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The Mortal Engines Quartet by Philip Reeve. Audiobooks narrated by Barnaby Edwards.
Book review by Kerey McKenna.

“It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.”

It starts with one of the most intriguing opening lines in science fiction fantasy. The Predator Cities Series—also called The Mortal Engines Quartet after the first book—is a saga that always seems in motion with grand oversized set pieces.

The world of the Mortal Engines is a bizarre post-apocalypse filled with high swashbuckling adventure. Millennia after futuristic doomsday weapons unleashed massive cataclysms on the Earth in “The 60 Minute War,” the remnants of humanity occupy a mere fraction of their former territory. China and North America are still radioactive wastelands, oceans have risen and fallen, and the earth shakes with new seismic activity. One way communities of survivors adapted to this new hostile planet was to become mobile. Using salvaged technology, cities that survived the initial Armageddon were jury-rigged into giant vehicles. Not just vehicles that are the size of cities, but vehicles with salvaged monuments, buildings, and streets that give these cities continuity with their pre-war progenitors. For example the first and oldest mobile city, London, is topped with the iconic Saint Paul’s Cathedral. These mobile or “traction cities” trundle along land on giant caterpillar treads, skate across the thick arctic ice, or float on the oceans. However some towns turned predatory. Not content to gather and cultivate resources where they could be found, large cities like Paris, Arkangel, and London took to gobbling up smaller, weaker cities and towns, chasing them down to claim their resources, technology, and people. And the towns are quite literally gobbled up, through large mechanical “jaws” that scoop them up into a salvage yard. As the system mimics many biological phenomena, the thinkers of the great predatory cities dub this system “Municipal Darwinism” and claim that this “city eat city world” is the “great game of civilizations” distilled to its most logical and noble form.

However, to paraphrase another great tribal leader who once resided in ancient London, “The problem with gobbling up other peoples’ cities is that eventually you run out of other peoples’ cities.” With prey running short, the great predator City of London turns its hungry eyes to the Static Cities of Central Asia, a civilization of non-mobile settlements long thought safe from the predator cities due to geography and massive fortifications.

Tom Natsworthy, an awkward orphan boy of fifteen in London’s historians’ guild (who might as well have a neon sign above him blinking “Due for a Hero’s Journey”) unwittingly gets in the way of London’s machinations to reach more prey. After Tom “sees too much,” he is cast out of the mobile city of London and into the wilderness and must survive with the mysterious Hester Shaw, a girl about his age, with a disfigured face and a vendetta against one of London’s most prominent citizens. Together, Tom, Hester, and other youths in London will discover London’s plans to break into the untapped frontier of Asia and how London’s hunger could bring new disasters to the planet. In the first book, the heroes— and the reader—will meet scoundrels, scavengers, spies, and ancient cyborg super soldiers and will travel through the mobile city of London with its literally vertical society, dangerous wildernesses where pirate suburbs roam, and the amazing floating city of Air Haven.

The Mortal Engines Quartet (Mortal Engines, Predator’s Gold, Infernal Devices, and A Darkling Plain—a fifth book, Night Flights contains three short stories) are compelling adventures through a bizarre post-apocalypse, written for a young adult audience but certainly enjoyable for almost anyone. I say written for a young adult audience because of the ages of the principal protagonists in the first two books (and a good portion of the protagonists in the ensemble casts of the third and final installments), and the third person near-omniscient narration that can make the elaborate agendas and conflicts of the latter half of the quartet a lot easier to follow.

Mortal Engines is also another young adult sci-fi fantasy series that the Hollywood machine has gobbled up in hopes of making a multi-media franchise, with the first installment landing in cinemas this weekend.

I had read the first book in the series some time ago but with the movie coming out I wanted to catch up so I downloaded the audio adaptations, all narrated by Barnaby Edwards. Revisiting and catching up to the series, I was pleasantly surprised to see that while I could understand why Hollywood would bet on this as the next big YA blockbuster adaptation, the books themselves won’t lend themselves to being as predictable or bound to a formula as other YA franchises. There is no magical school that the characters must return to every year or singular villain behind every unfortunate event that befalls the heroes. Like one of the bonkers roving cities, the quartet stacks up machinations and history into a contraption that is always moving.

I haven’t seen the film adaptation, but the prospect that they have translated the spirit of the books and realized some of the grand characters and set pieces of this world makes me eager to catch the movie when it rolls into town.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.