RIP Patrick Tilley

News has sadly broken that British SFF author and artist Patrick Tilley has passed away. He passed on 25 May 2020 at the age of 91, although the news had flown under the radar until now.

Born on 4 July, 1928 in Norfolk, Tilley studied art at the University of Durham and worked as a graphic designer in the 1950s. He travelled widely in the United States, falling in love with its vast landscapes which informed much of his writing. He switched careers to scriptwriting, penning an episode of the TV series Crane in 1964 and then penning the screenplays for the films Wuthering Heights (1970), The People That Time Forgot (1977) and The Legacy (1978).

He changed gears again to novels, penning the excellent but mostly-forgotten SF disaster novel Fade-Out (1975), in which an alien spacecraft arrives on Earth and inadvertently drains the planet of electricity, ending civilisation as we know it. His second novel, Mission (1981), postulated the arrival of Jesus Christ in modern-day New York. Tilley eschewed the perhaps more instinctive idea of simply repeating the New Testament story in contemporary America in favour of a more colourful space opera in which Jesus's return is part of an interstellar war between two alien powers, with Earth caught in the middle. The book accrued a small but passionate cult following.

Xan (1986) is a more conventional SF thriller in which a small family, newly arrived in Gainsville, Kansas, is caught up in events as an alien lands in the town to conduct reconnaissance before a full-scale invasion, leading to abductions and various other Close Encounters-but-the-aliens-are-bad shenanigans. Star Wartz: Tales of Adventure from the Rimworld (1995) is a pastiche of SF "Big Dumb Object" novels (such as Larry Niven's Ringworld or Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama), set on the Rimworld, a collection of 1,476 planets moved into orbit around two suns. A young man from Earth is transported to the Rimwold and gets involved in various misadventures.

However, Tilley will be best-remembered for his ambitious and impressive Amtrak Wars sequence: Cloud Warrior (1983), First Family (1985), Iron Master (1987), Blood River (1988), Death-Bringer (1989) and Earth-Thunder (1990), along with companion volume Dark Visions: An Illustrated Guide to the Amtrak Wars (1987). Melding science fiction, fantasy, dystopian, post-apocalyptic, Western and samurai themes, the six-volume series is set a thousand years after a devastating nuclear war has ended civilisation. A group of incredibly rich billionaires foresaw the apocalypse coming and set up a colossal underground bunker complex thousands of feet Houston, Texas, and in the following centuries have expanded this through surface waystations and subterranean, high-speed vac-trains to an entire civilisation, the Amtrak Federation (renamed the Lone Star Confederation in a reprint of the series). The Federation, led by the hereditary President-General, believes its manifest destiny is to recolonise the surface world by any means. However, in the intervening time the descendants of the less-fortunate survivors who had to eke out a living on the radiation-blanketed surface have spread out and colonised most of North America, forming a vaguely Native American-inspired tribal and nomadic society known as the Plainfolk Mutes. When the Federation sends its first wagon-train (a land-based combination of dreadnought and aircraft carrier) into Plainfolk territory, it triggers a war between their own high-tech civilisation and the Mutes, who have primitive weapons but an ace in the hole: an inexplicable ability to manipulate the natural elements. The series follows what happens to antihero Steve Brickman after he is captured by the Mutes and then escapes back home.

Later books in the series expand the worldbuilding to include an exploration of Ne-Issan, a civilisation reminiscent of Shogun-era Japan located (slightly inexplicably) along the Eastern Seaboard, and complex politics within each of the three major factions. The series ends on a distinct downer note; at one point Tilley planned a continuation of the story with a further trilogy (the first book of which, Ghost Rider, was reportedly started but never finished) but never completed the project, leaving the afterword to the sixth book (which seems to have been specifically written to provide closure to the series should the sequels not appear) to wrap things up. By the time the series was done, he'd effectively retired to become a sheep farmer in Wales.

In 2009 an Australian film company optioned the rights to The Amtrak Wars and developed the idea as a feature film adaptation to be called The Talisman Prophecy. The project dried up due to a lack of studio interest, which is a shame because amongst a lot of identikit epic fantasies and post-apocalyptic dystopias, the story actually has quite a few fresh spins and interesting ideas that could make for an original adaptation.

Patrick Tilley was a skilled worldbuilder and storyteller, particularly delighting in political intrigue and knotty scheming by morally ambiguous characters. His writing could over-indulge tropes and occasionally be cheesy (such as very odd, isolated fourth-wall-breaking moments) but his ability to stitch together widely disparate inspirations into a compelling and coherent narrative was impressive. He will be missed.

