A Roswell incident: Hugo, Nebula winning author Connie Willis sets newest novel in New Mexico

“The Road to Roswell” is the latest novel from award-winning sci-fi author Connie Willis.

The satirical novel is part silly rom-com, part road trip with an oddball, garrulous, rambling ad hoc band of five humans under the direction of a likable alien who looks like a tumbleweed.

A tumbleweed with wiry, flexible tentacles. He — use the male singular pronoun — is nicknamed Indy, short for Indiana Jones.

The road-tripping starts in earnest in Roswell with the main female character Francie unlocking a door of her girlfriend’s SUV and lo and behold, the alien is inside and abducts Francie.

Then, in a remote area north of Roswell, Francie picks up a hitchhiker named Wade, a friendly fellow who claims to be headed for the Roswell UFO Festival to sell anti-alien abduction insurance. Really. Wade is later revealed as an FBI agent.

Soon another passenger, Lyle, climbs on board. A UFO believer, nutty Lyle, recounts every alleged encounter as true-blue. He even has an explanation for Indy’s appearance: To retrieve the UFO that crashed at Roswell in 1947. That UFO has been hidden at secret government bases at Area 51 in Nevada, Lyle says, then moved to a secret base in Devils Tower in Wyoming.

Next joining the menagerie is Eula Mae, a chatty senior citizen who is wild about casinos.

Lastly, there’s Joseph, seemingly a vacationer traveling solo in an oversized RV. It becomes the new home on wheels for the ensemble.

“In my books, one thing I love to write about is people who are not what they seem. When you look at people, you draw conclusions that usually prove you wrong,” Willis said in a phone interview from her home in Greeley, Colorado.

Francie is what the author calls “the constant, the sane center” of the ensemble of Homo sapiens. We read what she says and, in italics, what she thinks.

“What would happen if a rational person is dealing with something strange? She applies logic and common sense to the alien (encounter),” Willis said.

A major influence on the novel’s structure is the 1939 “Stagecoach” movie starring John Wayne and filmed in Monument Valley. The author finds it a terrific film about characters with no shared past.

“I love the idea of taking people who don’t have anything in common, throwing them together and traveling across the country and the things that happen when you do that,” Willis said.

For her novel, she wanted an assortment of folks you might meet anywhere in the Southwest.

Francie herself doesn’t live in the region. She is to be maid-of-honor at her best friend/bad chooser of beaus Serena’s wedding in Roswell over the Fourth of July weekend. The UFO-themed wedding falls on the same weekend as the town’s annual UFO Festival.

No sooner does Francie get to Roswell than Serena’s fiance Russell decides something more important than helping with wedding decorations has come up. Russell goes off to check out the report of a sighting of a UFO near Hondo, the second sighting in a week and almost in the same location as the first.

Francie steps in to help Serena with the wedding prep and tries on a spangled neon green dress — Serena describes the color as “absinthe shimmer” — that Francie will be wearing as maid of honor.

Still in the dress, Francie runs out to Serena’s car to get a batch of twinkling lights. Surprise! Francie has an encounter of the first kind with a tumbleweed hanging out in the car. You guessed it.

Indy doesn’t fit the notion of aliens supplied by a man who early in the book is standing next to Francie in a rental car line at Albuquerque International Sunport.

He identified the three types of extraterrestrials — the Grays (silver skin, big head, almond-shaped eyes); Reptilians (they want to control the Earth); and the Venusians (“… tall and blond, looking outwardly human, but you can tell they’re aliens because they just feel wrong.”)

Did he forget brown, earless, short, big-stomach E.T.?

Willis said she’s probably read every UFO book and many UFO-related magazines in researching the novel. “I kept thinking that somewhere there was a germ of truth. No. No. No. It was all nonsense,” she insisted.

A Roswell incident: Hugo, Nebula winning author Connie Willis sets newest novel in New Mexico

Willis began work on “The Road to Roswell” more than 20 years ago when she and her husband made trips through the Southwest. Source material for “The Road to Roswell” was her 2002 chapbook “Roswell, Vegas, Area 51: Travels with Courtney.”

Willis has won 11 Hugo Awards and seven Nebula Awards. She regularly attends Albuquerque’s annual Bubonicon sci-fi and fantasy convention. She’s never been to the Roswell UFO Festival, “but it sounds like fun,” Willis said.