Road trips…
The movie Thelma and Louise is the quintessential road-trip flick that has some important themes to give it some meaning. So is John Christopher’s No Blade of Grass, although it’s sci-fi. It inspired me to write No Amber Waves of Grain, which isn’t a road trip; and The Last Humans and its sequel, which are, for the most part.
However, my most meaningful road-trip novel might just be Son of Thunder. Like some 3X-matches you’ll see political candidates offer for your donations, Son of Thunder contains three road trips: ex-MI6 spy and ex-Scotland Yard inspector Esther Brookstone, whose put her name on my art-detective series, is on a quest to find St. John’s tomb; so is Sandro Botticelli, the Renaissance artist, accompanied by his parish priest; and St. John himself is jumping around the Roman Empire, a Christian rebel who’s out to destroy said empire with God’s love. All three road trips come together at the novel’s end.
Mary Magdalene, the first female apostle, in her own missionary and rebel role, provides the thematic meaning along with St. John; Botticelli, not so much. Esther’s commentaries touch on themes that have confronted human beings for centuries and that are still current and meaningful today.
Road-trip stories fascinate people because they can virtually travel to many places they either want to visit or feel they won’t have the chance to visit. The latter includes many sci-fi stories, of course. When A.B. Carolan wrote Mind Games, it was clear that it is a special type of road-trip novel where three different planets are visited. I don’t know if young adults like road-trip stories, but they’ll like A.B.’s whether they do or don’t. (As well as adults who are young-at-heart.)
To see how far back road-trip stories go, consider Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and Cervantes’s Don Quijote—none of them written in a modern language (arguably Quijote unified and created modern Castilian Spanish). The African Queen is a road-trip movie full of adventure that lets the screen presence of actors Katherine Hepburn and Humphrey shine. Road to Hong Kong is a comedic and musical road trip with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope acting and singing (guess who sings better). Movies and novels featuring road trips, as noted above, continue to appear even today, and the public never seems to tire of them. They’re one of the mainstays for writers, whether novels or screenplays. They can be funny; they can be depressing. The variety of road-trip stories says something fundamental about human beings. Maybe we’re all nomads at heart?
We certainly started out that way. Modern women and men’s ancestors made several migrations north from Africa into Europe. European Neanderthals returned the favor by migrating back to Africa a few times, according to the DNA, so that we modern women and men are a mix. Several migrations from Asia crossed the land-and-ice bridge and settled the Americas. Polynesians populated the South Sea islands. These were all early road trips, often odysseys in themselves, so there’s something to be said for them to be more than just our genetic makeup. Organized agriculture and the founding of large towns and cities in the ancient world made human beings stay at home more, but maybe that wanderlust is still in most of us. That might explain the love for road-trip stories.
***
Comments are always welcome.
Mind Games. This is A.B. Carolan’s third book in the “ABC Sci-Fi Mysteries” series. Androids with psi powers? What could go wrong? Della returns to her home in the Dark Domes on the planet Sanctuary to find her adopted father murdered. All her life he has told her to keep her psi powers hidden, but now she must hone her skills to find his murderer. Her quest takes her to Earth and then New Haven, planets in different star systems. She acquires many friends on those journeys and battles many enemies. Set in my ITUIP (“Interstellar Trade Union of Independent Planets”), this novel is available in print and ebook (.mobi for Kindles) format on Amazon, and in all ebook formats on Smashwords and its affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc.) and lending and library services (Scribd, Overdrive, Baker & Thompson, Gardners, etc.).
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
