This is a stellar collection of 12 tales, including the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning title story, “Fire Watch,” which features a time-traveling student and is set in the same milieu as her award-winning novels Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog. The inside flap includes a list of the other 9 Connie Willis titles Bantam Spectra had in print by 1998 across from that were one-sentence teasers for seven of the dozen stories contained within.

Still, I’m very fond of my 1998 reprint, mostly because of the stompin’ John Jude Palencar cover, which is brilliant. Fire Watch was published in hardcover by James Frenkel’s Bluejay Books in 1985 the first paperback edition appeared from Bantam a year later (see that one below). The copy above is the the one I found at Half Price Books last month, and not the first paperback edition. Willis published over half a dozen additional collections in the next 30+ years, including the Locus Award-winning Impossible Things (1994), the monumental 740-page The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (2007), and the Locus Award-winning The Best of Connie Willis (2013), but I think it’s fair to say that this is probably still her most famous. Its publication announced the arrival of a major new talent. John Harrison, and losing out only to Stephen King’s Skeleton Crew). Martin’s Nightflyers, Larry Niven’s Limits, and Viriconium Nights by M. It came in second for the Locus Award for Best Collection in 1986 (beating out George R.R. Fire Watch was the first collection from Connie Willis, and it had a huge impact on the field.

Fire Watch by Connie Willis