Railhead - Alien Stations

Continuing a short series about the Railhead trilogy, salvaged from the wreck of my downed website...

When I was working on Railhead it felt so stuffed with stuff that there didn't really seem to be room for aliens as well. I already had lots of non-human characters and creatures to introduce - sentient trains, androids, AIs, and genetically engineered dinosaurs. But obviously you can't have a sprawling space opera universe without aliens, so it was always my intention that the trains of the Great Network would eventually make contact with the trains of other civilisations. That happened in the second volume, Black Light Express, and by the time Station Zero begins, aliens from all these different species are starting to find their way to human worlds, and the society established in the first book is poised on the brink of huge changes.

Initially, I was quite keen to make my aliens properly alien. But gosh, it's difficult! It's very hard to invent a life-form that's truly unearthly, and if you do, it's even harder to describe it without invoking a comparison to some terrestrial critter. I've at least tried to avoid humanoid aliens (except for the reptilian Kraitt - part of the point of them is that they're the most human-like inhabitants of the alien Web of Worlds). So the beings Zen and Nova meet on their travels resemble civilised cephalopods, pair-bonding antelope, blue-furred worms, disconcertingly transparent giant newts, insect colonies which stomp around in hydraulic crab-suits, and the giant, whale-like Night Swimmers, warbling away in the depths of their planetary ocean.

This flying fish beastie and its accompanying lamprey, from a painting by the extraordinary artists and illustrators Olga Dugina and Alexander Dugin, doesn't appear in the Railhead books, but it helped me start to visualise the strange living locomotives which ply the alien railways.

With the exception of the Kraitt, the Railhead aliens are mostly peaceful sorts, traders rather than raiders, and they mostly seem to have a slightly lower level of technology than the humans - I didn't want the Railhead trilogy to turn into an alien invasion story: the alien worlds are in more danger from us than we are from them.

My favourites, I think, are the Hath; peaceful, tent-like creatures who live in vast colonies on the shores of lakes and shallow seas. They were partly inspired by the crowds of white bog-cotton flowers which spring up in summer on the wet bits of Dartmoor (which is most bits of Dartmoor). But when I moved them mentally from a bog to a beach they reminded me of the strandbeests, those strange, wind-powered, kinetic structures created by the artist Theo Jansen. Tiptoeing along the sand on their batteries of spindly legs, they look like - well, like nothing on Earth.


The Hath are certainly the most alien of my aliens, and I was quite with the way they they use the wind as an energy source, which I don't think any Earthly creatures do (although of course there are plenty who use it to get around). The trouble is, that perhaps because they are so alien, I couldn't find much for them to do. I had a Hath character tag along with my protagonists in one version, but he could never quite justify his presence in the story. And I had elaborate accounts of how the Hath had first encountered the trains of other species crossing their planet, and hopped aboard to take their own place on the Web of Worlds - but, like so much exposition, there wasn't space for it in the finished book.

Here's a bit about the Hath that landed on the cutting room floor.

There was a world somewhere with shallow seas and wide beaches and a warm wind blowing. That was where the Hath had begun. Their ancestors had lined the shores like living flags, spreading sails of skin to soak up sunlight and the energy of the wind, while anenome mouths on their legs filtered food from the water which swirled around their feet...

Hath was the name that they gave to their world, and they gave the same name to themselves, because they were one with the world and the wind. The wind blew and the sea rolled, and the Hath gathered in vast colonies to exchange their songs and stories. They built windbreak walls where their seedlings could be protected from the fiercest of the winter gales. The stories of the Hath were written in wet sand, and then on paper which they made from seaweed. They decorated their windbreaks with shells and coloured stones, traded from far along the beach. Hath civilisation was a chain a hundred metres wide and as long as the coastline of their world’s one continent.

A mock-up of a 1970s paperback edition of Black Light Express, by Ian McQue.