Review: The Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad: Book 1-4

The Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad: Book 1-4 by Felix R. Savage
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was looking for something fun and dumb, and I found it.

Notwithstanding an ending that veers too much into existential showdown, this is pretty good sci-fi that doesn’t take itself too seriously. As a stress reliever, it mostly did the trick, and I’m grateful for that.

The gimmick here hits you in the face: Fletcher “Fletch” Connelly is a working-class Irish kid who narrates his adventures in deep space. He hunts down A-tech, technology created by extinct races, and he tries to sell it back to humans.

This isn’t the deep future, just a late 21st Century. So, there are iPhones alongside space ships, and we even have an aging Mark Zuckerberg still standing as one of the titans of finance.

This could easily have been annoying if Savage had rubbed our noses either in the cleverness of his original conceit or in the ancillary sci-fi of his story. Instead, he makes it work by moving quickly and letting much of his real cleverness seep in through the cracks of the narrative.

The central sci-fi notion is clear in the title but glossed over for much of the early parts of the novel. (And that’s a good thing.) It seems one of the central achievements of past sentient races was the creation of what Fletch’s culture calls a “railroad” that spans the galaxy. Earthlings can attach our primitive spaceships to it and fly all around the galaxy, often to planets abandoned for millions of years.

Along the way, we get some fun and fast-moving stories. When Fletch comes across an animal species that drinks energy as moths go after light, it’s a close call. But [SPOILER:] he discovers they might be harvested as superior spaceship shields, creatures that absorb enemy fire should it come.

And Fletch’s in love, but it’s far from perfect. As I say, I’d be tired of a concept that I got my nose rubbed into, but it’s fun to see these space cowboys settle in to play Irish traditional music or to discover that the dread pirate of one adventure is actually a woman.

Make no mistake, this isn’t art. And, I confess, I’d probably had enough of it four-fifths of the way through. Still, this is the sort of fun I was looking for, and I’m grateful to Savage for providing it.


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