He is survived by two sons and a daughter.

A History of Epic Fantasy - Part 15

One of the criticisms levelled against epic fantasy and some of its trappings - worldbuilding, magic systems, maps, constructed languages - is that it runs counter to the more traditional idea of fantasy as being strange, exotic, weird. East of the Sun and West of the Moon is not a point on a map (to quote Pratchett expert Stephen Briggs) and knowing the metaphysical rules that allow a princess to be put into suspended animation for a century only to be woken up by a passing prince is a bit unnecessary to the story at hand.


There's also the fact that an awful lot of fantasy can feel like a history of the real Middle Ages but with dragons and fireballs replacing research. Starting in the 1980s, some authors wrote books that looked like epic fantasy and had many of the same trappings, but had rather different settings and were combined with other genres to create more interesting and original stories.

The Gunslinger


As a child, Stephen King developed a fascination with the poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came (1855) by Robert Browning. This was one of a number of poems and poetic works that would stick in the minds of various science fiction and fantasy authors, to be extensively quoted later on (see also The Second Combing by W.B. Yeats and The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot). King's take was rather more literal: a man named Roland seeks out a dark tower. Working out exactly what that meant took King over a decade, with him writing down the first version of the short story known as The Gunslinger in 1970. He finally published it in 1978. A series of four further short stories followed, with them being collected together and published as one volume in 1982.

When The Gunslinger appeared, King was already a rising star. He'd published Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, The Shining, The Dead Zone and the novel that had arguably defined him more than any other, The Stand. The Stand is itself a work of epic fantasy using modern American characters to stand in for archetypal fantasy heroes and the destruction of the modern world through a viral epidemic as its backstory. North America itself stands in for a fantasy landscape, with Las Vegas serving as the novel's Mordor. The novel was hugely successful, but some readers felt that there was a lot more to its mysteries - such as the enigmatically evil Randall Flagg - than King revealed on the page.

In the back of King's mind (perhaps influenced by Moorcock) had been the idea of a multiverse, a layering of fictional universes in which different stories could take place but where all these stories could intersect with them. What he lacked was a way of tying them together. The Gunslinger, with its ambiguous setting and the ability of its characters to pass between shifting planes of reality, provided that mechanism.

Seven more volumes in The Dark Tower series followed The Gunslinger: The Drawing of the Three (1987), The Waste Lands (1991), Wizard and Glass (1997), Wolves of the Calla (2003), Song of Susannah (2004) and The Dark Tower (2004), along with a stand-alone spin-off novel, The Wind Through the Keyhole (2012). The novels focus on Roland Deschain, a knight and gunslinger who pursues a mysterious "man in black" across a desert, gathering allies along the way. There are hints of a post-apocalyptic world, strengthened by references to The Stand and its characters. Real-life figures, including (controversially) King himself, make an appearance. Many other novels King wrote during this period tied into the main work: The Eyes of the Dragon (1987) is King's only "traditional" epic fantasy novel and features the return of Randall Flagg and references to The Dark Tower. Black House, Hearts in Atlantis, Rose Madder and Insomnia (among others) also feature blatant references to the series. In fact, some King fans suggest that all of King's work (even the non-supernatural thrillers like Misery) is set in the Dark Tower multiverse and they may be right.

Cloud Warrior

Patrick Tilley had already had an interesting writing career before he started writing his magnum opus in 1983. His first novel, Fade Out (1976), had been an SF novel about the arrival of an alien spacecraft on Earth that drained the planet of electricity, throwing us back into the Middle Ages. His second, Mission (1981), had asked what would happen if Jesus turned up in present-day New York City.

For his next work, Tilley decided to fuse together Mad Max, Shogun, The Lord of the Rings and the American Western because, well, why not? The resulting series was The Amtrak Wars, the kind of inspired, crazy genre mash-up that we don't seen nearly enough of in the genre.

The books open in 2989. The Old World was destroyed in a nuclear apocalypse (which took place in, er, November 2015) but a group of American industrialists and billionaires survived in a massive underground shelter beneath Houston, Texas. With the surface world too radioactive to survive on, they expanded the underground facilities into a vast subterranean empire, the Amtrak Federation. Emerging centuries later, they found to their horror that the surface world had been taken over by "Mutes", the mutated survivors and descendants of less fortunate Americans who'd had to struggle to survive after the thermonuclear war. The Federation initially waged war against the Mutes to retake the surface world, but ran into problems when it was discovered that the Mutes had somehow gained mastery of the elements and magic. Complicating matters further was the presence of a large nation of descendants of Japanese survivors on the eastern seaboard, Ne-Issan.

