Night Train to Rigel
The Quadrail series, Book 1
Timothy Zahn
Open Road Media
Fiction, Sci-Fi
**+ (Bad/Okay)
DESCRIPTION: The galaxy-spanning Quadrail is a wonder of the ages, connecting distant star systems will all the ease and convenience of an Earth railway, but while the rail's operators, the Spiders, seem happy enough to run the trains, they have remained mostly aloof from deeper interaction with the alien species who use it... until now. Earthman Frank Compton used to be a high-ranked agent with the powerful Western Alliance until he unearthed a political scandal that ended several careers, including his own. Now he's working freelance - and he has just found a strange young man who, though on the edge of death, lived just long enough to hand off a Quadrail ticket made out in Frank's name. Via the mysterious woman Bayta, the Spiders are reaching out to him. They want to hire him to investigate a possible impending attack on one of their stations: an unprecedented blasphemy on one of the core galactic resources. Frank's investigation takes him light-years across space, through the heart of alien politics, to uncover a vast and chilling conspiracy that is about to secure an unbreakable stranglehold over the entire galaxy.
REVIEW: I've previously read Zahn's adventurous middle-grade Dragonback Adventures, and from the concept I thought this would be along roughly the same lines: numerous aliens and casual planet-hopping and plenty of adventure, and if sometimes it stretched credulity it would ultimately be fun and interesting enough to breeze through. Unfortunately, Night Train to Rigel doesn't breeze, but rather clunks and lurches and breaks its own back around hairpin bends that don't always make sense and action sequences that exist for the sake of action sequences.
Zahn openly and even gleefully bases the story on old thriller and suspense movies, particularly Hitchcock and train mysteries, but while some authors can pull off the retro vibe, it just plain doesn't work here. The narrator Frank spends a lot of time hiding his true motives and deductions from the reader. His ostensible partner, the walking "mysterious lady" cliche Bayta, spends a lot of time hiding her true motives as well, while needing to be rescued and have things explained to her. (She is also, near as I could tell, the only female of any species in the entire galaxy. There's vague mention of females in the background of maybe two scenes, but every other named character was male or referred to as "he", even the ones with no stated gender. Makes one wonder how any race became populous enough to colonize multiple worlds, unless cloning is all the rage. Either that, or no race has women in any position of power, which is even more demeaning than eliminating the gender altogether. But, I digress...) Frank encounters a slew of oddball aliens (that don't ultimately seem all that alien underneath the scales or fur), which the reader is supposed to keep track of, among numerous star systems and outposts and planets and moons that the reader is also supposed to keep track of. Through this all wends a collision of conspiracies and secrets and lies which I honestly stopped caring about by the 1/3 mark, lost in a sea of interspecies testosterone with lots of fist fights and tired cliches and other ways in which square-jawed old school hero Frank proves human men to be the superior race of all alien races by figuring everything out despite all the half-truths he's fed (though he doesn't bother letting the reader in on it until the end, because to heck with letting the reader in on the plot.)
By the end, with the possible exception of the Quadrail concept, I didn't care about the galaxy or anyone in it, least of all Frank Compton, so I lacked a certain emotional investment in the climax and resolution. Though I got this as a Kindle 3-pack, I will not be reading on.
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