Mortal Engines

Mortal Engines, Philip Reeve, 296 pages

London is hunting again, making its way across what was once Europe on a headlong dash to who-knows-where, hardly pausing to snap up smaller towns along the way, and 15-year-old Tom Natsworthy, Assistant Historian, Third Class, is delighted. Is it not natural that town should eat town, and Municipal Darwinism spread across the globe? But when he interrupts an assassination attempt on Head Historian Thaddeus Valentine and is cast out of London along with the would-be murderer, the horribly scarred Hester Shaw, he must question everything he thought he believed in.

The trailer for the upcoming movie adaptation came out a fewweeks ago, and I knew I had to re-read one of my favorite YA novels of all time. It’s a dark, but hopeful, satire of consumerism, patriotism, and warfare, set thousands of years after the old, mad American Empire bombed itself and much of the rest of the world into oblivion – the Sixty Minute War. The worldbuilding is perhaps my favorite part of the book, and it’s usually how I describe Mortal Engines when recommending it to friends: massive Traction Cities rumbling across the land, leaving churned mud in their wake; patched-together airships with crews of sky pirates trading relics of long-dead civilizations, such as idols of Mickey and Pluto, the animal-headed gods of old America; the Shield-Wall of Batmunkh Gompa sheltering the Anti-Traction League, or “Mossies” (as in, a rolling stone gathers no moss); the terrible spectre of Grike, the Resurrected Man, with his metallic screech of a voice, the last remnant of the Lazarus Brigade. Mortal Engines is a masterpiece. I highly recommend it, and I hope that the movie does it justice.

NB: Many reviews call Mortal Engines steampunk. It's not steampunk – there's no steam engines. Just like Mad Max, it's more appropriately called dieselpunk.