Review of Bellwether, by Connie Willis

A comic portrayal of a team of scientists struggling to continue their research despite hopeless bureaucracy, diminishing funding and romantic entanglements - not to mention the difficulties of getting a decent cup of iced tea.
 
Chosen: bought after being introduced to her novels via a friend

I'm not sure whether you can call this a science fiction novel in the mainstream sense - no aliens, no far-flung planets, no adventures, even - but it's certainly fiction about science.

Connie Willis is a hard writer to categorise. Her novels range from the very funny To Say Nothing of the Dog, a time-travelling romantic comedy, to much more serious but gripping looks at history, such as the duology Blackout and All Clear.

Bellwether is set in a reseach lab in fashionable Boulder, Colorado, where sociologist Sandy is trying to track down the underlying source of trends and fads of all kinds. Meanwhile, her colleague Bennett is struggling to find the funding he needs for his research into chaos theory, and Management is trying out yet another management strategy du jour.

It's much quieter and lighter than her other books, and as such was a bit of a disappointment to me when I first read it - it certainly doesn't have either the pace of Blackout / All Clear or the screwball comedy of To Say Nothing of the Dog. But it's one that I've come back to repeatedly.  Engaging characters, a very neatly worked-out plot (no suprise, as TSNotD is structured in the style of a classic 30's murder mystery), and most of all, an author who clearly has a topic she wants to explore. The increasingly bizarre fashions followed by the characters (particularly the duct-tape) are a recurring comic touch. And its a nice reminder that middle-aged scientists and sociologists are every bit as driven by trends as their younger, more obviously fashionable juniors.

It's quite an achievement to combine a discussion of scientific breakthroughs, the problems of blindly following the fashion, and romantic comedy. Well worth reading, if only to see how lucky you are not to work at HiTek labs with fashion conscious Flip as your personal assistant.

One minor but important point. Connie Willis is totally wrong about bread pudding in this novel - it is delicious and Sandy's on-off boyfriend is quite right to change his mind about it.