Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy (Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, and The Last Command), set in the Star Wars universe shortly after the events of Return of the Jedi, flew circles around the average SF movie novelization, and I’ve been a fan of his work ever since—he’s a prolific writer with many succesful books both in his own and in other people’s universes.
What’s more, his name makes him eminently suited to be a bad guy in a Star Wars movie himself.
Darth Zahn’s latest book, Night Train to Rigel, delivers why-didn’t-I-think-of-that clever ideas and a zippy plotline that kept me flipping paper to the end. Our hero, Frank Compton, is a former government agent whose espionage skills make him the perfect hire for his new employer: the Spiders. They’re a race of giant metal arachnid-esque aliens that operate the Quadrail. What’s the Quadrail, you ask? That’s where things get interesting.
At some point in Earth’s future, astronauts discover a large tube deep in the solar system. The tube extends in either direction as far as any sensor can detect. That tube, they discover, is nothing other than one line of an intergalactic railroad that runs to every inhabitable star system. For a hefty fee, the Spiders who run the railroad install a station for the humans. From then on, mankind is able to purchase tickets and see the galaxy about as easily as 19th-century man traveled across Europe, except in the future humans mingle with a wide variety of aliens in the genteel surroundings of the dining car.
Of course, the “Quadrail” is no ordinary railroad. It may look the same inside the station (aside from the porters and engineers, who are gigantic metal spider aliens), but the tube itself takes a shortcut through hyperspace, allowing a trip to a nearby star to take a train a day or so traveling at about 60 kilometers an hour.
Naturally, this Quadrail conceit is just an excuse to frame a railroad mystery in space. Frank Compton is your classic private dick, and this could be the Orient Express for all the railborne intrigue. But where another author might struggle with such an obvious gimmick, Zahn makes it feel natural. By the end of the book, you kind of wonder why we can’t build our own intergalactic railroad.
The existence of the Quadrail would seem to preclude interstellar war, since there’s no real way to fit a battleship inside and send it off to attack one’s enemies, but there is one threat that spreads quite easily through this hyperspatial network, and it’s up to Frank and his mysterious female sidekick, Bayta, to unravel the mystery of this hidden enemy and save the galaxy.
Night Train to Rigel combines action and mystery elements smoothly. Although it doesn’t pack quite the same space operatic punch as Zahn’s Star Wars books, it’s a fun, compelling read. Not even bordering on the verge of hard SF, though, so don’t read it for any sort of plausible explanation of an interstellar railroad. You’ll give yourself heartburn, trust me.
Night Train to Rigel (Quadrail Book 1) by Timothy Zahn
Publisher : Tor Books; First Edition (October 1, 2005)
Hardcover : 352 pages
ISBN-10 : 0765307162
ISBN-13 : 978-0765307163
Genre: Interstellar railroad mystery
