A close encounter of the Western kind

Nov. 17—Francie is in a bit of a bind.

She's stuck in Roswell for her best friend's UFO-themed wedding to a believer in alien conspiracy theories. She's wearing the galaxy's ugliest lime-green wedding dress. And in the process of trying to convince her friend not to go through with marrying someone so clearly delusional, she gets abducted by an alien.

Such begins acclaimed science- fiction author Connie Willis' latest novel, The Road to Roswell, a high-spirited romp through the highways of New Mexico with an extraterrestrial in tow.

The novel combines all the classic tropes of the typical alien abduction narrative with buddy-adventure hijinks and the plot points of a Western romance.

Willis, a longtime lover of Western movies, says the novel's plot is loosely based on the 1939 classic Stagecoach starring John Wayne, which involves a ragtag group of strangers traveling through Apache territory.

The UFO/Western mashup is more fitting than it might seem at first blush — Westerns initially catered to people's fascination with the idea of an exotic and unexplored wild landscape populated by unfamiliar inhabitants. As the concept of "uncharted territory" continues to shrink, the desire for the thrill of the unknown has been pushed off-planet into stories about aliens.

"I think we love the idea of some other species coming to our planet and why they might come," Willis muses in a phone interview from her home in Greeley, Colorado. "Are they here to kill us, or are they here to save us from ourselves?"

The novel was released in June, and Willis makes an appearance in New Mexico later this month for a book signing at Bookworks in Albuquerque.

Willis is arguably one of the most acclaimed living science-fiction writers in the nation, having racked up multiple Hugo and Nebula awards throughout her decades-long career. Her most popular works are the books in the Oxford Time Travel series, a loosely connected series of sci-fi novels set in past and present England.

The Road to Roswell gave her an opportunity to write a novel a little closer to home, something Willis says she'd wanted to do for a long time.

"I love New Mexico, I love the Southwest, and I grew up on Western movies," she says. "A lot of my time-travel novels are set in England, so I don't get to write too much about my own stomping grounds."

The second novel in the Oxford series, Doomsday Book (Turtleback Books), follows a time traveler accidentally sent back to the 1300s at the peak of the Black Death in Europe. At the same time, her compatriots in future Oxford are dealing with a mysterious disease of their own. Written in 1992, the book received a fresh round of appreciation during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, when some of its plot points seemed eerily ripped from the headlines.

During the actual pandemic, writing about plague was the absolute last thing Willis says she wanted to do.

She had a longtime fascination with Roswell and had considered writing something connected to the site for years, but kept ending up working on other projects. The pandemic seemed like the perfect time to focus on something light, since the events of the real world were bleak enough.

details

THE ROAD TO ROSWELL by Connie Willis, 2023, Del Ray, 416 pages

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Author reading and signing

Tuesday, November 21, 6 p.m.

Bookworks 4022 Rio Grande Boulevard NW, Albuquerque

"I thought this is the time to write this book; it'll be light and fun and wouldn't touch on any of the things we're going through," she says.

Willis has touched on many different sci-fi conceits throughout her career, but this is her first full-length novel involving aliens. UFO lovers will be disappointed to know Willis isn't a true believer herself, describing the Roswell UFO museum as "the silliest thing I've ever seen in my life."

She's more interested in what the fascination with aliens says about people, which she views as a

modern-day equivalent to belief in fairies or ghosts.

"I think it's more likely that it fills a need for a belief in something other than the everyday reality, which can be kind of grim," she says of belief in extraterrestrials. "I think if we got absolute proof that there were no aliens present on the planet, that would immediately be replaced by something else that fills that same need."

Willis repeatedly plays with various pseudoscientific concepts throughout her work; her novel Passage (Bantam, 2001) explores near-death experiences, Crosstalk (Del Rey, 2016) telepathy, and Inside Job (Subterranean, 2005) psychic channeling. Communication, or the lack of it, is also a theme across her books.

That's a frustration she has with other first-contact stories, a genre she says she otherwise loves. The idea that an alien would land on earth and immediately be able to communicate with the humans it encounters is what for her most strains credulity.

On a recent trip to England to research her next time-travel novel, tentatively titled A Spanner in the Works, Willis says she struggled to communicate sometimes with Brits "and that's supposedly my mother tongue."

The alien in The Road to Roswell, nicknamed "Indy" by his human friends-slash-abductees because of his lasso-like arms, has an even harder time. Much of the novel focuses on the humans' attempts to find a way to communicate with Indy and figure out what he's searching for and why he needs their help.

Willis says she strove to create an alien character that thought and operated from a truly different set of rules.

"Too many aliens in novels are just a person in a rubber suit," she says. "They may look like aliens, but they think like humans, and they act like humans, which I think is a big mistake."

Indy is no such character. The lack of dialogue with the alien, which the humans eventually start making inroads with by watching Western movies, of all things, makes for a bit of a slow burn in the 416-page book. But Francie's human fellow travelers — who include a mysterious con artist, a grandmotherly gambling aficionado who's suspiciously sharp-eyed, and an actual UFO conspiracy theorist — are plenty engaging in their own right.

The group's quest in helping Indy takes them across a broad swath of New Mexico and into Las Vegas, Nevada, which Willis says might be one of the best places to hide an alien: "No one would ever notice you."

She did plenty of research for the book, including revisiting Roswell and going to the alleged site of Area 51 in Nevada. One thing that didn't require much effort: the references to the Western movies in her novel, which she says she already knew and loved. She hopes people who like the book will be encouraged to dive deeper into the Western canon.

"If I can convince people to watch Stagecoach or She Wore a Yellow Ribbon or Support Your Local Sheriff or any of those things, my work here is done," she says.

The Road to Roswell author reading and book signing

Tuesday, November 21, 6 p.m.

Bookworks, 4022 Rio Grande Boulevard NW, Albuquerque

505-344-8139; bkwrks.com