By Roger Zelazny
First Published: 1969
Rating: Very Good.
Hell Tanner isn’t the sort of guy you’d mistake for a hero: he’s a fast-driving car thief, a smuggler, and a stone-cold killer. Facing life in prison for his various crimes, he’s given a choice: Rot away his remaining years in a tiny jail cell, or drive cross-country and deliver a case of antiserum to the plague-ridden people of Boston, Massachusetts. The chance of a full pardon does wonders for getting his attention. And don’t mistake this mission of mercy for any kind of normal road trip-not when there are radioactive storms, hordes of carnivorous beasts, and giant, mutated scorpions to be found along every deadly mile between Los Angeles and the East Coast. But then, this is no normal part of America, you see. This is Damnation Alley….

Cultural Significance:
While Harlan Ellison’s A Boy and His Dog is universally cited as the story established the tropes of the “modern” post-apocalypse genre, another story was published that same year deserves just as much of the credit. Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley was the firest novel to weave a tale of a post nuclear earth where our hero–a legit Hell’s Angel–is drafted into transporting a vaccine across a gang and mutant infested Midwestern America. This book was The Road Warrior before there ever was a Road Warrior.

Just as important, though, is Damnation Alley‘s influence on cyberpunk. Aside from its hard-edged writing style and biker anti-hero protagonist, the novel was one of the direct inspirations for Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams (who thanks Zelazny within the book). And in 2000ad magazine, the new now infamous Judge Dredd story “The Cursed Earth” was almost a direct re-telling of Damnation Alley.