Hundreds of years after civilisation has been destroyed by nuclear war, the Earth is divided between the Trackers of the Amtrak Federation? And now the Iron Masters? Steve Brickman, a Tracker special agent, has travelled to the land of the mysterious Iron Masters in a bid to rescue his Mute friends, Clearwater and Cadillac. Here he has had to navigate the treacherous feudal politics of Ni-Issan. With the help of his psychic kin-sister Roz, the Federation and Clearwater's summoner magic, the three have just escaped, killing the head of Yama-Shita in the process.
Under orders from the Amtrak Federation to betray his friends, Brickman must play a dangerous game in trying to appease both sides, for his loyalties are torn. Brickman's love for Clearwater and respect for Cadillac pull him away from the duty he owes his own home. Still fleeing and ruthlessly pursued by the Iron Masters seeking revenge, they must also avoid the 'aid' of the Federation agents who would use Cadillac and Clearwater for their own ends.
Blood River, first published in , is the fourth instalment of Patrick Tilley's internationally best selling science fiction epic, The Amtrak Wars Saga. And now the Iron Masters — a powerful people living in the traditions of the Samurai — have joined the struggle for dominance.
Steve Brickman, Tracker agent for the Amtrak Federation, and blood brother to the Mute clan M'Call, is struggling to maintain his double life. After evading the Iron Masters, Brickman's love — Mute summoner Clearwater — has finally been captured by the Federation. As she lays fighting for her life, Brickman must keep up the pretence of his disinterest in front of his Federation handlers. Pretending to orchestrate a plan to capture Cadillac and Mr Snow, who intimidate the Federation with their strong Mute earth-magic, Steve finds it increasingly difficult to outwit his Tracker comrades.
Only Roz — his powerfully psychic kin-sister — knows of Brickman's predicament. Together they must work tirelessly under a false loyalty to the Federation. They must prepare themselves, for a great battle is coming, one which will test the Plainfolk magic to its limit, and prove Brickman worthy of the name 'Death Bringer. Death Bringer, first published in , is the fifth instalment of Patrick Tilley's internationally best selling science fiction epic, The Amtrak Wars Saga. The Mutes' physical strength and tribal way of life is no match for the advanced weaponry that is used against them.
Mr Snow, supernaturally gifted wordsmith of the Mute clan M'Call, is the Plainfolk's last hope in withstanding the onslaught of the 'sand-burrower's' attacks. Seventeen-year-old rookie wingman Steve Brickman is just about to graduate from Flight Academy. Safe in the knowledge of his own brilliance, his future seems assured. The Lady is able to beat off the attack but is forced to withdraw with heavy casualties, including the loss of most of its air wing.
Among the missing, presumed dead, pilots is Steve Brickman. In reality, Brickman survives and is taken prisoner by the Mutes. Once amongst their ranks, he learns that the Mutes are more intelligent and more human than the Federation makes them out to be, and that all the Mute bloodlines and clans, despite divided by petty internal differences, are united in the belief of something called the Talisman Prophecy , which states that a saviour-figure known as the Talisman will one day unite all the Plainfolk and destroy the Federation, crushing their cities beneath the ground, as well as rescuing the Plainfolk's kin taken into slavery in Ne-Issan.
Brickman falls in love with a Mute woman named Clearwater , but eventually overcomes his newfound respect for his captors to escape back to the Federation, where his story is met with widespread disbelief, as it is known that the Mutes do not take prisoners. Brickman is eventually recruited into the ranks of a shadowy intelligence organisation known as AMEXICO , which is well aware of the existence of both Mute magic and the Talisman Prophecy.
Brickman is ordered to use his relations with the Mutes to win their trust and capture the three most powerful Plainfolk magic-wielders, namely Clearwater, her former lover Cadillac and their mentor, the powerful Mr Snow.
As the books proceed, Brickman becomes a double-agent, working for the Federation whilst attempting to work out how to get all three of his 'targets' and himself to safety whilst ensuring the safety of his family back in the Federation, whom AMEXICO are effectively holding hostage.
Along the way, Brickman has to undertake a hazardous sabotage mission in Ne-Issan and a perilous journey across the northern plains at the height of winter, all the while trying to understand his own place in the Talisman Prophecy. The Amtrak Wars Wiki Explore. Wiki Content. Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account? Amtrak Wars. Edit source History Talk 0. Joined Dec 21, Messages Joined May 17, Messages 10, Here is probably the lenghtiest discussion on the topic.
We only start up author's forums if there is enough discussion in to warrant or if the author asks us to host their official forum. Believe me, we have a pretty good handle on how to run our forums here. Werthead Registered User. Joined Jul 6, Messages 3, Just started re-reading this series and it was surprising how well it's stood up. I got into the books when I was 14 and I was dreading picking up the first volume and finding it had aged horribly, and it's actually still decent.
I'm impressed with how fast the story moves and how well Tilley transmits worldbuilding information to the audience whilst keeping the pages flying past. The writing is a little rough and the storyline is very straightforward in Book 1 compared to where the political intrigue goes later on, but it's still good stuff. In answer to the long-ago-asked question, apprently Tilley wanted to complete the series as a trilogy and was still working on it as recently as early , but no word since then.
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. 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 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.
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 s and s and appears to be something of an Americanphile not just in the Wars but also in his excellent 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.
0コメント