Connie Willis’ The Road to Roswell reads like a Connie Willis novel from the ’90s — which is bad in this case, as it’s allegedly set in the present day. It’s the kind of book where one (allegedly young) character will call another from the airport to get verbal directions to a wedding venue, which is something no actual human would do at this point in history. (This was the point where I looked up how old Connie Willis is, and it turns out she’s 78. So yeah, her portrayals of modern twentysomethings are probably not entirely up-to-date.)

Everything else in the book — the cultural references, the general attitudes, really just the whole world it’s set in — feels just as dated. Part of me wants to say that Willis should have just set the book in the ’90s and written it as an explicit period piece… well, heck, all of me wants to say that, it would have been a better book that way.

But it still wouldn’t have been especially good. Because the other problem is that she’s doing her trademark fake-suspense thing of keeping everyone in motion and never letting them finish a sentence or have the obvious conversations that they need to have. This lets the plot contrivances creak along, but it’s such a frustrating structure. Normally, I’d say that this works better in her farces, but I think this was intended as one, and it mostly doesn’t work here.

My notes for this book end, after a pile of criticisms, with “but it’s fine,” and I think past-me was being generous, or possibly feeling some nostalgia for ’90s-era Connie Willis novels. But sure, okay, if you want a less-good version of the books Willis was writing back then, something reminiscent of Bellwether or Passage but worse, well, here you are.