≡ PDF Free Railhead shortlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal 2017 Philip Reeve 9780192742759 Books

Railhead shortlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal 2017 Philip Reeve 9780192742759 Books

Download As PDF : Railhead shortlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal 2017 Philip Reeve 9780192742759 Books

Railhead shortlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal 2017 Philip Reeve 9780192742759 Books

I'm not quite sure what to say about this book. I might still be trying to process it. It is completely unique, unlike anything I've read before. It is hugely creative and very well written. Reeve has created a wonderfully imaginative world filled with complex characters. You don't know who to trust or what to believe. There is no clear good or bad and this makes the reader feel somewhat unsure of what to hope for, what to expect. I found myself only hoping that Zen made it through alright. There is so much going on in this book on so many levels that it adds to the richness and complexity of the story. The book does not have a cliffhanger and works well as a standalone yet leaves the door open for further stories. Also, for anyone with reservations that this is a young adult book, I wouldn't personally classify it as such. Yes, Zen is a person of young adult age (late teens probably though I don't believe his age is ever stated exactly, only implied), but the book doesn't read like, or feel like, a typical young adult book. It doesn't feel like it was written for a young adult audience but rather for any reader with a sense of adventure and wonder.


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Railhead shortlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal 2017 Philip Reeve 9780192742759 Books Reviews

This book is awesome! TRAINS IN SPACE!!! I have loved Philip Reeve's way with story for a number of years now, and this one is a corker!
I was a huge fan of Philip Reeve’s MORTAL ENGINES series, and Railhead, first book of a duology, finds him in equally good form, offering up a fast-paced story filled with tension and wonder that, I’m happy to say, loses no steam in its sequel, The Black Light Express.

The central conceit is that in a universe where humanity has colonized the stars, travel between planets is not by spaceship but by AI trains (with independent thoughts and feelings) that travel through hyperspace gates. Humans are ostensibly governed by an Emperor, which over the millennia has been the head of one of the corporate families that controls the main lines. But in reality, the true overseers are the Guardians, super-AIs developed on long-ago Earth who have become like gods with a mission to guide and protect the human species. Other setting aspects include Motoriks (robots) and Hive Monks (insects that are mindless as individuals but which are intelligent in large numbers).

The main character is a young thief named Zen Starling, who after getting recruited for a heist job by Raven, the Guardian’s Most-Wanted fugitive, and Raven’s upgraded Motorik Nova, ends up pulled into an intrigue that will threaten to topple empires and lay bare long-hidden secrets about the Guardians, the trains, and the gates. Also entangled are the Emperor’s daughter Threnody, and Malik — the dogged Railforce agent who has been chasing (and killing) Raven for years. And one can’t forget the trains themselves, which thanks to their AI nature become secondary characters in their own right.

The plot is propulsive, beginning with a bang and sweeping the reader along for the ride from then on, only slowing now and then to allow for a few (really, just a few) introspective moments or for some momentarily quiet times between characters to allow relationships to develop just a bit more before someone else gets chased, shot at, nearly blown up, kidnapped, and so forth. There are also several moving moments sprinkled in amongst the chaos. The worldbuilding isn’t encyclopedic, but Reeve, as he did with the MORTAL ENGINES books, is able to not only convey the important setting points quickly and efficiently, but also manages to slide in some wonderfully vivid details, as when a train slides from one station to another and the reader is treated to a wonderfully tantalizing glimpse of a strange planet. One therefore has both a sufficient understanding of this invented universe and a few startling images to hang the whole thing on without the world-creation bogging down the story.

As a character, Zen is stubbornly, and perhaps surprisingly given the YA nature of the story, consistent in his “looking out for number one” attitude, which adds a bitter tang of realism to the tale, as far too often “tough” characters end up all-too-quickly with the heart-of-gold reveal or transformation. This can be discomfiting at times, especially as Reeve isn’t shy about ratcheting up the body count, and while Zen isn’t wholly blasé about the deaths around him, he’s also less forthrightly moved/motivated than is usual for the typical YA character.

