Roadmarks

This is an imaginative and entertaining minor novel, and one of the better books I've read by Zelazny, who somehow managed to write well without ever producing a masterpiece.In [b:Nine Princes in Amber 92121 Nine Princes in Amber (The Chronicles of Amber, #1) Roger Zelazny https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1416090973l/92121.SY75.jpg 1383240] he imagined a man driving a car sideways in time, across parallel worlds; and in this book he imagines people driving assorted vehicles forwards and backwards in time, along the secret Road made by the dragons of Bel'kwinith.But this is not a story that goes deeply into time travel. It's the story of a man who travels the Road in search of his destiny, pursued by friends and enemies who don't understand him or his destiny; nor does he.The bizarre things that happen on the way, during his quest, make up the story, although they're not really important in the long run, they're just incidents from which he could tell anecdotes, someday.Sometime in his travels, he accidentally fathered a son, who accidentally discovers the Road and uses it to search for the father he's never met. The son's story particularly appeals to me, although it takes up only a few small parts of the book.The book seems to me like a promising draft that could have become the start of a series of good novels, if Zelazny had been able to make something more substantial out of his initial ideas. But I think the dragons were not a good idea: they're too big and too vague and too powerful. They're not really interesting, there isn't much he could do with them. I wish he'd thought of some other reason for the Road to exist, and some other destiny for Red Dorakeen.

3.5 stars, Metaphorosis Reviews

Summary
Red has access to a temporal highway, complete with rest stops and occasional patrols, that runs from past to future and back. But someone has set a ‘black decade' against him - a formal ten-strike effort to kill him. Meantime, his son is looking for him, with odd companions of his own.

Review
Roadmarks is one of Zelazny's minor novels - pleasant, but not particularly striking. While I'm not a fan of time travel stories, here Zelazny uses the time road mainly as a setting, not a plot driver, and blurs the usual problems with a little alternate, merging timelines handwaving. There's a bit of an unsupported ending as well.

The problem for Roadmarks, though, is the characters. They're nice, they're engaging, but not that much happens to them. Their obstacles are low, as is the tension. We discover minor items about Red, but - until near the end - they're not particularly compelling. Plus, confusing to me, at least, some of the characters have similar names and voices, making them harder to tell apart.

I remembered the book as of only middling interest, and anticipated liking it less, decades later. As it happens, I again found it of middling interest - not close to classics like Lord of Light, but better than Eye of Cat. In tone, it felt a bit similar to To Die in Italbar, but far less interesting, and with less character development.

If you're a fan of Zelazny already, read this for the sake of completism. If you're new to Zelazny, don't start here. You won't hate it, but if this is all you read, you may wonder why people think he's so great. He really is - in other books.