By Philip Reeve
Read for the first time as a kid; then again from 7-9 October 2024.
I somehow remember being very young, and utterly fascinated by the trains in this book—grand locomotives, full of grandeur and spark, colourful, ornate, and singing as they traverse space. I also dimly remember a love story, but the impression is not of much, just a lingering kiss somewhere, entwined with the thrill and danger of the rest of the plot.
The memory floated up and sank many times over the years, and then I spotted the book in an Oxfam, and I got it on a whim, wondering whether it would inspire the same imagery in me now as it did when I was a kid. It was a low-stakes choice: not as devastating as reading Percy Jackson again now, and yet with more weight than many other things I read, like Itch or Alex Rider.
It turns out the book came out in 2015, and given that I definitely found it in a library somewhere, I must have been at least 15 when I read it. It’s interesting how it’s so hard to match your personalities to your age.
My first impression was that I had made a mistake. The quality of the writing was…lacking. The language was ungainly, and overly sentimental, describing connotations and nuance outright rather than letting them bubble into view. Then I remembered that this is, at heart, a kids/YA fantasy book (in a sci-fi garb, like Star Wars), and through that lens I enjoyed it much more! When read as if it were for teens, the characterisation is swift and clear, the setting depictions lush, and the worldbuilding outright brilliant.
It’s an adventure story: a young ragamuffin, Zen Starling, is followed by a girl, Nova; she catches him, revealing herself to be an android, and takes him to her father/creator Raven, a seeming terrorist who tells Zen he is actually an illegitimate scion of the Imperial family, and asks him to steal a small object from the Imperial collection, on board a train. He does so, causing catastrophe in the process, and loses Nova in the attack. Having returned the object to Raven, he gets his reward and moves his mother and sister to a safe place. He returns to Nova, who tells him what the object was, potentially a destructive device that could ruin the technology allowing humans to travel between planets. They go to stop Raven; it turns out that it is actually a device that will allow humans to travel further than before. The Imperial family catches up to them; Raven dies; the attackers are defeated, and Zen and Nova, having fallen for each other, travel to unimagined lands together.
The story itself is a little cliché (but of course, if you’ve never encountered a cliché before, it is novel), but what really takes the spotlight is the worldbuilding. The single clearest image I had of the book from the first time around was of a train, resplendent and magnificent, singing in a high voice on a starry field. I was not let down. Inorganic objects given consciousness and personhood is common in sci-fi settings, but here only androids and trains have it. It’s never really explained, but somehow the presence and characterisations of these great machines, sparkling with thought and music, travelling around a galaxy, was just wonderful.
It’s also been a while since I read a romance, and while this was a somewhat simple, shallowly-written one (girl and boy; boy is like wow why do I think she’s pretty now; I’d do anything for her; I’m hopelessly in love with her, plus we never see things from her perspective (although the book is written in limited third-person following only a small cast of characters)) it was nice to read. It made me remember why I used to read AO3, and what a hold some ships had on me.
Niggling further issues: the worldbuilding is lush but inconsistent, all science is ignored, huge gaping loopholes.