Railhead - Interstellar Connections

A few years ago Lisa Owen-Jones asked me some interesting questions about my novel Railhead as part of her MA project. Here they are, along with my answers, salvaged from the wreck of my old website.

The Railhead Trilogy. Cover illustrations by Ian Mcque

L.O-J: Music and other art forms feature heavily within Railhead. Is this a conscious or an unconscious part of your writing process? You seem to love music. Your instruction ‘Listen…’ being the first word of your novel. Zen running down Harmony street, the Interstellar Express ‘thundering down the line from Golden Junction, and singing as it came’. Zen then gets on the Helden Hammerhead – a fusion of two David Bowie tracks that were inspired by Kraftwerk. 

I pick up a lot of references to electronic music in Railhead most notably to Kraftwerk and their albums ‘Autobahn’, ‘Trans-Europe Express’, ‘The Man Machine’ and their trademark motorik beat. Would this be a valid interpretation of your novel and if so why?

PR: I’m DELIGHTED that you think it’s like a symphony - an idea that had never crossed my mind! I’m not very musical, but I guess music did play a part in this one. It started out as an attempt to write a space story, but I could never make it work. Then, a few years ago, I dozed off listening to my i-pod one evening, when on came V2-Schneider, the instrumental track which opens side two of David Bowie’s Heroes. It starts off with what sounded to me like a train approaching, and I woke up realising my space travellers could go by train instead of starship - the rest of the book fell into place quite quickly after that.

It also brought with it a kind of Berlin vibe that wasn’t in the early drafts - that’s when terms like K-bahn and Motorik came in, and Helden, of course. (Not sure about Hammerhead - I don’t know any music with that name?). And the character who ended up as Raven, who had been a sort of Tom Waits-ish hobo in earlier versions, grew increasingly thin, white and ducal...

Photo by Andrew Kent

There was, of course, a great temptation to call the book Station to Station, but I don’t like naming books after the titles other works of art*, so I resisted that. But as a kind of joke I gave it the working title Low Heroes for a while, and that crept into the text as the name that Zen and other streetwise ne’er-do-wells use for themselves.

I wanted the sound of trains to run all through the book, and its obviously a very musical sound - there must be hundreds of pieces of music inspired by them - but that motorik beat was what I kept hearing. And that’s why it starts with ‘Listen', and the sound of the train approaching, and I guess that’s how the idea of the trains actually singing came about.

*Aha, you might ask, but isn't Night Flights named after a Scott Walker song? Well not quite - the song is called Nite Flights - and it was an ACCIDENT. Night Flights was a working title, but somebody at Scholastic pressed the wrong button and released the info to Amazon while I was still trying to think up a better one.  


L.O-J: The structure of your novel to me follows that of a symphony with its four parts. Your first and second subjects being Zen and Nova, your recurring motif being the train. Do you think the train is the key to uniting and driving the plot in the world you have created? It’s very symbolic.

PR: I never thought consciously about the structure of Railhead, but it is structured differently to my other books - un-named chapters divided into four named parts. I think there’s a basic rule to writing SF or fantasy which is, if your book is set on a moving city then the story damn well has to be about the city moving, and if it’s set on an interstellar railway then the trains need to be near the heart of the story. So I tried to make most of the big scenes revolve around trains and stations. And of course a train is extraordinarily resonant, both as a symbol in itself, and in terms of all the associations it has with books and films.

Not that I expect all my readers to make those associations, because most of them are only 12! I must stress that I don’t write these books as puzzles, I never put a reference in because I’m expecting anyone to follow it, and if they do, it may cast no light at all on the proceedings - I probably just used it because it was a good sounding name, or because it has some private meaning for me.)

L.O-J:  What do you think are the characteristics of your narrative voice?

PR: I don’t think I can comment on my narrative voice, that’s your job! I was aiming this time for something a bit more hard-boiled than my previous books, a bit more modern. I don’t know if I hit it. 

L.O-J: How would you like Railhead to be interpreted? Do you like it that there can be so many interpretations that pop from the text for the reader?

PR: I’ve never thought about anyone interpreting Railhead. It’s an adventure story, I hope it’s exciting, I hope it creates a world (or worlds) and certain moods. It’s not meant to be a metaphor for anything. It’s pulp fiction, but, because it’s the sort of pulp fiction I enjoyed when I was a teenager, it serves as a way of expressing something about myself - I don’t expect readers to care about  that, though; I want them to be turning the pages and wondering what happens next.

 A few final points, responding to other things Lisa mentioned in our e-mail conversations...

A lot of the references you pick up may be accidental. I often find out long after a book is published that I’ve a used a name someone else has already used.  ‘Nova’ was only chosen because it was the most bog-standard Sci-Fi name I could think of back when I was starting my space novel. (Zen likewise). I don’t think Dog Star Line is a reference to anything except the Dog Star. A Time of Gifts is a book by Patrick Leigh Fermour that I happened to catch sight of while I was trying to think of a name for a train - often the references have no more thought behind them than that; often I use such a name as a placeholder, thinking I’ll come up with something better, but then I just get used to it and changing it sounds wrong. Gentlemen Take Polaroids (for instance) was a song by Japan, back in my youth. Not a particular favourite, but it’s an odd title, so it stuck in my mind.

As for 'steampunk motifs’, I hope you won’t find any - Railhead came at a time when I was aiming to leave behind my Mortal Engines series, and I’ve come to dislike steampunk intensely! So Railhead was meant to be all about the future! (Or at least, the future as I might have imagined it from the perspective of the late 70s and early 80s when I was growing up.)

Many thanks to Lisa Owen-Jones for letting me post this interview here. Railhead, Black Light Express and Station Zero are all published in the UK by Oxford University Press, and in the US by Switch Press.