When life is getting you down, nothing is more invigorating than a road trip1. What can beat going down the road, enjoying beautiful vistas, the wind fluttering your hair2? For authors, road trips also have the benefits of forcing characters out of their comfortable niches while showcasing those parts of their narrative world as yet unmentioned.
Herewith, five works about road trips.
Tau Zero by Poul Anderson (1970)
The starship Leonora Christine’s mission is to establish a human presence on the habitable world orbiting Beta Virginis. Beta Virginis is only about thirty light years from the Solar System, thus a comparative close neighbor on a cosmic scale. In the grand scheme of things, not much of a trip.
A mid-journey mishap leaves the Bussard ramjet unable to decelerate. To turn off the ramjet is suicide, as plowing unprotected through the interstellar medium would fatally irradiate the crew. Leaving the ramjet on, on the other hand, dooms the ship and everyone on it as the craft accelerates ever closer to the speed of light. Thus, what was supposed to be a mere thirty light years journey ends up traversing the cosmos, as the universe ages and dies around them.
I really miss Bussard ramjets. You knew where you were with Bussard ramjets.
Tau Zero’s road trip is unusual: enormous distance covered, trapped in a speeding spaceship, inescapable claustrophobia. Yes, the crew literally crosses the universe, but nobody can disembark until they’ve worked out some way to repair the ship and slow down. And there is no guarantee that repairs are possible.
How The White Trash Zombie Got Her Groove Back by Diana Rowland (2014)
Angel Crawford has squandered her life, died, and risen again as a brain-eating zombie. She has not wasted her unlife. She found suitable employment, met a bunch of cool new friends (some living, others alternatively mobile3) and even got her GED.
Angel’s comfortable new unlife is threatened by series antagonist Saberton. Saberton is determined to monetize zombie-ism regardless of the cost to nobodies like Angel or the risks to the world in general. Angel’s friends and allies begin to vanish. Rescuing them demands a road trip from St. Edwards Parish to New York, New York!
Except for Saberton’s unrelenting campaign of harassment and the associated murder events, New York comes off unusually well in this narrative. The lesson offered here is that as long as you don’t have a malevolent megacorporation gunning for you, New York can be a lot of fun.
Cog by Greg van Eekhout (2019)
Heeding the dictum of his parent-figure, uniMIND researcher Gina, that “good judgment comes from experience, but experience comes from bad judgment,” Cog optimizes his learning environment with a huge mistake. The humanoid robot survives his inelastic collision with a moving car… at a cost. Cog regains consciousness to discover that Gina is gone. She has been replaced by Nathan.
Nathan is determined to extract maximum value from Cog. If that requires placing Cog’s brain in a VR machine to speed-run Cog through simulated experiences, Nathan is OK with that. Cog would prefer not to have his brain removed. Cog would like to be reunited with Gina. Therefore, accompanied by Car (an intelligent car), and ADA (an extremely Three Laws non-compliant fellow robot)4, Cog sets out to find Gina.
Members of the extremely literal-minded community, to which I myself belong, will find Cog and ADA highly relatable. If people did not want literal-minded people to act on what turns out to be woefully incomplete or misleading data5, they should properly and completely brief us beforehand, rather than assuming we will deduce things left unsaid.
The Raven and the Reindeer by T. Kingfisher (2016)
Greta adores beautiful, frost-hearted Kay. Greta is certain that she is as dear to coldly proud Kay as Kay is to her. Greta is deluded. When Kay is kidnapped by the Snow Queen, Greta’s comprehensive misunderstanding of the relationship is sufficient to compel her to rescue the unfeeling boy…which she hopes to accomplish by slogging toward the Snow Queen’s castle over an extensive, dangerous magical landscape.
Greta can see the best in people. She is blind to the worst. Her sunny acceptance may win her allies, but her blindness to malice might get Greta killed.
Touring After the Apocalypse by Sakae Saito, translated by Amanda Haley (2020 onward)
Touring (Shūmatsu Tsūringu) is a Japanese manga series. It began serialization in ASCII Media Works’ seinen manga magazine Dengeki Maoh in September 2020.
