Five Unconventional SFF Road Trips

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.

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.

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 She has been replaced by Nathan.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.

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 (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.