Summer's Last Gasp

Where did the summer go? Part of me is relieved we're headed back to school, but another part wants one more trip to the lake with family, friends, board games and good books. At the very least, we deserve a few more weeks of reading on the patio before Labor Day, when we settle down for the seriousness of fall and winter.

Emma Healey's Elizabeth Is Missing (Harper, June 2014) is perfect for a season that is winding down. Healey's narrator is Maud Horsham, a mother and grandmother who survived the London Blitz, but is now descending into dementia. She lives alone and copes with the help of daily visits from a carer and her harried, but loving daughter, Helen. Maud also writes endless reminder notes to herself. Many of them involve her best friend, Elizabeth, who is no longer to be found at the house she shared with her disagreeable son. Despite Maud's visits to the police and the concerns she voices to Helen, no one seems to care about the missing Elizabeth.

This reminds Maud of the police reaction to the disappearance of her older sister, Sukey, shortly after World War II, and we follow her increasingly scrambled thoughts to the 1940s, where her memory is clearer. Then, she was 15 and living with her parents and a boarder who worked as a milkman. When the beautiful Sukey disappeared, she was married to Frank, a moving man experienced with the black market. Maud's narration is remarkable in its weaving in and out of its 1940s conciseness and its increasingly helter-skelter present. If Maud had a less loyal family, Elizabeth Is Missing would be heartbreaking reading. As is, it's an unsentimental but tender and insightful look at the disappearance of an aging woman's memory and identity.

John Scalzi also looks at aging, memory and identity in his book of science fiction, Old Man's War (Tor, 2005). The twilight years of John Perry, however, are light years removed from Maud Horsham's. John celebrates his 75th birthday by paying respects to his deceased wife and then enlisting in the army, now called the Colonial Defense Force. The CDF is full of old men and women, because their expertise is valued. They defend the Earth, now considered the sticks, but they also seek to colonize what little is left of unclaimed inhabitable outer space real estate. It almost goes without saying that other planets seek to colonize it too. Wars over colonization have been waged for years.

Upon enlistment, CDF soldiers are given youthful bodies. If they survive two years of service, they are given homestead claims on a colony planet. They are forbidden to return to Earth. Of course, the war they have to survive is unlike anything they expect. Scalzi's writing is witty and offbeat and his unusual elderly heroes are a welcome change as we head for a season of autumn colors and falling leaves.

An Other-Worldly Anniversary

Do you know what day it is? A hint: take a look at the interactive Google doodle.

Sixty-six years ago today, the information officer at the Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico issued a press release stating that a flying disk had been found on a ranch near Roswell. Hours later, the RAAF said that the debris came from a weather balloon. Thus began the myth that an alien spacecraft had crashed at Roswell, that aliens had been autopsied, and that the US government was covering it all up.

I've never been a Roswell conspiracy believer, but I've been a fan of movies and novels involving visitors from outer space since I was a kid. On a list of my most traumatic childhood experiences is the TV viewing of the 1953 movie, Invaders from Mars. That movie begins when a young boy climbs out of bed to witness a flying saucer landing outside his window. Soon, humans become vessels for the hostile aliens; you can tell whose body has been taken over by a mark on the back of the neck. Eventually, the boy helps to save the world. As the movie ends, all seems well, until the boy once again climbs out of bed to peer out the window. Wouldn't you know it, here comes a flying saucer again.

I'll be celebrating Roswell's 66th anniversary tonight with a re-watching of John Carpenter's 1984 movie, Starman, in which Jeff Bridges, playing a sweet alien who answers a Voyager 2 invitation to visit Earth, takes on the appearance of Karen Allen's recently deceased husband. It's a great sci fi/road movie/romance that fittingly travels through Las Vegas and ends in the American Southwest.

You may prefer to watch an episode of Doctor Who; The War of the Worlds (the 1953 version is best); ET the Extraterrestrial; District 9; The Rocky Horror Picture Show; or the charming Galaxy Quest, involving a group of appealing Thermians, who swoop down to Earth to pick up the crew of a cancelled TV series resembling Star Trek, because the Thermians desperately need their help dealing with the evil outer-space warlord, Sarris.

If you'd rather read about alien visitors than watch them, you could try a book we Material Witnesses have enjoyed: Rob Reid's Year Zero (mentioned here by Sister Mary Murderous; her Amazon review is here); or Jack Finney's 1955 novel, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In that book, the author of Time and Again envisions seeds from outer space becoming pods near the fictional town of Santa Mira, California. In the pods grow perfect replicants of sleeping people who, when replaced, crumble to dust while their replacements live for 5 years. This book formed the basis for several movies. The 1953 movie's screenplay was written by Daniel Mainwaring, who also wrote the screenplay for the noir masterpiece Out of the Past; it stars Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter. The 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers stars Donald Sutherland, Leonard Nimoy, and Jeff Goldblum. I enjoyed them both.

A third fun book is Robert Jackson Bennett's American Elsewhere, published by Orbit in February 2013.

Bennett's 38-year-old Latina protagonist, tough ex-cop Mona Bright, has left Houston and is drifting around when she learns her dad has died, and she has inherited his cherry-red Dodge Charger and her long-dead mother's house in Wink, New Mexico. The terms of the will give her 11 days in which to claim her inheritance in Wink.

The facts that Wink doesn't appear on any map and no tax assessor has ever heard of it are only Mona's first pointers that the picture-perfect community, created when the now-shuttered Coburn National Laboratory and Observatory was established on a nearby mesa, isn't your typical small American town. Then comes the hotel, whose last guest arrived decades ago. The proprietor, Mr. Parson, seems to play Chinese checkers with himself, and he warns Mona that it's best to stay inside at night. Over the course of this 662-page book, Mona makes a few important discoveries: all unhappy families are not alike, time and place aren't as fixed as she once thought, and Wink inhabitants have varying takes on how to live the American dream. While the last third of the book is a bit repetitious, this is a thought-provoking and entertaining read. The best book ever for a summer thunder storm.

No matter how or with whom you spend this anniversary evening, I'm sure you'll remember that you're only human.