wonder aloud whether imaginative literature can BE literature; it's both "sf" and "terrific writing." If you have read Willis' other work, this is her FIRST collection; the story "Fire Watch" was written before _Doomsday Book_ and has the first appearance of Kivrin. In addition to the Hugo-winning stories ("FW," "Clearys") _FW_ has many other treasures. Not everyone likes them all; "Sidon" is the one I can't figure out, while "Lost & Found" is my favorite, a haunting, standout story.

I was delighted to buy some great stories by my favorite author -- other reviewers have described them wonderfully, so I won't repeat that. My only gripe is that it seems no one proofed the transfer of the text to Kindle format. I counted an average of one mistake every two Kindle pages. For example the word "burn" was often ported with the "rn" interpreted as an "m" -- rendering the otherwise scary prospect of incendiaries burning the Cathedral into the more amusing "buming" of the Cathedral. Although I was mostly able to read around these errors, given the purchase price, I would have appreciated cursory edit by someone empowered to fix these frequent and distracting typos.

I really liked this book. The first story inspired me to investigate further into the Battle of Britain and World War II. The story "All my Darling Daughters" creeped me out big time, and told me a truth I didn't want to know. I recommend this book to any one who needs a jump start to their thought processes.

I've only finished the first story in the book. However, constant errors have made my reading experience quite distracting; tons of missed punctuation & multiple misspellings. I'm not sure I'm going to invest my time to finish the book. I'm disappointed at having paid $6+ for this product. In the future I will check reviews more carefully to avoid similiar reading disasters. This is definitely a "buyer beware" circumstance.

I love the stories in Firewatch and have loaned out my paperback copies to several of my friends and family over the years, to the enjoyment of all. Bought the Kindle edition because I enjoy re-reading them.
Wow- I imagine it never got proofed at all after it was scanned to e-text. Mostly the errors are a nuisance. In some instances, a problem. Since C.W. Plays so much with language, I found myself more than once relying on previous reads to make sense of the gibberish substituted for the original text. If it were my first time reading it, I'm not sure I would have made sense of it all. I hope they release an updated version with corrections!