The books chronicle the development of the Talisman Prophecy, which the Mutes believe will see the destruction of the Amtrak Federation, and the role played in it by four young people from both the Federation and the Clan M'Call of the Mutes. The books are also notable for their vivid action scenes and extraordinarily complicated politics and schemes-within-schemes developed by the central character, the Machiavellian antihero Steve Brickman.

Six volumes were published in the series: Cloud Warrior (1983), First Family (1985), Iron Master (1987), Blood River (1988), Death-Bringer (1989) and Earth-Thunder (1990). The sixth volume ended on something of a cliffhanger, intended to lead into a sequel series set 15-20 years later when the Talisman Prophecy came to fruition. However, Tilley chose to move onto other projects. There was a renewed attempt to continue the series in 2007 with a new trilogy, whilst an Australian production company licensed the film rights in 2010 with a view to making a movie called The Talisman Prophecy, but neither came to fruition. Still, the series remains remarkable for the ease with which Tilley brings together a myriad number of sources and ideas into a coherent world and story.

The Wizards and the Warriors

Few could accuse New Zealand novelist Hugh Cook of lacking vision. In 1986 he published The Wizards and the Warriors, the first novel in a series he called Chronicles of an Age of Darkness. Cook's plan was for this series to run to twenty volumes, to be followed by two series of equal length, Chronicles of an Age of Wrath and Chronicles of an Age of Heroes. The sixty-book plan was overly ambitious despite Cook's high speed of output, but ultimately he only finished the first half of the first series (ten novels in six years) before it was halted due to lack of sales.

Unusually, the series was not one massive epic story. Instead, it was more episodic with some novels taking place simultaneously alongside others, with events varying depending on who was witnessing or instigating them. The books used unreliable narrators and a prose style that could vary significantly from volume to volume. The books also eschewed a lot of epic fantasy tropes, with the books not following a set chronology and not having a central hero or villain. The books featured whimsical humour and influences from sword and sorcery as well as planetary romance. Some books were reminiscent of the later New Weird movement (China Mieville was a big fan). Some books were more like roleplaying games, with Paizo Publishing reprinting one of the volumes, The Walrus and the Warwolf, as part of its Planet Stories line.

After the series concluded (prematurely) Cook published several more books before sadly passing away in 2008 from cancer. His massive mega-series was never finished, but its breadth, vision and general batshit insanity remain intriguing (and echoes, intended or not, of the tonal variations, dark humour and continent-skipping structure can be found in Steven Erikson's Malazan novels).

Wolf in Shadow

We have already looked at Legend, David Gemmell's first novel, published in 1984. Gemmell subsequently produced several more books in the same setting and he was soon being pigenoholed as a heroic fantasy author.

In 1987 he shifted that perception with Wolf in Shadow (sometimes published under the title The Jerusalem Man). This was a post-apocalyptic novel, set in a world devastated by an unspecific event known as "The Fall". An episode later in the novel has the titular Jon Shannow, a gun-wielding antihero, discovering the wreck of the Titanic, indicating the action is set on the now-bone-dry floor of the Atlantic Ocean. The novel and its two sequels featured post-apocalyptic tropes combined with fantasy, particularly with the introduction of the Sipstrassi or Stones of Power, items with magical capabilities.

The core series featuring Jon Shannow is among Gemmell's most popular works, but it was later expanded with a duology set in ancient Greece and featuring Alexander the Great. The duology initially appears to be historical fiction, but the introduction of the Sipstrassi linked it to the Jon Shannow books and hinted at a grander, weirder scheme in place. Gemmell later returned to his Drenai setting and several new fantasy worlds before concluding his career with pure historical fiction, so it is unclear how this series would have continued.

Shadowrun

Released in 1989, the roleplaying game Shadowrun has a central premise which it executes very well: epic fantasy meets cyberpunk.

The roleplaying game and its attendant video games and novels postulate an existential catastrophe which takes place in 2012. The world is transformed, with some of the human population transformed into fantasy races like elves, dwarves, trolls and orks. Magic also suddenly comes into existence, other planes of existence are revealed to exist, allowing demonic entities and dragons to enter our world. Despite widespread death and destruction resulting from the catastrophe, humanity manages to survive and prosper, with technological advancement proceeding and the new races integrated into human culture.

