It’s the birthday of science fiction and fantasy author Connie Willis (b. 1945), known as one of SF’s premier humorists and also known for winning more major SF awards than anyone else, including 11 Hugos and seven Nebulas.

(For the record: Robert Heinlein won the most Hugos for Best Novel with six wins out of 12 nominations; Ursula K. Le Guin won the most Nebulas for Best Novel with four wins out of six nominations. Willis’ wins include awards for novels, novellas, novelettes, and short stories, but I feel that she could sit down to lunch with Heinlein and Le Guin and not embarrass herself. Which begs the question: which science fiction/fantasy author would you most like to have lunch with? Discuss. I choose anyone but Isaac Asimov. Literally anyone.)

Constance Elaine Trimmer Willis was born in Denver, Colorado, and studied English and elementary education at what was then Colorado State College and is now the University of Northern Colorado. Willis graduated in 1967, the same year she married Courtney Wayne Willis, taught elementary school and middle school for a couple of years, and published her first short story, “The Secret of Santa Titicaca,” in 1970 in the magazine Worlds of Fantasy. Within about a decade she started winning those Hugos and Nebulas, beginning with the novelette “Fire Watch,” which won both in 1983.

(I’m going to explain here what the difference is between a novelette and a novella because I don’t want you learning it on the streets. A novelette is longer than a short story but shorter than a novella and clocks in at about 7,500 words to maybe 20,000 words. A novella is longer than a novelette but shorter than a novel and clocks in around 17,000 to 40,000 words. Yes, there’s some overlap there, but that just provides an opportunity for us all to strengthen our tolerance for ambiguity. Don’t you hate ambiguity? It’s almost as awful as change.)

Willis’ first win for Best Novel for both the Hugo and the Nebula was for Doomsday Book (1992), which takes its title from an actual survey of England done in 1086 by William the Conqueror. It’s set in the world introduced in “Fire Watch” and is the first in a series about Oxford historians who time travel for research purposes, and I really want to read it now because it’s stuffed full of the Black Death, and if there’s one thing I haven’t had enough of yet this year, it’s pandemic. The rest of the series includes To Say Nothing of the Dog (1997), which won the Hugo and Locus Awards in 1999, and Blackout/All Clear (2010), a two-volume novel that won the Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Awards for Best Novel.

Willis and her husband live in Greeley, Colorado, where her husband taught physics at the University of Northern Colorado, and have one daughter. She once said in an interview, “I sing soprano in a Congregationalist church choir. It is my belief that everything you need to know about the world can be learned in a church choir.” She also claims that she hates sequels and said, “One of the bitterest disappointments of my life was Tolkien’s The Silmarillion.”

Have a luminous New Year’s Eve, be grateful for what you have, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.