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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The Drowning Woman by Robyn Harding

Published by Grand Central Publishing on June 13, 2023

Lee is homeless but she has romance on her mind when she meets a hunky guy who doesn’t immediately try to take advantage of her. Maybe focus on finding a place to live before you start dreaming about wedding bells but hey, that’s just me.

Lee owned a New York restaurant that was starting to be trendy before the pandemic shut it down. She couldn’t pay her bills so her gangster investor (strike 1) broke her finger and threatened to break the rest if he didn’t get his money back. She tried to blackmail her sister’s fiancé (strike 2) but only made an enemy out of her sister. To keep her fingers intact, she fled to the Pacific Northwest and is living in her car, working off the books as a waitress at a diner. The plot to this point is trite but just barely plausible. Unfortunately, plausible plotting is soon abandoned.

Lee is parked by the ocean when she sees a fully dressed woman walk into the water. Hazel is trying to drown herself as an alternative to living with an abusive husband. Lee rescues her. Hazel started out in a consensual dominant/submissive relationship (she envisioned a 50 Shades of Gray thing) with Benjamin, then moved to a consensual master/slave relationship (complete with a Total Power Exchange contract that no American court would enforce), but her consent and the limits she set eventually became unimportant. Hazel is a gold digger so, apart from sympathy for the abuse she endured, I found it difficult to care about her as a character.

After the rescue, Hazel asks Lee to teach her how to disappear from a threatening environment. Yet Lee fled impulsively, with no plan at all, and managed to get robbed when she parked in a bad neighborhood. She’s living in a car. Would Lee seriously believe that Hazel wants to emulate her?

A hot personal trainer named Jesse comes into the diner where Lee is working and asks her to have a drink with him. Lee seduces him on their third date and is thrilled to feel “seen” again, particularly after Hazel snubs her in public. She’s also thrilled to use Jesse’s shower and sleep in a real bed. After a good shag, she feels that she is “more than my mistakes.” It will be obvious to everyone but Lee that her self-congratulation is premature.

Hazel comes up with a sketchy plan to switch places with Lee (they miraculously look like twins after Lee gets her hair done) for a couple of hours, long enough for Hazel to thwart her husband’s surveillance and hop on a plane. I suspect that most readers will immediately think that entering Hazel’s home while pretending to be Hazel is both dangerous and stupid and that Hazel is playing Lee, but Hazel offers Lee a nice chunk of money to do it.

Both Hazel and Jesse send up a series of red flags but Lee is apparently too trusting to notice Hazel’s and too love struck to recognize Jesse’s. Lee sees the world from a naïve perspective that doesn’t match up with a homeless woman who fled from a gangster and encountered nothing but trouble thereafter. She eventually feels betrayed by two people she believed were “honest and decent.” I get it, but she only recently met both these people and had to ignore multiple warning signs to conclude that they were on her side. I find it hard to care about a character who is so remarkably dim.

I was prepared to write off The Drowning Woman as a waste of time until, soon after Lee enters Hazel’s home, the plot turns in a surprising direction. Unfortunately, Robyn Harding immediately kills the momentum by changing the point of view from Lee to Hazel and filling in Hazel’s backstory. Hazel, like Lee, fell head-over-heels in love, not with one man but with two. The women in this book think like characters in romance novels. Because they do not behave rationally, needless trouble ensues for everyone.

Hazel’s rewriting of Lee’s story from Hazel’s perspective brings us back to the surprising moment, which is no longer a surprise but is not yet explained. Point of view then shifts back to Lee, who would run like a rabbit if she had any sense, but that wouldn’t be much of a story. Lee decides to investigate a death for which she might be blamed, then discovers another fact (one unknown to Hazel) that places all the past events in another new light. Lee’s section ends with her discovery of yet another secret, but she doesn’t reveal it — even though she’s narrating events in the first person — because Harding wants to save it to set up the ending. Harding defeats the trust a first-person narrator should build with a reader by having her narrator describe her actions in real time while withholding her most important discovery at the moment she makes it.

