Mortal Engines: The Book

An amazing read. A fantastic, original story. A very enjoyable, humorous read.

Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines is all this and more. I read and enjoyed the rest of the series as well as the prequels, but I will just cover the first book. I might write a review for the other books at some point; I don't know.

I'll just give a bit of context for the book. It is, quite simply, about a post-apocalyptic world where the few people still surviving after catastrophic events and a terrible war known as the Sixty-Minute War, built moving cities to escape the movements of icebergs, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes. These moving cities were both huge metropolises, like Paris or London (the main city in the book) or small town or "suburbs". This practice became the worldwide norm, called Municipal Darwinism, in which the larger towns were forced to "eat" the smaller towns to get fuel and supplies for the citizens. The inhabitants of the unfortunate smaller town were usually integrated into the population of the town or city that ate them, but there were a few very inhumane cities who enslaved them or sold them as slaves, or even killed them if there were food shortages. Then, there were the typical rebel groups, joined together in one cause, called the "Anti-Traction League", who were against Municipal Darwinism and lived in unmoving towns like we have today, referred to as "static settlements".

That's the world they lived in, not even including the airships and the major air-city Airhaven, which was literally a haven for air-traders.

Anyway, this whole thing had been going on for around one thousand years, and prey—namely, other, smaller towns—was getting scarce for the larger cities. A boy of fifteen years, an orphan named Tom Natsworthy, works on the big moving city of London as an apprentice Historian. Now, it'll take a long time to properly explain what a Historian is in terms of this book, but basically it is one of several "Guilds" in London, each tasked with a different part of London's function. Historians are in charge of the London Museum, and they sometimes leave London to dig up artifacts from before the Traction Era, to have records of history from the previous millennium, and so on and so forth.

Well, Tom is suddenly thrust from his hum-drum, never-changing life when London eats a small mining town on which a young girl was hitching a ride. This girl had a vendetta against Tom's hero, the Head Historian Thaddeus Valentine. Tom stops her from murdering Valentine, and in turn falls off the city with the strangle girl. She is Hester Shaw, a a girl of Tom's age with a terrible scar and claims that Valentine killed her mother. Tom and Hester chase after London, Tom because he wants to go home, and Hester because she still wants to kill Valentine. Anyway, this starts a long stream of adventures, and they only manage to make it to London near the end of the book. However, I won't spoil it for you.

This is really one of the craziest, most unique sci-fi books I have read in the past few years. I really, really enjoyed it, although there are a few things that just fell short of perfection.

The first thing and by far the most prominent thing some people may not care about, but I will call attention to it anyway. One of the main protagonists, Hester Shaw, is a fifteen-year-old who lives for one thing—to kill Valentine. Once she accomplished that, she fully intended to kill herself and die alongside him. She's fifteen! But the thing that gets me in this instance is the fact that Hester is considered one of the "good guys". Sure, she wants to rid the world of an arguably immoral, "evil" man, and sure, she wants to stop the traction cities from eating the biggest non-moving city in the world, which is actually a wall protecting a whole bunch of static settlements. But in this day and age, she would also be considered a "bad guy". Alongside Valentine, probably. She would be locked up for several years for attempted murder and a host of other offenses. And the civilians would be glad she was off the streets! But it a fiction book, no, she's the good guy, she's the victim. It seems that in terms of fiction, the good guy is usually the rebel, the one who wants to get rid of the person who the author has engineered for you to hate. It doesn't matter what the real motives of the "bad guy" are, all that matters is why, specifically, the protagonist hates him/her. I concede, most of the time the bad guy is morally wrong and has committed atrocities that deserve consequences, although death may not be one of them.

I tend to ramble, don't I ? The point of all that was to just say "the person who wants to kill someone and has a valid reason for it is not necessarily the good guy". The book glamorizes the whole "revenge" thing and makes it seem like that's okay; that murder is fine if the person you wish to kill has killed your parents or even just someone close to you.

But that's basically all that fell short with these books. I know my ramblings make it seem like I really hated the book, but I will say again Mortal Engines is one of my absolute favorite books of all time, and the aforementioned shortcoming aside, it is a very good read for its intended audience. Namely, young adult.

I watched the Mortal Engines movie, released about two months ago, quite recently, and while I will not make any huge comments, I will say I liked the movie too, although the book was better. For more details, read the Mortal Engines: Book/Movie Comparison, which I will post in the near future.