Connie Willis, award winning author, "Cross Talk," "Doomsday Book"

Air Dates: January 7-9, 2017

This week's guest on "Report from Santa Fe" is Connie Willis, who has won more major writing awards than any other author, including 11 Hugo Awards, 8 Nebula Awards, 11 Locus Poll Awards . Inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, named Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, Willis discusses her new book "Cross Talk."

Willis is acclaimed as a science-fiction writer, with much of her writing exploring the social sciences. She often weaves technology into her stories in order to prompt readers to question what impact it has on the world. “Cross Talk,” published in October 2016, explores the culture of social media, twitter, instant connectivity, and the dark side of TMI (too much information). Using a delightful romantic comedy context, Willis reveals complexities of communications in our modern life, and analyzes contemporary issues of privacy, personal information, misinformation, and the effect of the constant barrage of information and noise on our consciousness.

Several of her works feature time travel by history students at a future University of Oxford—sometimes called the Time Travel series. They are the short story "FireWatch,” the novels “Doomsday Book,” “To Say Nothing of the Dog,” as well as the 2 part novel “Blackout/All Clear.” All four won the annual Hugo Award and three won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. In 2014 a new collection of her short stories “The Best of Connie Willis” was published.

Few authors have had careers as successful as that of Connie Willis. She has been called “the best science fiction writer of the age” by Analog and “A national treasure,” by the San Antonio Express News.

“Willis can tell a story like no other. . . . One of her specialties is sparkling, rapid-fire dialogue; another, suspenseful plotting; and yet another, dramatic scenes so fierce that they burn like after-images in the reader’s memory.”—The Village Voice