As the conspiracy theorists would have it, an extraterrestrial spaceship crashed near Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947. Government agents took custody of the aliens who’d survived the crash and rushed them to a secret base in Nevada called Area 51—and covered up the incident for decades afterward. It’s nonsense, of course. But the sighting of lights that revealed something crashing into the desert near Roswell triggered a flood of UFO reports for years to come. Soon, there were reports of alien abduction events in which tall, pale-skinned extraterrestrials subjected terrified humans to “probes” on their flying saucers. And some writers have used these stories as a springboard for their own fanciful tales. But not Connie Willis. In The Road to Roswell, she tells the alien abduction story to end them all.
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Francie and her bestie, Serena
Francie is a reasonably level-headed young woman, but her friend Serena is anything but. Serena has a well-established pattern of falling for guys who have gone off the deep end.
“When Francie first met her, Serena had been dating a kamikaze BASE jumper who’d wanted her to dive headfirst into the Grand Canyon with him, and her taste hadn’t improved since then. She’d dated a gun-stockpiling survivalist and a breatharian, who believed you could survive on air and positive thinking, and been engaged to a soul shaman and a storm chaser.” And now Serena is going to marry a UFO nut job—at the UFO Museum in Roswell, no less. She’s invited Francie to be the maid of honor at her wedding. But Francie is on her way there with the sole intention of talking her out of marrying the guy, as she’s done in the past. But reality, or Connie Willis’ fanciful rendering of it, will intervene.
The Road to Roswell by Connie Willis (2023) 416 pages ★★★★☆
An alien abduction story that rejects all the stereotypes
You can see more or less where this is going. When Francie sets out to retrieve something she needs from Serena’s car, an alien seizes her and forces her into the driver’s seat. Now, this alien fits none of the stereotypical categories of extraterrestrials reported by UFO nuts. Not a Little Green Man, a diminutive humanoid. Nor a Gray, a gray-skinned humanoid about 3.3 feet tall. Nor a Tall Nordic. No, this guy resembles a tumbleweed. It’s a tangle of thin, flexible tentacles that have a tendency to become tangled up in each other. And it starts tapping one of those tentacles on the windshield, indicating that it wants Serena to drive straight ahead.
Thus begins Francie’s adventure on the roads of the Southwest. But the two of them are not alone for long. At stops along the way, the alien feels the need to snatch others to maintain secrecy:
- A con man on his way to the UFO Festival in Roswell to sell anti-abduction insurance policies.
- A little old lady, who’s no lady at all but a card shark.
- Not to mention a UFO nut who can’t stop whining about how the alien is in the advance guard of an invasion of Earth and they will all be exterminated.
- And a wealthy businessman who talks with a drawl in Western movie clichés and travels in a $200,000 “Western trail wagon” full of DVDs of every Western film ever produced.
And, sure enough, the six in this motley crew will grow to be close as they shuttle across the roads of New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada at the alien’s insistence.
There’s no invasion, of course. And you can’t possibly guess what’s really going on here, much less how it will all end. It’s really quite funny.
About the author
Connie Willis has won eleven Hugo Awards and seven Nebula Awards—more major SF awards than any other writer. She became a SFWA Grand Master in 2011. She has written twenty novels and novellas, ten short story collections, and a long, long list of other short stories, as well as nine essays. Willis graduated with degrees in English and elementary education from what is now the University of Northern Colorado. And she lives in the state with her husband, a physics professor at the same university. They have a daughter.
For related reading
I’ve reviewed three other novels by Connie Willis:
- Doomsday Book – Oxford Time Travel #2 of 5 (A time-travel novel about the Black Death)
- Blackout – Oxford Time Travel #4 of 5 (Historians study World War II in person)
- Bellwether (From Connie Willis, satire that doesn’t make me laugh)
For two other stories of the same sort, see Alien Space Tentacle Porn (First Contact #8) by Peter Cawdron (A funny story about alien abductions) and Little Green Men by Christopher Buckley (Wonder where UFOs come from?) And see My 10 favorite funny novels.
For more good reading, check out:
- The five best First Contact novels
- These novels won both Hugo and Nebula Awards
- The ultimate guide to the all-time best science fiction novels
- The top science fiction novels
- 10 new science fiction authors worth reading now
And you can always find my most popular reviews, and the most recent ones, on the Home Page.
