Philip Reeve - Black Light Express

Reeves writing never flags, with moments of pathos and magic seamlessly interwoven Reeve has crafted something at once weirdly familiar and marvelously original. Thank the stars theres at least one sequel planned already.

Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Featuring gorgeously described alien landscapes, sharply drawn characters (some not even vaguely human), and genuinely awesome technology, this thrilling and imaginative escapade will captivate the Carnegie Medalwinners many fans.

Publishers Weekly, starred review

With adept and thoughtful hands, Reeve constructs a big, sprawling, and thrilling universe Sci-fi fans will delight in this lightning-paced and satisfying read.

School Library Journal, starred review

Reeve (Fever Crumb, 2010) carefully builds his world, balancing the plots action with politics, history, and inventive technologies meatier topics act as counterpoints to Zens exciting exploits, all of which come together at the threshold of a new universe.

Booklist

Above all, [Reeve] delivers an unflaggingly propulsive narrative that is never derailed by world-building. Rather, it rattles along like an interstellar express, leaving you eager for the next thrilling ride.

The Guardian

[Railhead] is brimming with a sense of wonder and mystery The book reads much like the Interstellar Express hurtling through the K-gate its fast-paced, exhilarating and brilliant.

SF Signal

The tunnel was only a few minutes old. Its walls still steamed, and even glowed in places, as if it had been bored by something intensely hot. Along its floor ran twin railway tracks, stretching for more than half a mile into the heart of the mountain, where the tunnel ended abruptly at a blank rock face. Something was fused into the walls and roof there: an archway made from a substance that looked a little like bone, but not much like anything.

The arch began to glow. The light had no color, and seemed to have no source. It filled the archway like a gently billowing curtain. A breeze blew through it, bringing a scent that mingled with the smell of scorched granite from the tunnels still-warm walls. It was the smell of the sea. A breath of air from another world.

And suddenly, where there had been nothing, there was a train. An old red locomotive towing three cars, pouring itself impossibly out of nowhere through that curtain of light. Trainsong and engine-roar rolled ahead of it along the tunnel. In the first carriage a lean, brown boy named Zen Starling and a girl named Nova, who wasnt really a girl at all, pressed their faces to the windows.

At first they saw only the seared, glassy rock of the tunnel walls rushing past. Then they shot out of the tunnel mouth; the walls were gone and the train was running across an open plain. Looming shapes flashed by, weird hammerhead things rearing up on either side of the train, scaring even Nova until she realized they were only rocks. Wide lagoons like fallen mirrors reflected a dusty blue sky, several suns, and a lot of daytime stars.

This was not the first time Zen and Nova had ridden a train from one world to another. They came from the sped from one planet to the next in a heartbeat. But the gate through which they had just passed was a new one; it was not supposed to exist at all, and they had come through it not knowing where it led.

A new world, said Nova. A new planet, under a new sun. A place that no one but us has ever seen

But theres nothing here! said Zen, half disappointed, half relieved. He was not sure what he had expected. Mystic cities? Towers of light? A million doing dances of welcome? There were just lagoons, and low islands of grass and reddish rock, and here or there a cluster of pale flaglike things standing in the shallows.

The train spoke. The old red loco Damask Rose had a mind of her own, like all the locos of the Network Empire. The air is breathable, she said. No communications that I can detect Im getting no messages from signaling systems or rail traffic control

Nova was a Motorik: a humanoid machine. She scanned the wavelengths with her wireless mind, looking for this worlds . There was nothing. Just static rolling like surf and the mindless warble of a quasar a million light-years away.

Maybe this world is empty, she said.

But there are rails here, said the Damask Rose.

Real rails? asked Zen. Ordinary ones? The right gauge and everything?

Hmmm, said the train. Theres a simple test we can do that will tell us that. Are we crashing? No. So Id say the rails are just fine. Just like the rails at home.

But where did they come from?

Its the Worm, said Nova. The Worm is laying them

The Worm was the alien machine that had pried open the fabric of reality to form the new gate and melted that tunnel out of the mountains heart. As it sped away from the mountains it let out its sleek new rails like spider silk. Soon Zen and Nova could see it on the Roses cameras, a cloud of dust moving steadily ahead of them. Inside that cloud, sometimes the waving spines and colorless lightning crackle of the Worm showed, and the hunched mass of it, like an immense half-mechanical maggot, a rolling cathedral of hi-biotech, spewing vapor and weird shears of light. Within it and beneath it, huge industrial processes were happening at dizzying speed. It wasnt just a matter of laying the ceramic crossties like eggs and running the rails over them and bolting the rails down. There were ridges that needed cuttings or short tunnels melted through them. And there had to be some foundation for the tracks to lie on, so something was being done to the ground beneath the Worm, leaving it harder and shinier than the ground around, and fizzing with odd motes of light that danced awhile then faded, and were mostly gone by the time the Rose reached them.

It is slowing, said the train at last, and she slowed too. Its moving off the line. Its making a siding for itself

They went past the Worm at walking pace. It had lost its iridescent sheen, that restless movement. It seemed burned out: a black hill, cooling like clinker. Somewhere inside it lay the dead body of Raven, the man who had built it, entombed on this new world.

The sound of the wheels changed.

Are there still tracks? asked Zen.

Lets see, said the Damask Rose. Again we must ask ourselves, Are we crashing? Ooh, and again, no

I mean, how are there tracks?

The Worm had fallen behind, lost in the hazy light that hung above the alien lagoons, but on the Roses screens the rails still stretched ahead, not quite so shiny now. They ran all the way to the horizon, where perspective pinched them together like an arrowhead.

These rails were here before, said Nova. The Worm made a spur to join the new gate to a line that was here already.

With a rattle of dry wings a big insect launched itself sleepily from a luggage rack and started battering at the glass in front of Zens face, as if it were eager to get outside and explore this new world. A Monk bug. Zen flinched. He had been through some bad stuff recently, and some of the worst had involved those insects. If enough of them got together they formed a hive-intelligence, and one of those hives had attacked him back in Desdemor. This bug must be a survivor from it. Mindless without its million friends, it had blundered aboard the train.