Nova is a bit more traditional, a combination of the humanoid robot that wants to be (and maybe is) a “real” girl character and the spunky, determined young girl character. Her depth comes from the conflict she feels between her feelings for Zen and her loyalty to Raven, her creator. Malik as well is a familiar type — the tenacious cop whose single-mindedness gets him in trouble with the superiors (but who is almost always right), but is individualized by some nice details/back story and by his stylistic voice. A few other characters, as well as some storylines, get short shrift in Railhead and may even seem as if they’ve been abruptly dropped, but many (characters and story lines both) play an important role or gain depth in The Black Light Express.

The action, as noted, steams right along, beginning as a caper story but then becoming an admixture of a heist tale, a political thriller, and even a mystery (where did the Gates come from, what’s going on with the Guardians, how has Raven been killed so many times?) Most of the answers, when there are any, come at the end, but as if often the case in a first book, they either present more questions or are only partial answers, so readers will want to have the sequel nearby to continue the story. Otherwise they risk feeling a bit let down.

Finally, because of the propulsive nature of the plot, it will be easy for readers to just zip along the surface of the story, riding the action wave, but Reeve presents his young readers with a slew of thought-provoking concepts and questions what is the nature of humanity? Can a seemingly more beneficent “guide and protect” programming of human-created AIs become just as threatening, albeit in different fashion, as the usual Terminator-style AI overthrow of humanity? How important is gender? Is inequality/social hierarchy so embedded in human nature that it exists even in a high-tech future? Reeve’s characters don’t delve too deeply, or even at all, into all these questions — they’re too busy chasing or being chased — but they’re there for the reader to ponder. And while they’re familiar questions to sci-fi fans, they’ll be relatively new to the YA reader (that said, Reeve also tosses a good number of bones to older fans, such as the gates being called KH for “Kwisatz haderech” gates or a reference to the “Old Earth language . . . Klingon.”

I thoroughly enjoyed Railhead, zipping right into The Black Light Express once I’d finished book one, and I heartily recommended it to my own fifteen-year-old son. I’ll let you know (or he will) what he thinks . . .
I'll read anything Philip Reeve writes.
Another excellent book from the author of Mortal Engines and Fever Crumb. A good solid story of the future with a space travel twist. A great beginning of the Railhead series.
The most creative world I've ever read about told with such detail that it comes alive. Trains and robots that communicate through networks, rays that fly like birds, angels of light, emperors and fighters, wars, and a young boy searching, wondering what path to take and who to trust. Loved it!
I finished all of the Mortal Engines books. I was a bit resistant to jump into railhead, because I was so in love with that imagined world. This future future world created for railhead is awesome, intellignetly designed and suprising. I love this book! If you loved Mortal engines, you will love this book as well.
Appealing concept (rails through space, sentient locomotives), but the plot bogs down in the middle, and the protagonist is less interesting than a couple of secondary characters (Raven, Malik). Genre definitions are debatable, but Railhead strikes me as more fantasy than science fiction (keeping in mind Arthur C. Clarke's notion about future technology being indistinguishable from magic). In any case, despite Zen being more of a type (Artful Dodger) than a fully developed character, I enjoyed the book enough that I'm going to give the sequel a try (not yet listed (in May 2017) on American but is on the UK site).
I'm not quite sure what to say about this book. I might still be trying to process it. It is completely unique, unlike anything I've read before. It is hugely creative and very well written. Reeve has created a wonderfully imaginative world filled with complex characters. You don't know who to trust or what to believe. There is no clear good or bad and this makes the reader feel somewhat unsure of what to hope for, what to expect. I found myself only hoping that Zen made it through alright. There is so much going on in this book on so many levels that it adds to the richness and complexity of the story. The book does not have a cliffhanger and works well as a standalone yet leaves the door open for further stories. Also, for anyone with reservations that this is a young adult book, I wouldn't personally classify it as such. Yes, Zen is a person of young adult age (late teens probably though I don't believe his age is ever stated exactly, only implied), but the book doesn't read like, or feel like, a typical young adult book. It doesn't feel like it was written for a young adult audience but rather for any reader with a sense of adventure and wonder.