The roleplaying game is set fifty years further down the line, with massive mega-corporations controlling the world and people surviving best they can. The game focuses on "shadowrunners", freelance agents who act as corporate spies, soldiers of fortune and mercenaries, working for themselves or corporations or underground resistance groups.

In Shadowrun's case, the mashing together of epic fantasy races, tropes and magic with science fiction and cyberpunk is wildly successful, bringing both a sense of fun from simply colliding the two worlds together and also allowing the creators to investigate themes of technology versus spirituality in unusual ways. After a lengthy period of relative quite, Shadowrun recently exploded back into popularity with the release of three new video games, Shadowrun Returns, Dragonfall and Hong Kong. Its future seems bright.

The mashing up of fantasy with SF and other genres has generated interesting results, although success and sales have often been patchy when this has been attempted. The once exception is historical fiction, which epic fantasy has riffed on with frequent and ongoing success.

Amtrak Wars movie adaptation moving forwards

Obviously I have my finger on the pulse of the moment or something (it wasn't a total coincidence, no sirree), as my recent reviews of the Amtrak Wars series have coincided with development of a series of movies based on the books. Renamed The Talisman Prophecy, the proposed film sequence has been in development for a couple of years and things had gone quiet. Surprisingly, it turns out there have been a fair few developments behind the scenes and the Australian production company working on the project have secured funding for the continued development of the films. In addition, some interesting concept art has surfaced.


More info and artwork can be found here on the project's homepage and on the newly-established Facebook page dedicated to the project.

Whether this amounts to anything or not remains to be seen, but it's certainly interesting news.

Earth-Thunder by Patrick Tilley

The epic Battle of the Trading Post and the bloody Battle of Twin Forks have changed the political balance of power in post-apocalypse North America. The Plainfolk are now determined to work together to prepare for the coming of their messiah, the Talisman, whilst the Iron Masters are wracked by internal disputes. Aware that the Iron Masters will not simply accept the loss of so many of their troops in recent battles, Cadillac and Roz decide to travel into Ne-Issan to secure peace and encourage the beginnings of a new civil conflict within the country. Meanwhile, Steve's attempts to keep a foot in both the Plainfolk and Federation camps continue as his star rises and he is made a member of the ruling First Family. But the higher he climbs, the greater the distance to fall...


When the captive Clearwater goes into labour at the precise moment Mount Saint Helens explodes with tremendous force, the First Family realises the Talisman Prophecy's fulfilment is at hand and the future of their war to take control of the surface world is about to be decided.

Earth-Thunder is the sixth and concluding volume of The Amtrak Wars. Patrick Tilley envisaged a twelve-volume epic divided into two sub-series spanning decades of history. However, after completing the sixth book he felt burnt-out and wanted to take a break. Life seems to have gotten in the way, and he has not released a new book since, despite occasional rumblings that a seventh book, called Ghost Rider, would appear. Whilst regrettable, it does mean that The Amtrak Wars has, for an SF/fantasy series, a surprisingly dark and grim ending (although not completely shorn of hope) which avoids cliche.

There's a nice reversal of roles in this book as Roz joins Cadillac on the surface and Steve has to return to the Federation, where he scales the ladder of promotion and success and has to navigate between different factions within the First Family with different visions of how the Federation is to move forwards. Whilst an interesting diversion it's not entirely successful. Part of the fun of the series is seeing Steve on the front line surviving by his wits. Having him back at base trying to learn Japanese and getting dubious offers from conflicting factions in the government is less compelling. This is made up for by Roz and Cadillac's journey into Ne-Issan, playing off the factions against one another in a morally dubious story of murder, skulduggery and intrigue. It's good stuff.

Where the novel succeeds is the final part of the book. With the series coming to an end Tilley - hardly a squeamish author at the best of times - has no problem with gunning down major characters and a real sense of the story spinning out of control comes to the fore, culminating in a surprising climax. There is then an epilogue (unless you have the 1998 edition, which removed it) which clarifies some of the events which took place in the two years following the end of the series which does give a much better sense of conclusion and finality to the story. Perhaps not ideal, but certainly better than getting no answers at all.

Earth-Thunder (***½) brings The Amtrak Wars to a reasonable, if surprisingly bleak, conclusion. Second-hand copies of the book are available via Amazon.co.uk but not on Amazon.com (not for less than $40 anyway).

Death-Bringer by Patrick Tilley

Steve Brickman and his reluctant ally Cadillac face a major problem. Clearwater has been taken captive aboard the Federation wagon-train Red River, and they need to find a way to break her and Steve's sister Roz out with only the warriors from Clan M'Call to help. But as they struggle with that issue, Mr. Snow faces the biggest challenge of his life. Enraged with the destruction of the Heron Pool and the loss of their assault force on Lake Michigan, the Yama-Shita have sent five warships to the trading post at Lake Superior for the annual exchange of goods and servants. Allied to the treacherous D'Troit Mutes, their orders are to destroy the M'Calls and their She-Kargo allies once and for all. The stage is set for the biggest military confrontation since the War of a Thousand Suns.


In my review of the previous book in the series, I noted that every epic fantasy series seems to have a 'scene-setting' book where the characters are just getting to where they need to be for the next slice of the action. It is also true that every series has a balls-to-the-wall, balloon-going-up volume where all the ant-hills are kicked over and all hell breaks loose (and many metaphors are mixed). Death-Bringer is that book. As with the previous volumes in the series, there is a lot of scheming, political intrigue, and truly impressive layers of deception as Steve continues his attempts to keep a foot in both the Tracker and Mute camps, involving some fancy foot-work. In fact, Steve and his intellectual nemesis, Karlstrom, may be the most impressive schemers I've encountered in a fantasy book with the possible exception of Littlefinger, Walder Frey and Tyrion Lannister.

Death-Bringer eases off the scheming to finally bring some widespread carnage to the table with two huge battle sequences. The Mute clans finally choose their sides and engage in a massive conflict on the south-western shores of Lake Superior, egged on by the Iron Masters, in this series' equivalent to the Battle of the Blackwater or the Pelennor Fields. Shortly afterwards, the M'Calls get to dish out some payback by launching a full-blown assault on Red River. Tilley proves to be an excellent writer of action sequences, fulfilling the promise shown in earlier novels, and there is some catharsis in all the plotting of the previous three volumes finally reaching a head. The ending is murky and definitely not neat - there's one more volume to go - but the sense of a climax to numerous complex and sometimes confusing plot threads is most welcome.

There are some weaknesses. As with the other books in the series, it's not high art and the layers of deception are so complex it's easy to get confused over who knows what and what people are supposed to know versus what the actual truth of the situation is, but then a lot of the characters express the same concerns. There's also a slight sense of contrivance at the end where the author needed to get one character into another location and the way he handled it was a bit artificial. Oh yeah, and the title is one of the corniest I've ever come across.

Death-Bringer (****) is one of the strongest books in the series, with a fine sense of pacing and action, with some truly excellent plot twists and revelations. As with the other books in the series, it is currently not in print, but second-hand editions should be available in the UK and USA.

Blood River by Patrick Tilley

In Ne-Issan, the balance of power has shifted dangerously after the exposure of the Yama-Shita's treachery and the death of its ruling lord. The family has been brutally oppressed at the order of the Shogun, and the family burns for vengeance, most notably against those Mutes and Trackers responsible for destroying their project at the Heron Pool.


Meanwhile, these individuals - Steve, Cadillac, Clearwater, Jodi Kazan and Dave Kelso - are now fleeing for their lives out of Ne-Issan on Federation Skyriders, but a lack of fuel forces them down near the southern shores of Lake Michigan, still many hundreds of miles from the M'Call home turf in Wyoming. Their attempts to escape are challenged by a wily Mute wordsmith, an ambitious Ne-Issan foreign agent and the Federation, who have sent the Lady from Louisiana to 'aid' Steve's attempts to escape. Steve, still playing both sides against the middle, is still trying to keep a foot in both camps but Cadillac is about to make maintaining that pretence very difficult indeed...

Blood River is the most transitional of the Amtrak Wars books. It seems that every multi-book series needs a volume which doesn't have much of an internal plot but instead is taken up getting the characters to where they are needed for the next big story movement, and Blood River does that. It also does it quite well, with a real sense of urgency as our heroes are hounded by both the Federation and the Iron Masters and Brickman's Machiavellian plotting reaches new heights, but is challenged by Cadillac and Clearwater calling him on his bullshit and trying to get him to finally choose a side, culminating in the most shocking moment in the series to date. As I've said in previous reviews of the series, Clearwater has been a bit bland and not very well-drawn compared to the other principle characters in the series, but here she really steps up and shows in more detail a cunning and ruthless streak only previously hinted at.

Elsewhere, there are weaknesses. Steve and co. spend a lot of time dealing with simple problems of travel and survival which, whilst well-written, do take time away from the core storylines of the series. There are also a few dubious deus ex machina moments when our heroes get out of tight spots with hitherto-unrevealed Mute magic powers or other abilities, although this is not unprecedented in the series (or any fantasy series involving magic, really).

