Here’s the thing: if you set any substantial part of an action/adventure story on a train, you are obligated to get your good guy and your bad guy up on top of the train for a fistfight, or at least a chase. This is true if your setting is in nineteenth-century Herzoslovakia, with the train puttering along at fifteen miles an hour, and it’s true on a TGV. Well, and Timothy Zahn has just barely missed with Night Train to Rigel, where trains run between the stars at a light year a minute. Yes, he gets the good guys up on top of the trains, but the bad guys never get off their lazy pod-person asses to chase them. There’s no excuse for that.
Oh, and I enjoyed the book a lot.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
From the Useless Comment Division:
At first glance, I thought you were making some kind of pun or spoonerism off that song about making friends with Nigel. And because no useless comment is complete without TSOR, I went looking for “making friends with Nigel” on Google — and found to my horror that “were only making friends with nigel” is apparently an extremely common junk phrase thrown into adult sites to pick up extra hits. The entire first page of results appear to be porn or dating-service irrelevancies of some kind or another. Ick, and I still don’t know who wrote the song.
Alas, Dan P, your memory has betrayed you. They are not making friends with Nigel, they are making plans for Nigel. They only want what’s best for him. Early XTC; no horn line. Still, the filk We’re only taking trains for Rigel/We only want to infect you with a parasitic polyp that will allow us to control your brain, er, never mind.
Thanks,
-V.