Back to Hazel, who make a series of stupid decisions, including lying to the police. You’d think the wife of a criminal defense lawyer would know of her right to say, “I don’t want to answer questions about that topic.” Most of Hazel’s narrative is preposterous. Characters effortlessly hack telephones and obtain fake passports. The brief description of legal proceedings betrays an unfamiliarity with the law. The ending — well, pretty much the last half of the novel — is less than engaging. Multiple loose ends continue to dangle at the story’s end (e.g., how do police deduce from a jawbone that washed ashore that the victim was stabbed in the chest multiple times?). The novel’s first half at least generates mild suspense, but it fizzles out well before the end. An epilog delivers a feel-good resolution to the protagonists’ lives that feels forced.

Two unlikable protagonists stuck in an unbelievable plot compete to see which one will make the worst decisions. Some of the setup is interesting but the novel in its entirety doesn’t live up to its modestly promising start.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Be Mine by Richard Ford

Published by ‎ Ecco on June 13, 2023

Thrillers and other genre novels often follow a character who stars in a series of novels. Literary fiction has fewer recurring protagonists. Off the top of my head, my favorites are Jim Harrison’s Sunderson, John Updike’s Rabbit, and Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe.

Bascombe was a sportwriter when he debuted as a protagonist. He later became a real estate salesman. Now he’s retired and thinking about death. Not so much his own, although at 74, “with a modest laundry list of ailments and sorrowing memories,” he knows his end is approaching. He thinks about his mother’s lifeless face, about a son who died at the age of 9, about the death of a former wife, about friends who have passed away. But mostly he thinks about his son Paul, who has ALS (“the bad kind”) and will soon stop breathing. Frank knows “there aren’t many chances left to do things right.”

Paul is 47. He has always been annoying and a mild asshole, or at least Frank has seen him that way, probably with good reason. Paul is unfriendly, sloppy, snarky, and alienated. He makes unfunny jokes with his ventriloquist’s dummy but he moves his lips, making him a failure at comedy. Approaching death hasn’t improved his disposition. Paul has always taken an unserious approach to life. In that regard, he is closer to his father than Frank would like to admit.

On the other hand, Paul loves puns and quirky language. He asks whether steeple jacks are all named Jack, whether civil servants are always civil, whether daredevils are really devils. He views life in relative terms, as “contingencies, bemusements, sly looks, and the unexamined way being all there is.” Frank always thought Paul was an odd boy who would grow up to be normal. It never happened and now it never will.

Frank fears that he has been less supportive, less loving, than he should have been during his son’s life. Since he refers to his son by such terms of endearment as “dimwit,” it is easy to understand those fears. Frank doesn’t like his son much but, to be fair, he doesn’t like his daughter either. Frank numbers Paul’s faults — the number is high — and chides himself for wondering how this man can be his son. Yet Frank’s strongest experience in the face of his son’s illness is helplessness.

The plot takes Frank on a journey to Minnesota so that Paul can participate in a clinical trial for a new ALS drug at the Mayo Clinic. Frank decides to rent an RV and take Paul on a father-son trip to Mount Rushmore, perhaps not the wisest destination in February. It’s a late and lame attempt at bonding time, but Paul goes along with it because Paul goes along with everything.

Paul fills the trip, as he has filled his life, with snarky commentary. The highlight for Paul is the Corn Palace. It’s particularly suited to his desire to embrace the absurd. A place where he can buy corn sunglasses is his idea of Heaven. He appreciates Mount Rushmore because it’s “completely pointless and ridiculous.” Frank feels the same way about the monument, creating a bonding moment — one of the few he’s ever had with his son. He thinks it is better to bond over the ridiculous than to bond over approaching death. Frank believes that growing old is “like having a fatal disease, at least insofar as I’m no more ready than my son to give up on comfort, idleness, and taking grave things lightly.”

Ford paints a mesmerizing and sometimes dismal portrait of the landscape, small towns, billboards, tribal casinos, and oddities of South Dakota. “There are scarcely towns at all — land and sky merging at a far distance, stitched by a jet commencing the polar route.” Rapid City is a “soul-less splat of mini-malls, tower cranes, franchise eats, car purveyors, and new banks” — in other words, a cocondensed version of Los Angeles.

Ford introduces motel owners, tourists, waitresses, and the other people everyone meets on a road trip, making the kind of connections that occur when Americans “conduct an earnest but inconsequential exchange” with a stranger. One stranger admits to being from New Jersey; the other describes something that happened to him in New Jersey. It’s not a great connection, but it’s a connection, a reminder that we’re all part of the same plot.