Blood River (***) is a solid and enjoyable continuation of the series with some weaknesses balanced out by Tilley's trademark relentless pace. The book is no longer in print but second-hand copies are available in the UK and USA.

Iron Master by Patrick Tilley

Steve Brickman, former Skyhawk pilot turned AMEXICO secret agent, is out of his depth. His mission to capture Mr. Snow, Cadillac and Clearwater, the three M'Call Mutes whose powers pose a direct threat to the Amtrak Federation's expansion, has been complicated by the fact that Cadillac and Clearwater have been sent as envoys to Ne-Issan, the homeland of the mysterious Iron Masters. With little choice, Brickman is forced to follow and soon learns that Cadillac is posing as a Tracker wingman, using the knowledge and information he stole from Brickman's own mind to construct an air force for the Iron Masters.


Meanwhile, in Ne-Issan the Shogun is concerned over the ambitions of the powerful Yama-Shita family, who already control the lucrative Great Lakes trading routes into the Mute heartlands and now seem to be organising themselves for an attempt to displace him from power by sponsoring the air force project. His top agent, Herald of the Inner Court Toshiro Hase-Gawa, is dispatched to sabotage the aircraft production facility by any means necessary, and soon finds an unlikely ally in the shape of Steve Brickman...

If Cloud Warrior was an exploration of the culture of the Mutes and First Family looked more closely at the inner workings and government of the Federation, Iron Master turns its attention to the society of Ne-Issan. For reasons that Tilley doesn't entirely explain, vast numbers of East Asian refugees from the War of a Thousand Suns somehow reached the former Eastern Seaboard of the United States and set up a feudal society based heavily on Shogunate-era Japan, running from Nova Scotia to South Carolina. The society they have built is undeniably well-drawn and fascinating, but it seems a bit odd that refugees from Asia would end up on the Atlantic coast of America and not, say, in the Washington-Oregon-California area.

Anyway, ignoring that geographic oddity, Iron Master is the best of the first three books in the series. Tilley's grasp of political intrigue and his appetite for plans-within-plans and multiple layers of deception reaches its full flower here, as Brickman pursues his agenda, Hase-Gawa pursues his, the Shogun's wily chancellor pursues yet another and AMEXICO do their bit to add to the confusion as well. It's a complex and at times confusing story, but Tilley's clear prose, relentless pace and gift for action sequences keeps events ticking along nicely. Characterisation is strong, with Brickman's evolution to a full-blown double agent continuing in an intriguing manner and Hase-Gawa making for an effective supporting character (his true motivations are held back for the last few pages of the book and make for a nice twist). Unfortunately, Clearwater, despite being one of the central figures in the series, remains a bit bland and distant as a character.

Iron Master (****) is a strong and compulsive read and is a solid continuation of the series. Again, it is no longer in print but second-hand copies are available in the UK and USA.

First Family by Patrick Tilley

Having escaped from the clutches of the M'Call Mutes, Steve Brickman triumphantly returns to the Federation fully expecting to be congratulated on his exploits and his gathering of vital intelligence on the enemy. Instead he is arrested as a deserter and narrowly escapes death before being sent to menial, ball-busting work in the A-levels. According to the doctrines of the First Family, the rulers of the Amtrak Federation, Mutes do not take prisoners, and that 'truth' cannot be contradicted. But now Brickman knows something of the truth the Family has other plans for him, and for his Mute friends...


Picking up immediately after the events of Cloud Warrior, the second volume in The Amtrak Wars is a slightly different beast. There's still a fair amount of action and the pace remains furious and at times page-turningly addictive, but after the straightforward plot of the first book things get murkier here. Conspiracies are revealed, deeper mysteries are alluded to and labyrinth plots are set in motion. Political intrigue also rears its head as we meet some key figures within the Family, such as the President-General and Karlstrom, the ruthless head of the clandestine intelligence agency AMEXICO. Tilley's grip of worldbuilding also remains strong, as we begin to learn more about the shadowy Iron Masters who live on the Eastern Seaboard and trade weapons with the Mutes through great steamships ploughing the Great Lakes.

As I mentioned in the first book, true-blue all-American hero Steve Brickman started off as a bit of a lemon, but in this second book he starts evolving into a more interesting protagonist. A key theme of the series is Brickman's torn loyalties between the Federation and his family, and the Mutes, his would-be mentor Mr. Snow and Steve's would-be lover, Clearwater. This results in Steve having to spin out some pretty spectacular lies, cover-stories and half-truths to keep either side from plugging him, and seeing Steve struggle through the mental gymnastics required to keep one step ahead of everyone else is fascinating (and it's all rather mild here, compared to the labyrinth of plots and counter-plots that have developed by the final volume).

