Bryce Walton 23 min read

Some influential people disagreed with him, so he was put on the road, condemned to drive a ten-lane superhighway forever, a hundred miles an hour to nowhere and back.

Bryce Walton's 1955 story imagines a chilling dystopia where dissidents are sentenced to endless, purposeless travel. Sharp, bleak, resonant social SF. Read it for a haunting tale of a man and wife trapped on an infinite freeway with no place left to go.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

23 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller