Another delightful book by Connie Willis, who strays along the edges of Science Fiction in this one. It is about dreams, the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, General Robert E. Lee, .... A fascinating and enteraining book! ( )

I found this to be an enjoyable and quick read. It is very typical Connie Willis - the characters are engaging, and the novel explores some big questions about what it means to be human. More specifically, it asks what dreams mean, and whether dreams connect us with other people, living or dead. As always, Willis's research is impeccable, not only about dreams and what the scientific community thinks about them, but also about the Civil War and the lives of Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee. Willis also has an amazing knack for writing subplots from the point of view of the main character, yet the main character is totally unaware of the subplots. The reader knows a lot more about what is going on than the main characters do, and this adds interesting dimensions to the story.

I don't really have anything bad to say about the book, but it's still only a 4-star book - it was very good, but didn't quite have that extra dazzle that makes a book worth 5 stars. ( )

Oh, what to say about this book. I do love it, fairly uncritically.

The protagonist is a understated quiet man, who works as a research assistant for an author who churns out a lengthy series of American Civil War novels; he spends his days traipsing up and down the eastern US trying to pin down footnotes, confirm details, check geography, all those things. Of late, he has got irritated with his boss's obsession with the dreams Lincoln had of his death.

And one day, he meets a young woman, who is herself having terrible, vivid, dreams, incomprehensible to everyone but him - he recognises them as real events, and becomes convinced that she is somehow dreaming, in detail, the memories (or the dreams?) of Robert E. Lee. Events force them to flee Washington, heading south through the old battlefields, where her dreams become worse and worse, until they return north for a final denouement. Sounds silly; works excellently.

The ending is... interesting; you spend the last few chapters guessing and reguessing as to how she's going to explain the story, with the narrator himself repeatedly inventing ideas and dropping them before settling on a conclusion. It isn't happy, but it's elegant; the dreams aren't explained, but there's an interpretation which works cleanly and leaves some very interesting implications.

The writing itself is beautifully done; there are one or two passages which made me stop reading with that odd thrill of delight you get when something just works. I haven't reread this for some years, and I'm not sure I will; it's beautiful and a delight, but I think repeated rereading would blunt that reaction.

Connie Willis typically writes science fiction or fantasy and while Lincoln's Dreams doesn't take place in the year 2197 or on the planet Baktakazini, it is equally mind bending and thought provoking. Jeff Johnston is a historical researcher working for a Civil War novelist, Thomas Broun. Broun is obsessed with Abraham Lincoln's dreams of foreshadowing before his death. Broun goes to great length to analyze them with Jeff's help. Through his research, Jeff meets Annie, a beautiful Sleep Institute patient who has troubling dreams of her own. Annie has been having dreams not about Robert E. Lee, but AS Robert E. Lee. It's as if her dreams really are those of Lee's. Jeff takes it upon himself to not only satisfy the growing obsession Broun has with supporting facts about Lincoln's dreams but, he also tries to cure Annie of her own Civil War nightmares while falling in love in the process. ( )

Several years ago my friends Mike and Annie lent me a time-travel adventure novel called The Doomsday Book (1992) by Connie Willis. I enjoyed the book (it helped me get through a kidney stone for starters) and have been smitten with Willis' brand of science fiction ever since. A typical Willis novel generally involves some psychological phenomenon with a number of people obsessively trying to unravel it's mystery. This is true for fads in Belwether (1996), near-death experiencs in Passage (2002), and psychics in Inside Job (2005). The Doomsday Book and its sort of sequel To Say Nothing of the Dog merely have people obsessing about time travel and the predicaments they find themselves in as a result (and remain my first and second favorite Willis books respectively). A weakness of these books are that all the characters seem equally obsessed and serve only to present new information and twists and turns rather than be fleshed out as individuals. Willis makes up for this with a good sense of suspense, humor, and well-researched scientific and historical facts.

My fondness for Willis and Abraham Lincoln made reading Lincoln's Dreams (1987) a natural choice. The topic of obsession here is naturally dreams: do they rehash one's day, foresee the future, or are they your body's way of telling something. The book could easily be called Lee's Dreams as a central character Annie appears to be revisiting the Civil War through the Confederate general's dreams. The title comes from another character, a Shelby Foote-like author, who obsesses over the dreams Lincoln had foreshadowing his assassination. Despite a nice hodge-podge of dream psychology, history (with great historical tales about Lee's horse Trigger), and the familiar setting of Washington and Virginia, this book didn't hit the mark to me. The characters are so subservient to plot and the plot so subservient to a nice pat theory of dreams that there really is no story here at all. Then again, it's brain candy, but a least of an intelligent kind. ( )