Satire is possibly the most difficult style of writing to pull off. If the satire is too subtle, the humor is lost; if it's too obvious, the humor is obnoxious. Christopher Buckley's well-timed new novel Little Green Men finds the right balance between those two extremes, incorporating the contemporary hot-button issues of millennium fever, presidential scandal, media overkill, and conspiracy theorizing into an entertaining farce. In the book's near-future reality, it turns out that UFOs have long been a myth perpetuated by the U.S. government, both as a ploy to confuse foreign powers and as a means to maintain high levels of funding for the military and space program. As the decades progressed, so did the extent of the deception, eventually leading to the elaborate kidnapping-and-probing schemes found in many tales of alien abduction. But when a frustrated worker in a classified government division orchestrates a close encounter with John O. Banion, a prominent national TV news personality, the carefully regulated propagation of extraterrestrial myths careens out of the agency's control. Buckley spins the facetious supposition that America is run by aliens into a stinging direction that nicely addresses the country's fascination with cover-ups and scandals, as well as its occasional preference for tabloid tales over the truth. Buckley knows that silliness is his ally in a story of fanaticism and hyperbolic paranoia, so Little Green Men manages to stick together even as it grows increasingly ridiculous. Of course, because satire generally implies that its author is superior to his or her subjects, writers run the risk of getting a little too arrogantly ambitious (Is it a coincidence that the initials of Buckley's Biblically put-upon protagonist spell out Job?) Despite all the uneven in-jokes and well-placed but tired celebrity name-dropping, the book succeeds on the basis of his fictional creations, which aren't out of the realm of plausibility in an age of bizarre politics.