Sunday, July 19, 2015

Five of the best road trips in sci-fi & fantasy

Jeff Somers is the author of Lifers, the Avery Cates series from Orbit Books, Chum from Tyrus Books, and We Are Not Good People from Pocket/Gallery. He has published over thirty short stories as well.

At B & N Reads Somers tagged five of the greatest road trips in sci-fi & fantasy, including:
Find Me, by Laura van den Berg

Key to a road trip novel are the characters taking the trip—not the events experienced, but how those events affect the people we’re traveling with. In her debut, van den Berg starts off with a premise that might seem too familiar: a disease that causes memory loss and then, quickly, death, sweeps the world. Joy, an immune teenager suppressing her own bad memories, is rounded up into a hospital in Kansas with other immune teenagers and subjected to experiments, ostensibly to find a cure. When order breaks down, Joy escapes into a post-plague America in search of her mother, and that’s where the novel finds its footing, and becomes amazing. Joy’s road trip leads to a series of unexpected, imaginative encounters as it explores what people might do (or become) when stripped of society’s constraints.
Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue