The Road to Roswell by Connie Willis

Published by ‎ Del Rey on June 27, 2023

Connie Willis’ time travel novels are some of the funniest — and remarkably insightful — works in the field of science fiction. In The Road to Roswell, she brings her sense of humor to a First Contact story, while goofing on people who attend UFO conventions with the absolute certainty that aliens walk among us, or are about to invade us, or at least make regular appearances to abduct us for a fun day of anal probing.

Francie Driscoll hasn’t taken much of an interest in UFO sightings. She’s invited to be the maid of honor for her former college roommate, Serena, who is getting married in Roswell during a UFO convention. A High Priest in the Church of Galactic Truth is presiding. The wedding was planned by Serena’s fiancé, a nutcase who takes UFO conspiracy theories way too seriously. This is not the first nutcase to whom Serena has been engaged. Francie believes it is her duty as a loyal friend to talk her down from her insanity.

As a Connie Willis fan might anticipate, Francie is abducted by an alien as she is retrieving wedding decorations from Serena’s car. She is thoroughly pissed off to learn that alien abductions are a real thing, upending her commitment to rational thought.

The alien resembles a tumbleweed but has remarkably strong and stretchy tentacles. She tries to report the abduction to the local police but they’ve had their fill of alien abductions. She manages to leave a message with an FBI agent who was invited to the wedding before the alien hurls her phone into the desert. She eventually names the alien Indy, after Indiana Jones (the tentacles remind her of whips).

Indy has Francie drive in multiple, seemingly random directions. A hitchhiker named Wade who stands in the middle of the road to make her stop is also abducted. Wade tells Francie that he’s a con man who on his way to Roswell to sell alien abduction insurance policies.

Indy decides they need a bigger vehicle so he abducts the driver of an RV (he calls the RV his Chuck Wagon). They add an elderly woman who is gambling at a casino and a UFO enthusiast named Lyle who believes every conceivable conspiracy theory about aliens, most of which he has drawn from science fiction movies.

Over time, all the abductees but Lyle become more curious than frightened, as Indy doesn’t seem to intend them any harm. They eventually become protective of Indy. Lyle, on the other hand, is convinced that Indy is the vanguard of an invasion force and is taking them to be anally probed.

Indy seems to understand Francie but can’t communicate with her until he learns to match written with spoken language. His English lessons consist of (1) pointing at road signs until someone reads them aloud and (2) watching westerns with the closed caption activated. The Chuck Wagon owner has pretty much every western worth watching. Indy comes to understand certain human concepts, including duty and friendship and loyalty, by watching westerns. On the other hand, he freaks out whenever Monument Valley appears, as it often does in westerns (regardless of where they are set).

The plot follows Francie as she attempts to understand Indy’s purpose for abducting her. He wants to go somewhere, but where and why are a mystery, as is his fear of Monument Valley. Indy is a decent little alien, if a bit annoying and demanding in the way a 5-year-old tends to be. The RV owner and the gambler have interesting personalities, while Lyle is the dolt you would expect a conspiracy theorist to be. Wade behaves mysteriously for much of the novel until Willis reveals his secret.

The story is cute. All its mysteries are neatly resolved in the last act. Willis doesn’t deliver the kind of rolling-on-the-floor laugher that she elicits with her best novels, but the plot and characters are consistently amusing. Willis adds a bit of romance with an ultimate “meet cute” that might be just a little too sappy, but romcom fans will be pleased. I wouldn’t be surprised if Netflix amps up the romance and turns The Road to Roswell into the movie. For the rest of us, the novel’s mockery of Las Vegas and UFO conspiracies, along with its reverence for classic westerns, is enough to make the novel worthwhile.

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Take a Look at the Five and Ten by Connie Willis

Published by Subterranean Press on November 30, 2020

Take a Look at the Five and Ten is both a Christmas story and a love story. I’m not a fan of either genre but I’m a huge fan of Connie Willis. She is known for her science fiction, typically involving time travel or an historical setting. Take a Look at the Five and Ten involves science and history but it’s more of a mystery than science fiction.

The mystery resides in an old woman’s memory of a seasonal job she held at Woolworth’s when she was nineteen. The woman is Grandma Elving, who is actually the grandmother of Dave’s fourth wife. Dave likes to host holiday dinners. In addition to Elving, this year's attendees include Dave's current wife Jillian, Jillian's daughter Sloane, Aunt Mildred, who is related to Dave’s second wife, and Ori, whose mother was briefly married to Dave at some point in his chain of failed marriages. Ori narrates the story. Dave seems like a decent fellow, Ori is meek but pleasant, and Elving is sweet, although nobody wants to listen to her talk about Woolworth’s. Sloan, Jillian, and Mildred are all the kind of relatives who make people dread holiday dinners.

Grandma Elving has spent years boring her relatives with stories about Woolworth’s. It’s all she ever talks about. Everything reminds her of it. When Sloan brings her boyfriend Lassiter to Thanksgiving dinner, Lassiter is fascinated by the Woolworth’s story. He’s researching a phenomenon called Traumatic Flashbulb Memory. He’s sure that Elving suffered a trauma that caused her brain to capture all the surrounding circumstances while repressing the traumatic event. Lassiter wants to test his theory by testing Elving as she recounts all the details of her memory, which Elving is only too happy to do. Ori is only too happy to help Lassiter, despite her lack of interest in the Woolworth’s stories, because she quickly develops a thing for Lassiter.

The mystery surrounds the nature of the trauma that triggered Elving’s flashbulb memory. Whenever Elving seems to get close to recalling it, the memory slips away, leaving her to talk about Woolworth’s Christmas decorations and the perfume counter and her co-workers and whatever other Woolworth’s-related stories pop into her head. She happily goes on field trips with Ori and Lassiter (or sends them off to look for the nativity figures she’s always talking about) as they try to prompt her repressed memory.

Lassiter’s research eventually takes him in an unexpected direction that he can’t easily accept. That’s human nature. When data isn’t consistent with our theories, we cling to the theories and blame the data. But scientists need to be better than that. They need to abandon bad theories or revise them to account for nonconforming data. That ongoing process is what science is all about. (It should be what thinking is all about, yet a large body of people prefer to dismiss reliable data as “fake news” when it disproves a false conclusion that they find comforting.) Using the tools of a masterful storyteller, Willis makes that point without ever saying it out loud.

The novella-length story touches upon issues that engender debate among philosophers and neuroscientists. Are negative emotions (such as fear and distress) stronger than positive emotions (such as joy)? Is there a difference between happiness and joy and, if so, is the difference only one of degree? Yet this is ultimately the story of two people who, while coping with annoying relatives, are drawn to each other as Christmas approaches. It doesn’t necessarily need to be read on a deeper level — as a Christmas love story, it’s sweet enough to star Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in their younger days — but Willis offers greater depth for readers who want it.

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Jack by Connie Willis

First published in 1991; published by Subterranean Press on April 30, 2020

Nominated for both a Hugo and a Nebula, Jack is a novella by the incomparable Connie Willis that Subterranean Press has reissued in a signed, limited edition. It is one of many stories that Willis set in London during the Blitz. Some of those are time travel stories, but Jack is more a work of horror than science fiction. The Blitz is the novel’s true horror; nothing a lone man could do can compare to the carnage of war. Willis has a knack for conveying the terror of being present at a time when falling bombs and crumbling buildings caused indiscriminate death.

The narrator is named Jack. He works as an air-raid warden, helping rescue people who are buried under the rubble after the bombs fall. Jack tells us about another man named Jack who has recently come down from Yorkshire to do the same work. Jack Settle is particularly adept at finding people who are trapped. Another person in a different ward with the same talent is called a “bodysniffer” and claims the ability to read the minds of the people who are trapped.

So can Jack Settle read minds? Can he distinguish the scent of the living from the dead? Is his hearing exceptionally acute? Narrator Jack begins to understand how Jack Settle finds so many bodies, why he refuses to eat or drink, and why he disappears (supposedly to go to his day job) before the sun rises.

Jack Settle’s quirks will suggest an obvious explanation to fans of horror novels. Jack the narrator comes to that conclusion and regards Jack Settle as a monster. Maybe he is, but how should the reader balance Jack Settle’s nature against all the lives he saves? Is Jack really such a bad guy when compared to the men on both sides of the war who drop bombs that set cities on fire and tear children to pieces? Is he worse than the shopkeepers who keep young women working until closing time, even after the air raid sirens blow, forcing them to run through the blackout in the hope of finding shelter? People do what their natures compel them to do; whether that makes them monsters is a matter of perspective.

Willis gives life to a half dozen characters besides the Jacks, the names of whom will be familiar to readers of a famous horror novel. They are ordinary people whose ordinary lives are disturbed by the extraordinary forces of history. The characters are transformed by their experiences, in ways both big and small — a wallflower gains self-confidence, a man who always wanted to write produces a newsletter, a delinquent makes his father proud by earning a medal in the RAF. Even Jack Settle is transformed, because he finally has an opportunity to use his nature for a worthwhile purpose. As always, Willis takes a deep and meaningful look at what it means to be human, even when she writes about a character who might not be.

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Bellwether by Connie Willis

Published in 1996

Bellwether is less a science fiction novel than a novelization of Office Space. Not that it matters, because anything Connie Willis writes is worth reading. She uses a light touch to illuminate human nature. The results are not always pretty but they are always funny.

Sandra Foster works for one of those think tanks that suck up as much grant money as they can while urging scientists to develop anything that might turn a profit. Sandra is a "soft" scientist, a statistician who researches fads. Her value to her employer, of course, is that predicting a fad before it becomes a fad is a key to vast wealth. Who wouldn't have wanted to be in on the ground floor of the hula hoop?

Sandra becomes stuck as she ponders the origins of the bob, a hairstyle that was fashionable during the early 1920s. She decides to help another scientist who would like to be studying chaos theory but, in the absence of grant money, is studying information diffusion. He eventually does that by trying to teach the leader of a flock of sheep (known as the bellwether) a simple task to see how that knowledge is transferred to the other sheep. The project is complicated by the fact that sheep are too stupid to learn anything.

The story has a bit of romance and a lot of humor, most of it focused on Flip, a whiny office assistant who is about on the same intellectual level as the sheep. Bellwether does, however, make two serious points. The first comes from Willis' exploration of fads. Every chapter is introduced with a fad, ranging from fashionable colors to dance crazes to chain letters to coonskin caps. The sheep become a metaphor for human behavior, as people follow a fad until it loses it trendiness and then give their loyalty to the next fad that comes along. The serious point, of course, is that independent thinking is a valuable but scarce commodity.

When Bellwether is not discussing fads, it explores the nature of scientific discovery, which leads to the second serious point. Happenstance figures prominently in "eureka" moments (a spore drifted through a window and contaminated a culture, leading to Fleming's discovery of penicillin), although a variety of unexpected factors have contributed to scientific breakthroughs. Science is about hard work but inspiration is not so easy to explain. Willis attempts an explanation in Bellwether, and her thoughts (which partially derive from chaos theory) may have some merit.

Serious thinking aside, it would be difficult to read Bellwether without smiling, so you may need to take some breaks to give your smile muscles a rest. This isn't by any means Willis' best novel, but her second-string novels are better than the best efforts of most writers.

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The Best of Connie Willis by Connie Willis

Published by Del Rey on July 9, 2013

I'm a fan of the "Best of" series, but how does an editor pick the best of a writer who won eleven Hugos and seven Nebulas, among other awards? Some writers are better at drama than comedy, some are better at comedy, but rare is the writer who is equally adept at both. Connie Willis is one of the rare ones. Her range of talent -- her ability to write hilarious stories alongside stories that are sad and moving -- is on full display in this anthology.

Willis excels at time travel stories, making "Fire Watch" a welcome addition to the volume. History student Bartholomew doesn't know why he's been sent to London during World War II, but he suspects he's there to keep St. Paul's Cathedral from burning down. Willis' time travel stories are often quite funny but this one is both an ironic tale of paranoia and a sad reminder that the real lessons to be learned from history are often concealed. "Fire Watch" won both the Hugo and the Nebula in 1983 and it's my favorite serious story in the anthology. A close runner-up, "The Last of the Winnebagos" (1988 Nebula, 1989 Hugo) -- a story about guilt and forgiveness that combines a mystery with a commentary on the loss of privacy -- imagines a sad world in which all the dogs have died.

The other serious stories are: "A Letter from the Clearys" (1983 Nebula), in which a letter written before the nuclear war reminds a family of everything they've lost. A visitor to London notices a cold winds and smells death and decay at several tube stations in "The Winds of Marble Arch" (2000 Hugo), but when he investigates the phenomenon, he comes to understand some sad truths about life.

The funniest story (I'm still laughing) is "The Soul Selects Her Own Society," a sendup of doctoral students written as a scholarly paper arguing (rather convincingly) that Emily Dickinson was visited by Martian poets. It won a well-deserved Hugo in 1997. A close second is "All Seated on the Ground" (2008 Hugo) which asks the amusing question: What if aliens visit Earth but make no attempt to communicate and only respond to one stimulus ... Christmas carols?

The other funny stories are: Attending a convention "At the Rialto" (1990 Nebula), a physicist comes to realize that the randomness inherent in quantum physics makes perfect sense in Hollywood, where chaos theory reigns supreme and the uncertainty principle is a way of life -- particularly in a hotel where nothing can be predicted. A woman who visits Egypt with her husband and two other couples experiences "Death on the Nile" (1994 Hugo) -- that is, she wonders whether she's actually on the journey to the afterworld described in The Book of the Dead. In "Inside Job" (2006 Hugo), a skeptic is prepared to expose a spelling-challenged spiritualist who channels "Isus" until the spiritualist appears to channel the greatest skeptic of all. "Even the Queen" (1993 Hugo and Nebula) turns the concept of women's liberation upside down as a family debates a young woman's decision not to free herself from menstruation.

Each story is followed by an afterword in which Willis talks about the story. The volume ends with three entertaining speeches that Willis prepared. Fans of science fiction are probably familiar with Willis, but any fan of short stories, and for that matter, any fan of good writing, should enjoy this volume.

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