Though it seems dated now, "At the Rialto" won a Nebula award (a major sci-fi writing prize) in 1990. That seems reason enough to me to include it in this collection.

Besides, any writer with a career of nearly forty years (Willis's first short story was published in 1970) will have pieces that seem dated -- in another forty years we may be calling them "classics."

Okay, I suppose it could be considered a "fierce, breathtakingly well-crafted satire," but potential readers should be warned that by "satire" we're talking about Jonathan-Swift-on-a-bad-day levels of darkness and misanthopy (or more precisely misandry), not "South Park."

Connie Willis, like Stephen King, is a WRITER who chooses to work with genre materials, rather than a genre writer. Your pointed lack of reference to any sort of genre connection was refreshing and essentially correct. Willis is at the bottom an explorer in the vast ocean of possible human (and occasionmal et) relationships. She transcends genre in the same way that It, King's master work, does, by examining the lives of people who happen to be in a genre setting but are by no means genre characters. She is, quite simply, without equal when seen as a writer of genre futuristic fiction. Thanks for recognizing the one "sci-fi" writer that I can still bear reading.

If I had no idea what a short story was and read your definition at the beginning of this article, I'd never read one or seek one out. In fact I'd actively avoid them as precious, pretentious drivel. That'd be a shame because that's the opposite of Willis' work.

Some of her stories seem dated to you? Stay away from Dickens, Steinback and really any other "classic" writer then. It isn't that hard to read stories and keep their era in mind when you read them. In most short story collections their original date of publication is right in the front of the book.

Perhaps, as your teaser suggests, Connie Willis "eschews the cold perfection of the literary short story" because she's far more interested in telling stories and conveying ideas than creating "literature". Go listen to her speak sometime and you'll get the idea.

Perhaps the most unusual aspect of this review is that Miller left out any mention of genre. While Willis is best known as an author of science fiction and fantasy, those words are noticibly absent. Even Jack Williamson, an old-school SF writer who wrote for the original pulps, was simply referred to as a "writer."

As a long-time fan of science fiction and fantasy, I was initially disturbed by this deliberate omission. But after some thought, I actually found it Miller's decision refreshing. Why be a prisoner of genre? The literary world has used genre to segregate works and imply that they are somehow unworthy, and that should end.

If Cormac McCarthy, Richard Matheson, Stephen King, Roger Zelazny, and many others can write a post-apocalyptic novel there is no reason not to judge them on their ability to involve the reader instead of calling the McCarthy book "literature" and the rest "SF/fantasy" or "horror."

So bravo Laura for being bold and seeing literature the way it should be, instead of the way it is.

Thank you, Laura Miller, for putting into words exactly what I have felt about the short stories I've read in magazines the past few years. I couldn't figure out what was wrong but they all seemed the same and had such irritating endings. So much so that I've stopped reading them at all!

Quick minor correction from a Willis fan: "Fire Watch" came first; the novels Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing... with the same Oxford time traveling mechanism were written afterwards. (Even though an FW character refers to events in DB... in sf terms, DB is a prequel?)

As good as the novels are, FW is darned near word perfect and still makes me cry.

What I so appreciate about Willis is her willingness to experiment and exuberantly share the results. Thank you for letting us know about this anthology; I'd missed the news! Now I have to go find out who George Saunders is. :)