The writing in this volume is also notably better, with Tilley restraining his more excited passages to convey the action in a slightly more thoughtful style. However, the refreshingly informal prose remains intact, as do the slightly confusing multiple POV switches in one chapter.

First Family (***½) steps up the pace, deepens the world and the story and the cliffhanger ending effectively hooks the reader into the third book in the series, Iron Master. Again, the book is out of print at the moment but copies seem to be available in the UK and USA.

Cloud Warrior by Patrick Tilley

AD 2989. Nine hundred and seventy-four years ago, the Old Time ended in the War of a Thousand Suns. The cities of the United States were seared from the face of the Earth in a nuclear holocaust unleashed by the evil 'Mutes', malformed immigrants whose only desire was to destroy all that was beautiful and good about this great country. Or at least, that's what the historical databanks of the super-computer COLUMBUS say, anyway.


The Amtrak Federation: a network of underground cities and overland way-stations that grew out of a few bunkers where the top-ranking politicians and generals of the United States rode out a thermonuclear war. Forced to abandon the surface world due to radiation, the descendants of the survivors dug out a vast subterranean, high-tech civilisation where everyone knows their place and does their bit to help society survive, whilst the wise and just First Family rules over everything. Once radiation levels had dropped to a relatively safe level, the Federation emerged to retake the surface world. Unfortunately, they found that the Mutes had prospered and multiplied to truly frightening numbers in the intervening centuries. The Federation's response is to build enormous 600-foot-long wagon-trains and send them into Mute territory to begin the process of conquest and purification. With the Southern Mutes cowed, the Federation dispatches one of its most decorated trains, the Lady from Louisiana, and its air wing deep into the heart of the territory of the northern Mutes, or the Plainfolk as they call themselves. But the Plainfolk are a hardier breed with unusual weapons at their command, and in the epic Battle of the Now and Then River the clan M'Call drives off the Lady and takes one of its pilots captive.

For Steve Brickman, captivity amongst the Mutes is a terrifying prospect, but as he plots his escape he learns from his captors a radically different version of history and begins to question the very foundations of the society he was born into.

The Amtrak Wars is Welsh author Patrick Tilley's grand SF adventure series, originally published in six volumes throughout the 1980s. It is a cross-genre story, incorporating elements of post-apocalyptic SF fiction with the Western and epic fantasy (with North America standing in for a Middle-earth clone as the landscape) and, in later books, Shogun-style historical fiction as well. There is also a strong, often darkly comical subversive and satirical streak as well, with the Amtrak Federation itself coming over as a fascist state which employs some of the rhetoric and traditions of the 20th Century United States. Tilley himself spent a lot of time in the USA in the 1970s and 1980s and appears to be something of an Americanphile (not just in the Wars but also in his excellent 1976 disaster novel Fade-Out), but his use here of many of the traditions and 'feel' of the US government and military in the hands of an unelected dictatorship is effectively disturbing. However, I gather that American readers got the impression that Tilley was taking the mickey instead, perhaps accounting for its low sales in the USA compared to its much greater success in the UK, Canada and Australia.

In the first book, it is fair to say that Tilley is still getting a feel for the story. His previous novels had been an SF-tinged disaster scenario called Fade-Out and a rather bizarre story about Jesus turning up in modern New York (Mission), so Cloud Warrior represented a rather unusual new direction. The tone of the writing here is less formal than in his earlier novels, and it has to be said that the prose jumps around in its remoteness from the reader (at one point directly addressing the reader in a rather jarring fourth-wall-breaking moment). Some scenes take place in the limited third person perspective that is now traditional in epic fantasy, but most adopt an omnipresent viewpoint which feels curiously old-fashioned (and this is a book that's 26 years old) but not ineffective.

