Mortal Engines - Philip Reeve

Introduction Having recently finished a substantial series of fantasy books ostensibly for older children written by one Philip (Pullman) I found myself starting on something very similar written by another Philip (Reeve). While His Dark Materials is a trilogy, this one is a quartet (which name is used in preference to "tetralogy" by Reeve). Having finished the first book in the series, Mortal Engines, I think I've made a pretty good choice, and I would happily recommend it to most 11 to 16 year olds, though perhaps only for quite advanced readers at the lower end of that range. The few ... more

Far in the future, the post-apocalyptic world is an almost unrecognisable place. The Ancients wiped themselves out in the Sixty Minute War, along with a lot of their Old Tech, and now cities have been rebuilt on wheels and caterpillar tracks, so they can travel around, devouring smaller towns or villages that they come across, salvaging and utilising their raw materials in order to grow, in a way of life known as Municipal Darwinism. The dangerous Anti-Tractionist League has rejected this doctrine, however, and hold out behind the mountains, and the shield wall of Batmunkh Gompa, and have for ... more

It’s a familiar scenario: Earth’s weapons got so advanced, so devastating in their power that when war broke out, so complete was the destruction that civilisation as we know it ended. The Earth is almost uninhabitable. Survivors pick up scraps of old technology and try to unlock its powers with their limited understanding, while living with steam-age technology – and finding the right relic from a destructive age might just give a man great power. Countless post-apocalyptic and steampunk stories have begun like this. But Philip Reeve immediately announces something rather different with his ... more

[Backround Info] Mortal Engines was written by Phillip Reeve, released in 2001, and finally published by Scholastic. It’s the first instalment in ‘The Hungry City Chronicles’ series. It’s won a Smarties Gold. award and was shortlisted for a Whitebread award. Mortal Engines is set after a nuclear war called the “Sixty Minute War” which caused massive damage to the Earth’s land resulting in humans to mobilise cities and devour eachother to survive. These mobile cities are known as traction cities, which drive across the ravaged land usually with treads. The novel is supposed to have gotten its ... more