A first contact with a place we’ve seen many times before
I think we’re at a point when even making fun of Roswell conspiracy theories is itself a cliche, so tired and worn that little town in New Mexico has become in the years since what is in all likelihood a weather balloon crashed there in 1947 (even if it was several miles out of town and closer to nearby Corona—it becomes almost a supernatural version of Tours/Poitiers or Bull Run/Manassas). It is, most often, a reminder of how far science fiction has come, both in and of itself and within the broader constellation of American culture. It is consigned to the great storage room of our genre’s past, looked at in amusement and wistfulness on occasion, but rarely taken out and displayed to the world in its own right, and never entirely thrown away as we want to keep some sense of the past (I’m tempted to compare this tendency to the Cairo Genizah, although nothing so literally sacred is involved). However, Connie Willis has taken Roswell out for a spin once again, in her 2023 novel The Road to Roswell.
Your protagonist is Francie, a reasonable, normal American thirty-something woman (I’m guessing the age here but it strikes me as plausible) who is going to her friend’s wedding. This friend has had a long string of peculiar boyfriends, many of whom have been conspiracy theorists or other whackos of that general nature. Francie had thought that her friend was finally going to settle down with a normal, well-adjusted man who happened to like the desert, hence the wedding being in that famous town in New Mexico. Hoping against hope that it is mere coincidence that the annual alien festival is in town, she is disappointed to learn that, no, her fiancé is yet another conspiracy theorist. Francie accepts she’ll grin and bear it, eventually, after trying to talk her dear old college friend out of it, but the wedding is in the UFO museum. Francie goes out to her friend’s car to get some festive lighting, and is stunned to find in that car not only the lighting, but an actual, living, honest-to-God alien.
What follows over the next four hundred-ish pages is a delightfully weird, thoroughly entertaining road trip story through the odder side of Americana, blended with 1950s-style alien abduction story, and sprinkled with classic Western films for seasoning. This is a book of many genres, and Willis handles it all dexterously, as if spinning plates on sticks, never dropping them, never even letting them wobble.
Francie is the perfect sort of protagonist for this wacky and wonderful story. She is deeply, profoundly normal—not normal for science fiction fans, normal for the American mainline culture (at least that of the educated class). She isn’t too keyed into all the science fiction tropes that Willis is playing with. Some stories have protagonists who approach the weirdness of their worlds with a certain familiarity, a sort of self-insert for the people who write science fiction. Not so here. Francie only has familiarity with any of this through osmosis, through the most popular, mainstream speculative fiction, and as such sees all this with not exasperation but with genuine bewilderment, not unlike the protagonists of those old 1950s films. In this way, Willis makes all this old stuff new again, and sees how it works.
The vastness of the American West plays a role here. To those of us in cities, such massive expanses feel spectacularly alien (perhaps this is why they have so often been the sets for science fiction movies, then and now). It is here Willis makes both humans and nonhumans feel equally alien to one another. It is this particular juxtaposition of character and setting where a truck stop feels bizarre and the glittering Las Vegas strip feels like something from another planet.
There’s also a large engagement with the Western genre, although in a way that is hard to discuss without ruining the magnificent experience of letting the reader find out for themselves. This alien is being introduced to America, in all its peculiarities and foibles (but nothing much more grave than that, being a relatively light-hearted work), and it is bemused, as many foreigners are. This fish out of water is flung into the frontier mythos, and misinterprets things through that lens, to comical and profound effect. I’m not sure whether Frederick Jackson Turner would be proud, but he would certainly have some thoughts, quite possibly strong ones.
And another point that is hard to discuss without spoiling: the nature of the alien. This is a very interesting creature, on Earth for interesting reasons, and one who learns to communicate in interesting ways. It is this special form of communication that interacts with this panoramic West in ways that drive the plot forward, leaving what may once have been trite feeling fresh and new. This is helped by Willis providing it with interesting characters, Francie foremost but by no means alone, to play off of.
There are only a few defects. One is a relationship between two characters resolving in the end in a way that felt oddly rushed (there’s another such example, which feels out of nowhere, but very in character, so I was fine with it). The other big one is a throwaway reference to Native Americans and their tangential role in the plot (and I mean very tangential) that felt rather othering in that old SF way. One could object to a sanitized portrayal of the American West here, those indigenous to that land most of all, but that runs into problems of tone that I’m not sure could be elegantly squared.
While those missteps should be acknowledged, The Road to Roswell is a fun read. It’s the sort of science fiction that reminds us why we fell in love with the genre in the first place, and more broadly, perhaps more importantly, shows us why our ancestors fell in love with it. This is a novel that unrepentantly dusts off old tropes and takes them for a spin. I encourage you to enjoy the ride.
Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.
POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
Reference: Willis, Connie. The Road to Roswell [Del Rey, 2023].