The novel is haunting in its honesty. Frank’s reaction to his son’s death is almost nihilistic. He doesn’t see his son as a hero for clinging to life (not that Paul makes much of an effort). Frank refuses to wish that Paul will live an extra hour or day or month because he knows that the wish would be futile. Frank views continued existence as a product of luck, or something genetic, something we don’t understand and mostly can’t control. He is happy that his son will die within a year after his symptoms begin, as other sufferers of ALS endure a much slower death, living as a mind trapped in a body that over a period of years loses its ability to move, to speak, and eventually to breathe. There is nothing good or bad about death; it’s inevitable. Only the circumstances can be graded on a relative scale.

The novel ends with a discussion of “true happiness”: how young writers try to define it and tie it to its causes, joining it to guilt and tragedy. Frank finds it a waste of time to worry about causation; most causes are obvious, at least in retrospect, but that knowledge has limited value when planning a lifelong road trip to happiness, given the detours that cannot be foreseen. As an old man, Frank’s best road to happiness is one that is free of worry and planning. Sleep, eat, enjoy encounters with beauty. Sit on a couch. Walk a dog. Don’t think about how life will end, lest you make the ending more difficult than it needs to be.

Along those lines, the book’s most important message is summarized in its final pages: “that the most important thing about life is that it will end, and when it does, whether we are alone or not alone, we die in our own particular way. How that way goes is death’s precious mystery, one that may never be fully plumbed.” It amazes me that such a depressing story about two seriously flawed people can be so enriching, but over the years, I’ve come to expect amazement from Richard Ford.

RECOMMENDED

Code of the Hills by Chris Offutt

Publlished by Grove Press on June 13, 2023

“The country’s gone to hell since Johnny Cash died,” observes one of the characters in Code of the Hills. His complaint is that chain stores don’t sell baling wire. How that relates to Johnny Cash is something that only hill people understand.

Linda Hardin is a sheriff in Eastern Kentucky. Johnny Boy Tolliver is her deputy.  Linda is investigating the death of Pete Lowe. Pete’s body was found in his home, dead from a bullet to the head. Before he was killed, Pete hid his best fighting rooster with a friend. The friend was living in a chicken coop — a fancy one — for reasons that only a hill person could understand.

Linda’s brother Mick recently returned home after serving his twenty years in the Army. He was a criminal investigator during most of those years. He plans to live in France for a while because he expects to feel out of place wherever he goes so why not France? By virtue of hanging around his sister for a few days, Mick gets sucked into the investigation of Lowe’s murder. While he’s helping Tolliver, the investigation leads him to another body. Almost immediately, a third body turns up and his sister takes a bullet.

Deputized by the deputy who is now the acting sheriff, Mick is uncertain about returning to law enforcement in the civilian world. He identifies a couple of criminals but finds their motives to be righteous and is reluctant to arrest them “for things he’d do himself.” Arresting them would be contrary to the code of the hills. Tolliver eventually confronts a similar choice between following the code and following the law.

Military life left Mick with little discretion. He followed orders and let someone up the chain of command make decisions. Civilian life empowers him to do what’s right. Having responsibility puts Mick in uncomfortable positions that add depth to the story.

Code of the Hills is filled with colorful descriptions of a life that will be unfamiliar to most readers. A woman cuts the testicles out of a boar after urging a bystander to distract the boar by beating it with an axe handle if it comes untied during the operation. I can understand why the boar might become upset at the woman’s decision to save herself a veterinarian’s bill.

The plot isn’t burdened with complexity. For that reason, it moves quickly. Mick doesn’t back away from fights but this isn’t a tough guy novel. He’s a decent guy who is making a transition in life and doing the best he can to find a new direction. He treats people well, even when they might want to kill him. Linda is also likeable. She doesn’t understand why she likes men. “Men were morons who abused women and killed each other.” Maybe she doesn’t like them at all but just gets lonely. Strong characterization and an atmospheric, fast-moving story make Code of the Hills a good beach read for crime novel fans.

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Translation State by Ann Leckie

Published by Orbit on June 6, 2023

As liberals and conservatives argue about whether the constructs of male and female are inflexibly determined by biology at birth or have a gender identity component that might be more important than external genitalia, Ann Leckie continues to project the argument into the future. In her future, humans have largely moved beyond what it means to be male or female and are contemplating what it means to be human. Is human identity, like gender identity, a product of a deep inner feeling or does it depend only on genetics?

