[Roadmarks] is a throwaway novel, I'm sorry to report. It reminds me of a half a dozen Philip José Farmer books in which brilliant ideas are presented, then left underdeveloped, trivialized, or just cast aside in pursuit of an irrelevant plot…. In this case, the central premise is one of those outrageously literalized metaphors which only work in science fiction and fantasy. In mainstream they'd be gibberish. Consider a "road through time". Zelazny's Road, which may have been built by dragons, runs from the far past to the far future…. With discipline and imagination, there's no limit to what a first rate author like Zelazny could have done with it.

Unfortunately he does damn little. There are two narratives, the main one (chapters labelled "One") and a subsidiary, out-of-sequence one ("Two")…. Frequently a lot of attention is devoted to characters whose roles are quite trivial, and often they're...