Not Far From Roswell

I find Winter in Colorado a great time to catch up on my reading. My GoodReads “want list” grows until the first snow, when long dark nights give me plenty of time for a good story. One such book was Not Far From Roswell, a science fiction anthology edited by Kelly Harmon and Vonnie Winslow Crist. The quixotic cover notwithstanding, this collection has some serious writing. The shared theme for all the stories is first contact. Like other great science fiction, the stories are character-driven and show the choices people make when they encounter alien beings. Roswell, New Mexico, is at the crossroads of extraterrestrial encounters and the starting point for the eighteen dark tales whose settings span two centuries.

A taste of alien adventure

Steven R. Southard’s Reconnaissance Mission takes place in the Nuevo Mexico wilderness in 1829. The lyrical prose and period dialog take you back to a time when first contact referred more to American Manifest Destiny than meeting aliens from other worlds. His sublime ventriloquism maintains such purity of purpose that the writing seems engraved from the period. This fascinating epistolary story recounts a US Army sergeant’s sighting of a surreal “aero ship” whose mysterious inhabitants pay a visit to his squad. The setting, narration, and plot prove that historical fiction mixes well with science fiction. This cross-genre approach makes the first contact incident even more alluring.

Nominated for the Push Cart Award, When Cows Pray by Annelise Knoot recounts another dark mystery in the Roswell grasslands. I loved the narrative voice of Macy, the main character, whose independence and strength of mind reminded me of Mattie Ross in Charles Portis’s True Grit. Knoot has a gift of fitting dramatic tension in the subtext, such as when Macy observes “Dinner was set on the table and Ma was showing midnight bruises. She tugged her sleeves down to hide them even though the evening air was hot and still.” The story’s quiet preamble hints at the bovine terror to follow. The anthology’s cover art is a tantalizing tribute to this page-turning thriller that will keep you awake late at night counting cows, not sheep.

More dark tales from deep space

Most of my reading comes from novels and full-length non-fiction, so it was refreshing to wander through these stories, each with their own prose style and message. Short stories are a whole different animal from novels. In some ways they are harder to write. They have to hook you from the beginning, develop fascinating characters with compelling goals, and wrap everything up in an intriguing twist, all in the space of a single chapter for most books. Some say that science fiction is only plot driven, but reading Not Far From Roswell shows that speculative fiction can be as literary as it is thrilling.

This anthology is a smorgasbord of engaging tales with strange lights, alien abductions, implanted technology and more. From science fiction to dark fantasy, this collection has a yarn for every reader. The wide breadth of story ideas makes this an ideal book club selection. Many of the stories start with an everyday setting where ordinary people find themselves in extraordinary circumstances. This gives them an eerie authenticity, one that rings true to cosmologist Martin Rees’ maxim, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” That is to say, they really could be out there. About the possibility for alien first contact, the Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi asked “But where are they?” The answer is: Not Far From Roswell.