I love Connie Willis. I think it is a legitimate failure of the science fiction community because the only people I ever see talking about her work are me. She has eleven Hugo Awards!
I do think her most significant long works were in the '90s and the kind of science fiction she writes was not as embraced as science fiction as it would be now. I feel like there's been some much needed erosion of drawing firm lines between hard science fiction and soft science fiction and the idea that hard science fiction is /real/ science fiction have you read her short 1995 novel "Remake" about a future Hollywood dystopia where everything is just remakes of previously successful works starring digital versions of long dead actors that various production companies own the rights to and the protagonist is a disillusioned Hollywood cog whose job is finding sets and props in previous movies that can be digitally copied into the new version of movies so nothing new or real has to be made but I wasn't reading "Remake" I was reading Willis' new novel, "The Road to Roswell".
There are two kinds of Willis novels: the serious ones and the romantic comedy non-science fiction genre pastiches but make it science fiction. Willis loves a screwball comedy and doesn't see why she can't have that but also aliens are there or it's time travel and I love that.
"The Road to Roswell" is an alien abduction story that's also a road novel traveling around Nevada and New Mexico and the special kind of Americana that's grown around UFO sightings and alien conspiracies. Francie is reluctantly in Roswell on the Fourth of July weekend to be the maid of honour in her best friend's latest attempt at a wedding that Francie is determined to talk her out of (one previously referenced fiancé was a breatharian), when, at tentacle-point, she is kidnapped by an alien who looks like a tumbleweed. The alien wants something. Or to go somewhere. And Francie is going to be it's wheelman. As Francie tries to appease the alien and get back to Roswell in time to stop her friend's wedding, the group of abductees becomes bigger, eventually acquiring a conspiracy theorist, a man selling alien abduction insurance packages, a casino loving senior citizen, and a cowboy.
It's just charming. It's silly and light and easy to read and the affection that develops between the alien and its abductees, particularly Francie, as they grow from trying to figure out how to escape to how to communicate with it to how to help it achieve it's goal (but also still get back to Roswell to stop Francie's friend from marrying a man who's arranged for them to get married in a museum recreation of the alien autopsy video) holds everything together.
I never regret the time I spend with something Connie Willis' has written.