Inspired by digital photographs of notable locations, Genki Girl Youko is determined to see Japan’s many wonders for herself. Accompanied by her stoic companion Airi, Youko sets out on her electric motorbike.
This is a post-apocalypse Japan. The infrastructure is crumbling and overgrown; the rising seas are filled with deadly and, in some cases, mutated predators; the land is littered with corpses; and some of the robots still functioning are both hostile and heavily armed. Still, Youko isn’t going to let a little thing like the end of the world prevent her from enjoying her holiday.
As is often the case with manga, the work is filled with lavish scenery porn. I’ve only read the first volumes of this series, so if it eventually spirals into despair, sorry—the first volume is surprisingly upbeat for a book about exploring the ruins of traumatically depopulated nation.
Yes, I left off The Lord of the Rings. And The Hobbit. In fact, I omitted all but five of the many stories in which the authors provided their characters with the opportunity for travel6. Feel free to mention them and other works not mentioned in comments below…
- Also invigorating: two handfuls of Modafinil, washed down with a beer stein full of strong coffee. But that’s a different essay.
- Granted, male pattern baldness being what it is, for many of us to feel the wind in our hair we’d first need to remove our shirts. Or possibly, trousers.
- Angel’s kind of zombie isn’t supernatural but scientific.
- It might not be unfair to call ADA a “murderbot,” were that term not in use elsewhere. ADA isn’t sure what ADA stands for, but the heavily-armed machine speculates that ADA is short for Advanced Destructive Apparatus. The evidence on hand suggests this is a reasonable guess.
- How was I to know that “Be silent and stand perfectly still” had the unspoken qualifier “unless the demonstration of which you are a part sets you on fire”?
- Special shout-out to megastructure stories, which almost always force characters to walk from one part of the structure to another. Intended, I presume, to better highlight the author’s worldbuilding skills.
Rudy Rucker’s The Million Mile Road Trip is exactly what it says on the cover. Three California teens in an old station wagon have the road trip of a lifetime. Along the way they encounter flying saucers, friendly aliens and less-friendly aliens, and of course, themselves.
I always read your posts to see if you choose books I’ve read, especially when I think they are ideal for the topic. Sometimes I find something new to experience. I do think you’ve missed a couple of prime contenders here, both by Roger Zelazny. Roadmarks and Damnation Alley are both built around road trips. I read both something like 50 years ago, give it take, so I’m not surprised they did not leap to your mind, but I am sorry that Zelazny has fallen out of fashion.
Roadmarks is one i enjoy reading every few y
Speaking of Zelazny (who doesn’t get spoken of enough, imho) Nine Princes in Amber has a remarkable road trip also.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I have a weird problem with Zelazny. I’ve read a shelf-worth of his books and I remember almost none of them. It is not due to any flaw in RZ I can see. I don’t remember the plot of Damnation Alley at all… although for some reason I do remember the movie.
In this case, though, I have not read Roadmarks.
Grr, I seem to have lost my copy of Roadmarks. There are a lot of cool things and characters in that book (including other books, who are characters). Looking it up, George R. R. Martin said in February 2021 that he had an order from HBO for a pilot for a series. I guess that never worked out, oh well.
If you’re familiar with Judge Dredd, the Cursed Earth story arc is basically a rip-off of Damnation Alley – carry desperately-needed vaccines to another city through a nuclear wasteland. I don’t think Damnation Alley had a villain with a dial on his head that controls his rage level, but that’s DA’s loss.
Not read Roadmarks! I have a marked fondness for it.
I would go with Suzume, both the movie and the book.
Helen and Troy’s Epic Road Quest by
A. Lee Martinez
If per the first the road trip doesn’t have to be on a road, then HHGTG
I thought of Poul Anderson’s The Day of Their Return as a travelogue rather than a road trip, but in any case I though that it was showing off his worldbuilding to the detriment of the story (and I usually like a nice bit of worldbuilding).
Apart from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, at least some of the Tolkien-inspired fantasies involve long journals (e.g. Eddings).
TWOT dissolved into half-a-dozen parallel road-trips.