It's a tribute to Tilley's vivid and well-conceived (if somewhat barmy) story, characters and setting that the book overcomes these problems and roars along like a greyhound on crack. The traditional modern fantasy approach of the author spending two hundred pages just clearing their throat has no truck here as we are whizzed through the Amtrak Federation's air force training programme, introduced a dozen protagonists in both the Mute and Tracker camps and machine-gunned with inventive concepts and ideas (although luckily most are revisited later under somewhat more relaxed circumstances) in less than a hundred pages. The book hangs on its characters and one of The Amtrak Wars' trademark concepts is that half of those characters are tools whom you want to spend a fair amount of time beating the hell out of, most notably Steve 'All-American Hero' Brickman, whose arrogance and pig-headedness makes him a hero that's hard to like. However, he is also only 17 and the result of a disturbing indoctrinated upbringing, and as the book progresses and you see the scales falling from his eyes (a bit), the reader warms to him a bit more. Amongst the other characters, Steve's Mute antithesis Cadillac is well-drawn but is also a bit of a plank (the contrast between these two characters' developmental arcs over the course of the series is extremely well-handled), with the most fascinating character in the book being Mr. Snow, the Mutes' chief wordsmith and summoner who fulfils the traditional mentor role, although his approach of thinking his would-be students are total morons is refreshing (Mr. Snow is the missing link between Gandalf and Abercrombie's Bayaz). Other characters such as the inevitable romantic interest Clearwater are a bit one-note in this first volume, whilst later, more important characters like Jodi Kazan and Steve's sister Roz barely get more than a few lines. There is also an intriguing mention of a group called the 'iron masters' and a typical cliffhanger ending, setting up the inevitable sequel, First Family.

In Cloud Warrior (***½) Tilley sets up an interesting and somewhat original (in combination, if not in original conception) world and story with well-drawn and often ambiguous characters and some fresh takes on old concepts (Tilley's handling of the tired prophecy motif is particularly nicely done). The writing is a bit all over the place, though never less than readable, but settles down in the later, stronger volumes. The novel is not currently in print but second-hand copies appear to be readily available in the UK and USA.

The Amtrak Wars to resume?

Now here's a blast from the past. When I was a teenager I loved The Amtrak Wars series by Patrick Tilley. Six books long, this series was a seriously enjoyable mix of a Western, a high-tech SF post-apocalyptic scenario and Shogun. Set in the 30th Century, nine centuries after the world was devastated in a nuclear exchange, it saw the North American continent become the battleground for three very different factions: the primitive, Native American-like Plainfolk, the high-tech underground Amtrak Federation (based in and under Texas) and the nation of Ne-Issan (a Shogunate-era Japanese-derived culture dominating the Eastern Seaboard). Whilst not exactly great literature, it was a tremendously fun series with interesting worldbuilding, intricate political maneuvering and an action-driven pace. Its setting was vivid and compared to some other works of SF or epic fantasy (the series is heavily derived from both) it had some originality going for it. It was also quite brutal and ruthless, killing off major characters at a rate that would even put GRRM to shame.

Unfortunately, after the publication of the sixth volume in 1990, the author apparently abandoned the series. He published one more novel, a middling SF comedy called Star Waltz, in 1995 and nothing since then. Tilley later revealed that the series was supposed to be a twelve-book series divided into two natural stages: the setting-up of the Talisman Prophecy and its later fulfilment. Apparently he had started writing Book 7, Ghost Rider, and had been hoping to publish it before the end of the century but he lost faith in the project after being turned off writing violent stories by real-life events (specifically the Balkan wars).

Last year, The Amtrak Wars was optioned by an Australian development company to be turned into a series of feature films, although at Tilley's request the series was renamed The Talisman Prophecy. It's unclear if, as with some reprints of the original series, the Amtrak Federation will be renamed. The scriptwriter set up a Facebook group to reveal progress on the project. Apparently emboldened by this development, Tilley claims to have restarted work on the latter books, but has shortened them to a trilogy. Since he just turned 80 years old, he decided to hedge his bets and finish the series as succintly as possible.

Whilst these developments are encouraging, they may come to nothing in the end, but if this interesting and 'different' SF/fantasy crossbreed series can be brought to a more definitive conclusion it would certainly be worth taking a look. I remember reccing this series to friends with the tag-line, "Lord of the Rings with flamethrowers and samurai," and even my more cynical, older self has to admit that's still pretty cool.

The original series seems to be out of print, but I've rarely found a second-hand bookshop that didn't have at least a few of the volumes in stock (it was a huge seller back in the 1980s) and Amazon seems to have second-hand copies readily available. Intrigued by this news, I'll be re-reading the series in the near future and hoping it lives up to my fond memories of it.

The Amtrak Wars by Patrick Tilley
1: Cloud Warrior (1983)
2: First Family (1985)
3: Iron Master (1987)
4: Blood River (1988)
5: Death-Bringer (1989)
6: Earth-Thunder (1990)

Dark Visions: An Illustrated Guide to the Amtrak Wars (1988)