Roadmarks

Roadmarks appeared in 1979, a science fantasy novel by Roger Zelazny, and its premise is a highway running from the distant past into the far future with an exit at every point in between. Travellers who can find the road may step off into any era or into histories that never happened, and changing what they find there shuts some exits further along and opens new ones.

Its protagonist, Red Dorakeen, has been on the road long enough to have lost track of what he is looking for. He runs weapons to the Athenian army at Marathon in an attempt to rebuild the past as he remembers it, hoping that the right alteration will open an exit back to a place that has become unreachable. His companions are two poetry collections, Baudelaire's and Whitman's, rebuilt as machines that talk, argue and quote themselves at length.

Zelazny tells the story in two kinds of chapter: linear sections that follow Red along the road, and non-linear ones dealing with the assassins sent after him and with everything happening away from it. His editor asked for several of those chapters to be rearranged before publication, and the resulting structure is deliberately disorienting, closer to a mosaic of moments than to a journey with a destination. It is one of the shorter novels in Zelazny's catalogue and one of the most formally playful, which is why it tends to be discussed alongside his experimental work rather than his Amber books.