Upon traversing megastructures, I think Willy Wonka’s chocolate-factory may have had an elevator going sideways just before Star Trek did – depending if it happens in the book. It does have flight… I think someone in “Rendezvous with Rama” also resorts to flying and it isn’t a complete disaster, or was it?
Yes, the magical elevator is in the book version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, published in 1964.
IIRC, the RWR air-bike is damaged by the mother of all static discharges, then crash-lands. The crewman survives and is rescued. So, no, not a complete disaster.
Zero for five.
I’ve got a few to add to the list:
1. “The Tar Aiym Krang” by Alan Dean Foster
2. “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy
3. “The Scourge of God (A Novel of the Change) by S. M. Stirling
4. “Glory Road” by Robert Heinlein
5. “The Hobbit” by J. R. R. Tolkien
There are hundreds more.
I’d have said Glory Road was a quest rather than a road trip, but the line between them is thin and James’s wrapup suggests he thinks it doesn’t exist. (I’d have said a real road trip is pointless, but that would dump most of the species.) ISTM that Silverlock qualifies under the rules we’re using,
Well worthy of mention here (though I do not promise you will find it equally well worthy of reading) is Steve Wilson’s wonderfully titled The Lost Traveller: A Motorcycle Grail Quest Epic and Science Fiction Western, which has the virtue of being exactly what it says it is.
KSR’s 2312 is at its heart a road trip through a rather startlingly well-colonized (in less than 200 years) Solar system.
Though I’ve not read it, someone named Vincent Fields has a book out called Road Trip Through the Apocalypse.
Somehow, Percival Everett’s James seems to be considered at least genre adjacent and, like its source material, is a story of a road trip.
And, of course, there’s Dante and his road trip across Hell, Purgatory and Heaven…
Isn’t KSR’s A Memory of Whiteness also a road trip through a well-colonized solar system?
Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, aka Yokohama Shopping Trip, a post-apocalyptic manga series. Faced with a world where the oceans have risen and humanity seems to be on the way to senescence, the android Alpha takes her fate in hand…and goes on a shopping trip. It’s a contemplative, gentle look at a world where the era of humans is passing.
Was introduced to this through the two episode anime adaptation. As you say, very peaceful and fascinating!
Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach has our hero and a lot of extremely large bugs travel from England to the US in the aforementioned giant peach. I particularly lied the part where they lassoed seagulls to carry the peach. Luckily, giant bugs include some that look extremely yummy to seagulls, getting them close enough to trap.
It’s less SFF than his other books, but I really enjoyed I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom by Jason Pargin. It’s still as gonzo as everything else he’s written
John de Chancie’s Skyway trilogy deals with the ultimate road trip to the end (beginning?) of the universe.
This was indeed my first thought as well, one of my longstanding favorites. By the way there is a short story followup in the anthology ’18 Wheels of Science Fiction’, would love to read more in that universe tho it would be tough to surpass that original voyage.
Regarding footnote #1, I respectfully request five stories about unwise use of stimulants.
Terry Bisson’s Talking Man is the first one I thought of.
Anvil of Stars: a road trip for justice (or vengeance) with friends made along the way.
Becks Chambers’ “The long way to a small angry planet” is a wonderful contemporary space roadtrip.
The focus on the people on the trip and the relatively small stakes throughout make it a relatively “pure” roadtrip story.
If time travel is allowed, I would think that a lot of stories qualify – the most obvious example is Doctor Who, which is pretty much an endless time and space travelogue, but I have a special soft spot for Time Bandits and the group of time-travelling dwarfs that kidnap the young hero and take him on a weird odyssey into the past and the world of legends.
This randomly reminds me of a daydream/story idea I used to have back in high school: When I rode the bus to and from school, I’d look at the house numbers on the passing buildings and imagine they were years, and I mused about the possibility of some kind of roads through time that characters could commute through (no doubt influenced by Asimov’s The End of Eternity and its time kettles, but on a much shorter timescale counted off in years instead of centuries). It never blossomed into a real story idea, though, but just remained a fantasy to make the bus rides less boring.
