Connie Willis's science fiction : Doomsday every day / edited by Carissa Turner Smith.

All this has happened before, and all this will happen again : Doomsday book and recurring pandemics / Joelle L. Renstrom -- Flip passes : interpreting agency and contagion in Bellwether / Jill Marie Treftz -- Emergency unpreparedness : responses to disaster in Connie Willis's Passage / Matthew Newcomb -- Taking it personally : private engagement with public trauma from World War II to J.F.K. / Janet Bland -- "You were here all along" : Doomsday book and the bodies of Christ / Chad Schrock -- Christmas every day : incarnational theology in Connie Willis's "Inn" and "Epiphany" / Erin Newcomb -- Bell speech in John Donne, Richard Wilbur, and Connie Willis's Doomsday book / William Tate -- Finding love (and truth?) In the midst of chaos : the influence of Dorothy L. Sayers's detective fiction on To say nothing of the dog / Christine Colón -- The mote in the jester's eye : aspects of race and gender in Connie Willis's light short fiction / Sylvia Kelso -- "Tell all the truth but tell it slant" : rhetorical humor in Connie Willis's short fiction / Rosalyn Eves -- Messages in a bottle : the historian's ethic in Connie Willis's quantum universe / Kathryn N. McDaniel -- Schrödinger's cathedrals : humanist memory and posthumanist sacramentality in Connie Willis's fiction / Carissa Turner Smith.

"In spite of Connie Willis's numerous science fiction awards and her groundbreaking history as a woman in the field, there is a surprising dearth of critical publication surrounding her work. Taking Doomsday Book as its cue, this collection argues that Connie Willis's most famous novel, along with the rest of her oeuvre, performs science fiction's task of cognitive estrangement by highlighting our human inability to read the times correctly-and yet also affirming the ethical imperative to attempt to truly observe and record our temporal location. Willis's fiction emphasizes that doomsdays happen every day, and they risk being forgotten by some, even as their trauma repeats for others. However, disasters also have the potential to upend accepted knowledge and transform the social order for the better, and this collection considers the ways that Willis pairs comic and tragic modes to reflect these uncertainties"-- Provided by publisher.