As Leckie’s fans know, the Presger are not human. They are driven to eat humans and members of other species. A treaty with the Presger took humans and some nonhuman species out of the Presger diet. To communicate with humans, the Presger and the Radchaai (the most powerful group of humans) created Translators — sort of a hybrid of Presger and human — who go through a growth and maturation process that teaches them to interact with humans without eating them. Qven has gone through that process without being eaten by his peers and is approaching the next stage of a young Translator's life.

But then there’s Reet Hluid, the apparent offspring of a human and Presger Translator. He was adopted by a human family after he landed on Zeosen. He has recently been suspected of being a Schan, a lost scion of the ancient rulers of a branch of humans called Hikipi who have long been exploited by a branch called the Phen.

Reet doesn’t think of himself as a Schan or as a Presger Translator, although he comes to accept that a Translator might have been his biological parent. He liked to bite when he was a child but it’s under control now, apart from an occasional urge to rip someone to shreds. Is he human or Presger? Does anyone other than Reet have the right to answer that question? And should he be forced to choose between being human or a Translator? Can’t he choose to be himself?

The parallels to contemporary debates about the right to be who you believe you were born to be are obvious, which is one reason sf fans on the far right are so disdainful of Leckie. After all, the traditional sf hero is a straight white male human who protects weak human females from dangerous aliens who are bent on conquest. There is little room in that mythology for stories that value women or members of other racial/ethnic groups, much less changing notions of sexual identity. Leckie freaked out those fans when she started writing award winning fiction that played with pronouns. It’s ironic that a genre based on opening minds to unexpected possibilities has a vocal minority of fans who believe they are defending tradition by keeping their minds firmly closed.

A number of humans (Hikipi in particular) don’t believe the Presger even exist. The Presger Deniers believe the Radchaai invented the Presger to control the rest of humanity through fear. Perhaps Leckie is mocking people who refuse to believe any fact that is politically inconvenient. The Hikipi seem to have invented a conspiracy theory to explain away facts they don’t like. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

In any event, the Presger Translators must decide what to do about Qven, who has reached an age where he can match (or merge) with another person in a process that— well, as I understand it, the two beings eat each other until they recombine as a single entity that occupies two new bodies. Qven began that process (against his will) with another Translator juvenile and is now regarded as defective.

The Translators would like to dispose of Qven, but they would have to admit that his lineage was a failure and other members of that lineage are loathe to make that concession. They decide instead to give him a chance to match with Reet, whose half human parentage might give him unique insights into human behavior. Neither Qven nor Reet are keen to match with anyone, but they feel comfortable with each other in a way they don’t with anyone else. The theme of feeling isolated as an “outsider” who doesn’t belong to a recognized group is advanced through certain nonhuman characters, as well.

Reet petitions the diplomats at the Treaty Administration Facility to recognize him as a human and to shield him from the Translators. Qven likes that idea, declares himself human, and adds himself to the petition. If people cannot decide upon their own identity, Leckie seems to be asking, does the government have the right to choose their identity for them? Ron DeSantis seems to think the answer is yes.

A Presger Translator argues that if Reet is allowed to live among humans without matching, his offspring may be unable to develop the self-control needed to keep them from eating humans. The story calls to mind objections to interracial marriage, spiced with beliefs that members of certain groups are too uncivilized to let loose in society.

The other key character is Enae Athtur. Forced to uproot after the death of an elderly relative for whom she was caring, Enae is given a cushy job investigating the disappearance two hundred years earlier of a Presger Translator. The Translator, of course, is Reet’s biological parent, a circumstance that eventually puts Enae and Reet together in the Treaty Administration Facility. The novel works its way to a conclusion after the hearing to determine whether Reet is human is disrupted by an assassination attempt and a threatened Hitipi attack upon the facility.

Leckie is an amazing storyteller whose stories of the future reveal important truths about the present. Despite her detractors, it’s heartening that Lecke has so many admirers. She is an imaginative, original writer whose characters are easily relatable (even to many of us cisgender white male readers) because they ask the question that is central to science fiction and perhaps to all literature: What does it mean to be human?

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