Two very weird road trips: China Miévilles Railsea – Moby Dick on Rails.
And the German Lord Gamma by Michael Marak, where the protagonists rolls down a straight street on a crd without engine (the street is slanted) and every district has clones of the same persons, but in different societies. Hes looking for the original body of his girlfriend. Its weird and even weirder that it works.
Only because I’ve recently read (or reread) these they are in the front of my mind:
The Stand by Stephen King (to be fair most apocalypse books are road trip books)
A Black and Endless Sky by Mathew Lyons
Memorials by Richard Chizmar
A road trip that starts off with a bang – literally – would be Arthur Dent heading out on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Not even enough time to pack a towel, let alone a change of clothing.
A more recent addition (2024 publication) to the list MAL GOES TO WAR by Edward Ashton. In the middle of a major human conflict, a free A.I. (with its own opinions re: humanity, wars, etc.) gets trapped in the body of a cyborg mercenary & ends up on a long & winding, cross country road trip with humans in order to find a way to return to infospace.
Eternity Road: Jack McDevitt’s road trip on post-apocalyptic roads.
Kino’s Journey: gunslinger Kino and their talking motorbike journey across a fantastic landscape, never spending more than 3 days in each bonkers location. Based on a manga; I thought the anime series was worthwhile.
JMS strikes with, “Together We Will Go” – a very strange one-way road trip across the country, with kind of a bummer twist until it ends as advertised in the beginning.
Re: “Tau Zero”, at least they were around for the next Big Bang…
Thanks for mentioning this, I had never heard of it but it looks very good, especially the audiobook version
The Phantom Tollbooth !
In addition to *Touring after the apocalypse* there’s *Girls’ last tour*, where the vehicle is a kettenkrad, and the structures pretty mega. Two girls in fatigues wander an abandoned world. They have vague memories of conflict, but we have no idea where everyone has gone.
Do James Blish’s *Cities in Flight* count as a road trip?
“Do James Blish’s *Cities in Flight* count as a road trip?”
I don’t think it counts if they take the roads with them.
James did a brief review of Girls’ Last Tour a while back (longer than I thought, 2019):
https://reactormag.com/surviving-the-end-of-the-world-girls-last-trip/
Oddly I can find that link searching Google, but not using Reactor’s own search tool, which could perhaps use some improvement – maybe an author field, or the ability to group search terms together with quotation marks.
I’ve found the new search tool is OK unless for some reason you want to use it to search for things, in which case it does not work at all. Since I post links to all of my Reactor pieces on my blog, I search my blog if I need to track down my own stuff. I don’t have a great solution for other authors’ work.
I generally use Google with “site:reactormag.com” and the author’s name.
The Road to Roswell by Connie Willis is a road trip with aliens
In Iain M. Banks’ Consider Phlebas, shapeshifter Bora Horza Gobuchul is given the mission of kidnapping a Culture Mind by the Idiran, at war with the Culture. The Idiran ship that rescued him in order to brief him on his next mission is attacked by a Culture GSV. Shipwrecked Horza begins a long and dangerous road trip to the Mind’s location. The many exotic locales he visits (most involuntarily) include a doomed ring megastructure, a megaship eternally sailing the looped sea of that megastructure, and a dead world maintained as a monument to its former (and self-extincted) civilization by an inscrutable godlike being.
I feel called out but also understood on a spiritual level.
I love these posts, but anytime I see Tau Zero I become a bit sad.
I read it a couple of years ago and it was so abysmally bad that I had to join goodreads to post a review. The only redeeming quality of the book is that it has the Swedes as benevolent overlords of Earth. As a Swede is hilarious that someone thought we would steer the world in a pure and good way :)
I also miss Bussard Ramjets.
Eon (followed by Eternity) by Bear : traveling The Way , beginning in the last chamber of the hollow asteroid that nears Earth
Destiny’s Road by Larry Niven, traveling the road from the outer limit to its start at the city.
Another “road trip through a ruined world” is Adrian Tchaikovsky’s recent Service Model in which a robot valet wanders through the remains of the automated world looking for a human.
loved that one! laughed a lot