Mortal Engines

I like Philip Reeve's YA Steampunk novels Larklight and Starcross so much that I am quite happy to give anything else he's written a try.  I finally picked up Mortal Engines (2001), the first book in the quartet known as either the Hungry City Chronicles or simply the Mortal Engines Quartet, depending on which side of the Atlantic you're on.  Mortal Engines is once again billed as YA fiction (and even won a couple of awards as YA/children's literature), but it seems aimed at a more mature audience than the Larklight books.

The concept behind this series is grand: in a post-apocalyptic world the descendants of the survivors of the Sixty Minute (nuclear) War live in mobile Traction Cities that survive by city-eat-city Municipal Darwinism, crunching up smaller cities and towns for their raw materials and absorbing or enslaving their citizens.  Opposing them is the Anti-Traction League of non-mobile cities and villages, based primarily in Asia.  Merchant airships and scruffy independent pilots travel between the Traction Cities and the floating city of Airhaven.

Within the great city of London, Third Class Apprentice Historian Tom Natsworthy interrupts an assassination attempt on the great explorer-archeologist Thaddeus Valentine and finds himself unexpectedly left behind on the ground in the company of the prickly and mysterious Hester Shaw.  Fabulous shenanigans ensue as they try to catch up with London while being pursued by the Stalker Grike, a sort of mad cross between a Terminator and a Cyberman, who is weirdly obsessed with Hester.  Encounters with the dashing and dangerous lady adventurer Miss Fang and the comical Peavey, captain of the pirate suburb of Tunbridge Wheels and would-be gentleman, keep things lively.  But back in London, Valentine's daughter Katherine and Apprentice Engineer Bevis Pod discover that London and its Guild of Engineers are playing for much larger stakes than a few munched-up towns with the mysterious MEDUSA device.

Other than the unlikely youthful protagonists who end up at the center of events, Reeve makes no concessions to audience age.  The Stalker is scary.  The body count is high and some of the deaths genuinely painful.  There are plenty of bad puns and other jokes that will entertain adult readers.  And the world of the Traction Cities is terrific, with the simultaneously logical and hilarious concept of Municipal Darwinism and the flag-waving citizens watching on viewing screens as their cities pursue each other across the landscape while fluttering Historians classify Disney characters as "the animal-headed gods of lost America."

I highly recommend Mortal Engines and can't wait to read the rest of the quartet and its prequels.  This is exactly what I like in Steampunk.

See for yourself:

Comments

[Joshua Kronengold]

ok, odd. Don't seem to be able to respond to this; I get "we cannot accept this data".

[Joshua Kronengold]

Oops. I ended up responding with my comment about not being able to rather than the actual response.

Thank you for the review!

I very much liked Larklight and Starcross myself; will check out the Mortal Engines series when I get a chance.

[Serge]

...must.... NOT... buy another... book!