Don't they know science doesn't work like that? You can't just order scientific breakthroughs. They happen when you are looking at something you've been working on for years and suddenly see a connection you never noticed before, or when you're looking for something else altogether. Sometimes they even happen by accident. Don't they know you can't get a scientific breakthrough just because you want one?

Clarke Awards
Nominations
Doomsday Book: SF novel: 1993
Passage: SF novel: 2001


World Fantasy Awards
Nominations
Chance : novella : 1987
The Winds of Marble Arch : novella : 2000


John W. Wolfe has written "Willis the erstwhile stand-up superstar of SF conventions – having her as your MC is like getting Billy Crystal back as host of the Oscars – and the author of some of the field's funniest stories is a woman of considerably greater complexity and gravity than her personal popularity reflects and for all her facility at screwball comedy knock-offs and snappy parody Connie Willis wants us to know that Connie Willis's a writer of some gravity as well. Biography
Willis is a 1967 graduate of Colorado State College now the University of Northern Colorado.

She was inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2009 and the Science Fiction Writers of America named her its 28th SFWA Grand Master in 2011. Several of her works feature time travel by history students at a faculty of the future University of Oxford—sometimes called the Time Travel series. All four won the annual Hugo Award and all but To Say Nothing of the Dog won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards.