Mortal Engines

"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."

- Opening sentence of Mortal Engines.

The Mortal Engines Quartet is an award-winning, critically acclaimed series of novels by the English author Philip Reeve, marketed (somewhat ridiculously) as The Hungry City Chronicles in America. Four books were written in chronological order: Mortal Engines (2001), Predator's Gold (2003), Infernal Devices (2005), and A Darkling Plain (2006). Prequel books set many centuries before the first book are currently being published. Fever Crumb (2009), A Web of Air (2010) and Scrivener's Moon (2011) are out so far, with more to come.

Mortal Engines takes place in a post-post-post-post-post-apocalyptic Used Future. Nations no longer exist, except in the lands of the Anti-Traction League. Traction Cities - entire cities mounted on caterpillar tracks for mobility - are fiercely independent city-states, using giant jaws to devour one another for resources in a horribly unsustainable city-eat-city environment known as Municipal Darwinism: large cities eat small cities, small cities eat towns, towns eat suburbs, and everyone eats non-moving or "static" settlements. Trade is mostly accomplished by airship, though sometimes cities of roughly equal size (unable to devour each other) will stop to trade. Much of the Applied Phlebotinum involves Old-Tech, ancient remains of lost civilisations ranging from statues of Mickey Mouse ("animal-headed gods of lost America") to Forgotten Superweapons.

Traction Cities' military and ideological counterpart, the Anti-Traction League, is a vast Eastern coalition of static settlements, who aim to remove the abomination of Traction Cities from the world.

Something worth mentioning, given the amount of back-and-forth editing in the page history, is that the most prominent Stalker is named Shrike in most editions and Grike in the North American ones. For Theme Naming reasons made clear in Fever Crumb - that is, all the Stalkers in his 'batch' were named after birds - 'Shrike' (a small predatory bird) makes considerably more sense than 'Grike' (a feature of limestone pavements).

Peter Jackson and WETA Digital have released a film adaptation of the first book, Mortal Engines, in 2018.


 * Action Girl: Hester Shaw. Later a Dark Action Girl.
 * Also, Anna Fang in the first book. With an equally unclear distinction between Action Girl and Dark Action Girl.
 * Adorkable: Hester sure thinks Tom is.
 * Adventurer Archaeologist: Played straight with Thaddeus Valentine, subverted by Nimrod Pennyroyal.
 * Aerial Canyon Chase: In Predator's Gold, Tom flies an airship at street level through a moving city to lose the pursuit. One of the airships chasing him does crash.
 * Aerith and Bob: Let's see. There's Freya... Shrike... Gargle... Smew... Fishcake... brothers Lego and Duplo... Oenone Zero... Nabisco Shkin...Tom...
 * After the End: The Apocalypse is here known as the Sixty Minute War, and was by all accounts an hour to remember: the North American continent gets glassed, Central America is completely wiped off the map, geological instability causes new chains of volcanoes to spring up all over the place, and humanity is thrown into centuries of anarchy and barbarism.
 * Airborne Aircraft Carrier: Airhaven is an entire floating town, complete with docking for more conventional airships, so it counts.
 * More conventionally, several of the larger military airships probably count.
 * All Hail the Great God Mickey: Literally -- the first book has Tom running past statues of "...Mickey and Pluto, the animal-headed gods of lost America."
 * Anti-Hero: Hester is a Type IV.
 * Anti-Villain:
 * Anyone Can Die: And HOW. See Killed Off for Real below.
 * Apocalypse How: Though humanity's back on its feet (15,000 or so years will do that for a civilization) the Sixty Minute War had such massive environmental effects and dumped so many nukes that south China was flooded, Antarctica de-frosted, seas moved around, pretty much everything north of New York City froze solid, Australia seems to have vanished (though Word of God says he just never got around to writing anything about it) and Panama ceased to exist. Not flooded,  severed and destroyed. Class 2, verging on a class 3a.
 * attempts a Class 3a in A Darkling Plain.
 * Apocalypse Not: Hits hard in the third and fourth books as more and more cities are depicted and the lands of the Anti-Tractionists are revealed to cover swaths of Asia and Africa, sort of turned back on itself as the previously unmentioned wider human civilisations are in the process of annihilating each other in a stalemate war.
 * Applied Phlebotinum: Old-Tech can be jewellery, can be useless but shiny rubbish, can be city-melting superweapons, and can make cities fly. Almost nobody can tell the difference.
 * Badass Longcoat: Anna Fang.
 * Also Tom, as can be seen on the second book cover.
 * And, to a lesser extent, the London Engineers and their white rubber lab coats.
 * Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Deliberately and avoided by Hester Shaw, who is horribly scarred and disfigured. As in missing an eye, most of her nose, and a good chunk of her mouth.
 * However, she's also something of a murderous psychopath in the later books.
 * Base on Wheels: Base? Pff. City on wheels. Really BIG cities on wheels.
 * On a much smaller scale, A Web Of Air features funicular houses, which only move up and down on rails.
 * Betty and Veronica: Although they don't meet until the very end of the book, Katherine Valentine and Hester Shaw can be seen as this. The second book plays the trope straight with Freya Rasmussen and Hester Shaw.
 * Beware the Nice Ones: Although Bevis Pod is genuinely nice, Katherine is still shocked to see.
 * BFG: Hester gets a huge armour-piercing jezail in A Darkling Plain, which also features lightning guns and anti-city artillery.
 * And let us not forget MEDUSA the  and ODIN the.
 * Bilingual Bonus: Lots of these in German, French and Chinese, in particular some of the city names.
 * Bittersweet Ending: Your Mileage May Vary on whether it's this or a Downer Ending.
 * Bi the Way:
 * Black Box
 * Brick Joke: At the end of the first book, Tom insists (not convinced himself) that someone must have survived . About halfway through the fourth,
 * Broken Bird: Hester, so much.
 * Book Dumb: Hester, especially compared to Tom.
 * Book Ends: The first line of the first book.
 * Broken Ace/Broken Pedestal: Thaddeus Valentine isn't as nice as he seems...
 * Chekhov's Gun: The seedy in Mortal Engines, which Tom finds at the very beginning of the book and later uses as a payment to be accepted aboard a town.
 * Early in the same book, Katherine mentions that her father's copilot during his expedition to America was a woman,.
 * The Tin Book of Anchorage in Infernal Devices.
 * In A Darkling Plain, Wolf Kobold pays Tom and Wren so they fly him to London. At the very end of the book, Wren remembers the money and uses it to buy her own airship.
 * Colony Drop: Slow Bombs are remote-controlled asteroids.
 * Cool Airship: The Jenny Haniver. It's built of junk, but hey, so's the Millennium Falcon. A connection noted by Tom's "It's made of junk!" comment upon first seeing the Jenny.
 * Crazy Prepared:
 * Crazy Survivalist: On an enormous scale.
 * Determinator. Any Stalker, but Shrike in the extreme. A lot of the human characters too, particularly the frail Oenone Zero, also have an unexpected, somewhat terrifying determination to them.
 * Distant Finale
 * Downer Ending, and then some.
 * Driven to Suicide:
 * Dropped An Airship On Him.
 * Also, Shrike. Though it's more
 * Early-Bird Cameo: After a fashion. An aviatrix named Cruwys Morchard is mentioned in passing early in the second book; she's a significant player in the fourth.
 * End of the World Special
 * Enormous Engine: How do you think a Traction City gets around?
 * The Fagin: Uncle.
 * Fantastic Racism: Between the Scriven and humans.
 * Feet of Clay: Both of Tom's heroes. Nimrod Pennyroyal is the slightly nicer., Small Name, Big Ego/Gilderoy Lockhart version. Thaddeus Valentine is the nasty, nasty kind.
 * However, Valentine is the more likeable character, almost a Tragic Villain, while Pennyroyal is as despicable as Gilderoy Lockhart characters tend to be.
 * Foregone Conclusion: The London Underground in Scrivener's Moon aren't going to stop the reconstruction of London as the first Traction City.
 * From what we know of air technology in Mortal Engines, Arlo isn't going to complete his aeroplane
 * Forgotten Superweapon: MEDUSA the and ODIN the Kill Sat.
 * For Science!: The Engineers in Fever Crumb. They're still some of the most ethical characters in the entire book. Despite, ironically, trying to avoid emotions and other "irrational" things.
 * Friendly Enemies: Naga and Kriegsmarshal Von Kobold. Naga sends his rival a gift of a bullet-proof vest enscribed with the words 'sorry we missed you' when he learns that the Kriegsmarshal survived an attack from a Green Storm sniper. The Kriegsmarshal, in return, considers Naga more likable than some of his allies in the Traktionstadtgesellshaft.
 * Future Imperfect: Plastic idols of Mickey and Pluto, "animal-headed gods of lost America."
 * America, incidently, was first discovered in 1924 by Christopher Columbo, the notable detective and explorer.
 * Reeve is just fond of this trope in general - "blog" is adopted as profanity in Fever Crumb.
 * And, of course, in the same book, the "Hari Potter" cult throw away gag.
 * Gadgeteer Genius: Dr. Popjoy for creating and Dr. Zero for.
 * Gambit Roulette: used a couple of times; it seems just about everything is helping  get the control codes to the superweapon.
 * Getting Crap Past the Radar: about triples in quantity in the third book. Particularly when  and is caught by some of its soldiers: "One of the men searched her for weapons, more thoroughly than Wren felt was really necessary (surely they must know that you couldn't hide anything very dangerous inside your bra?)."
 * Although never explicitly mentioned, its obvious that Tom and Hester had (or almost had, due to an interuption) sex right before  in the last book
 * Good Scars, Evil Scars: Played with. Hester has some truly hideous scarring on her face and is... complicated. Her extreme moral ambiguity really stems from her scarring and the event that caused it.
 * Grey and Gray Morality: Both well-played on both sides, and deconstructed in that some people act out of selfish reasons. Though nobody is quite a Complete Monster (though that's debatable with Hester in A Darkling Plain), surprisingly enough, there are a few Jerkass characters who are simply in it for themselves.
 * Growing Up Sucks: Hester, Tom, Wren, Theo, and every single last one of the Lost Boys. Arlo Thrusday to a lesser extent.
 * Half The Woman She Used To Be:
 * He Also Did: The author wrote another steampunk series, Larklight and its sequels. They feature British Stuffiness, an amiable giant crab, a close-knit family, an equally close-knit band of very pleasant Space Pirates, a giant blue lizard in a crinoline, a Ninja Maid, and an entire race of Nice Hats. Not an entire race of people who wear nice hats, an entire race of people who (most of the time) are nice hats. We suspect antidepressants.
 * Heroes Want Redheads: Tom has had crushes on Katherine Valentine and Freya Rasmussen, but the only one he has ever loved is Hester.
 * Heroic Sacrifice: in the first book. Also,  in the last one.
 * I Am Your Father: Thaddeus Valentine and.
 * I Did What I Had to Do: Magnus Crome, in particular (I wanted to make London strong!), but also Hester, Thaddeus Valentine, Oenone Zero, Shrike, Anna Fang, Wolfram von Kobold... Usually just makes things worse for everyone.
 * Idiot Ball: Theo Ngoni does some pointlessly stupid things in A Darkling Plain.
 * I Have No Mother:
 * Implacable Man: All Stalkers, but especially Shrike, who gets; hit by multiple times an emplacement-weapon grade Tesla cannon, buried for centuries, torn apart, shot (ineffectively), stabbed multiple times by many different people and other Stalkers (likewise, ), Battle Frisbee-d (makes sense in context) blown up, run over by a city (literally), dropped out of an airship into a frozen lake, and.
 * Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Hester in the first book. In the following ones, she's still this, but only with the people she cares for. With the others, she borderlines on Complete Monster. And it is awesome.
 * Karma Houdini: somehow played and averted with Pennyroyal: he never paid for but at the end of the last book,  . Whether you consider this is not enough to compensate for what he did or that he's not that much of a negative character is YMMV territory.
 * Killed Off for Real : Employed liberally; a great number of major and minor characters get the chop, usually quickly and horribly. In the first book alone, . Partly subverted as in the course of the second, third and fourth books, some of these characters turn out to have survived, but then at the end of the fourth book (before the Distant Finale).
 * Kill Sat: ODIN (Orbital Defense Initiative), used to obliterate cities and make volcanoes.
 * Lost Technology, dovetails neatly with the above Kill Sat and Black Box.
 * MacGuffin: The Tin Book is seemingly one of these for some time.
 * Made of Iron: Shrike, who survives being run through with a sword, falling into a ravine, and being run over by a city, among many many other things. In fact, he's actually older than the Traction Era itself, and has lived through it all.
 * Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Subverted. At the beginning of the first book, Tom dreams of being pulled from his dull life into a wild adventure possibly involving a pretty girl. He does, but the girl is far from pretty and the adventure will leave him more homesick than ever.
 * Meaningful Name: Anna Fang may be from the German "anfang", meaning "beginning"; some characters' and vehicles' names may be meaningful (such as the airships Jenny Hanniver and Shadow Aspect, or the steam powered-ram ship Supercolider), but others are just as often meaningless (there's a minor character called Lurpak. Yes, really. And his first name is Cat.)
 * Tom Natsworthy, probably because he starts out as a mere good-for-nothing apprentice.
 * In Greek mythology, the medusa was a half-woman half-monster creature who would turn anyone into stone if they looked directly at her. The MEDUSA from Mortal Engines does do this after a sort, but it mostly just kills everything in it's path.
 * In Northern mythology, Odin was the one-eyed god of death. This about says it all.
 * Minored in Asskicking: The Engineers in Fever Crumb don't let a complete lack of combat skills stop them from showing just how effective they are in a crisis. See Crowning Moment of Awesome.
 * Narrator All Along
 * Nice Guy: Tom embodies this trope.
 * Its for this reason that 'everybody likes Tom', which is mentioned at least once in every book that features him.
 * No One Could Survive That: Shrike, several times.
 * Non-Action Guy: Tom Natsworthy.
 * Omnicidal Maniac:
 * Opposites Attract: Lawful Good Non-Action Guy Tom Natsworthy and Chaotic Neutral when not Chaotic Evil Dark Action Girl Hester Shaw.
 * Parental Substitute: Anna Fang is hinted to be seen as this by Tom and Hester: in the first book, a conversation with Anna reminds Tom of his late mother, and in the second, Tom and Hester put a picture of Anna in an alcove aboard the Jenny meant for pictures of parents, though this is partially do to neither of them having any pictures of their own.
 * Also, Shrike wants to be this for Hester.
 * Precursors: The Ancients, i.e. us.
 * Riding the Bomb: More like "piloting the bomb". The fanatical Green Storm employ Tumblers, piloted heavy ordnance dropped from airships.
 * Running Gag: In the first book, characters tend to mispronounce Tom's family name, including Anna Fang when they first meet. His encounter with in the second book references this.
 * Scavenger World
 * Shipper on Deck: Tom likes to tease his daughter about her relationship with Theo Ngoni.
 * Schizo-Tech: Heavier than air flight is literally re-invented in the series. It's primitive and unreliable, whereas drive systems that can move entire cities at motorway speeds across uneven and often constantly shifting terrain are universal.
 * Hot air balloons are reinvented in Fever Crumb. Though they only get one use.
 * In Web Of Air The City Of London adopts a policy of
 * The Green Storm takes this Up to Eleven. Expect to see massive air-destroyers with tech modern humans won't develop today, dropping kamikaze Tumblers and firing more guns than a fleet of AC-130s, providing backup to cavalry armed with machine guns and Killer Zombie Robots while they're being strafed with armed Wright Flyers, which are in turn coming under attack from undead birds and fighter airships. Yes, seriously. Like an F-16 in airship form.
 * Shout-Out: Almost too many references to name, recalling all kinds of fact and fiction.
 * The city of Brighton has an aircraft guidance system consisting of a large wheel with lights on it. It's called the "Pharos Wheel", as in Ferris Wheel and Tower of Pharos.
 * Two mechanics in the mercenary fighter squadron "Flying Ferrets" are named Algy and Ginger. These are two major characters in the British book series Biggles, which was about fighter pilots.
 * Again, the steam-ram ship Supercollider. "Collider" is a specific type of particle accelerator.
 * The god Poskitt is named for Reeve's real-life friend Kjartan Poskitt. Mortal Engines has many Shout Outs in its vast, varied and frequently invoked pantheon, including "The Thatcher, six-armed Goddess of unfettered Municipal Darwinism."
 * Many cities are Shout Outs:
 * London is based on the real London, complete with St Pauls and a vertical transport parodying the Underground.
 * Brighton is likewise full of references to Reeve's hometown.
 * Wolverinehampton, an ugly place with huge jaws, is a predator city named after Wolverhampton.
 * Tunbridge Wells has become an amphibious town known as Tunbridge Wheels.
 * Grimsby is thought lost, deep under the ocean.
 * Many German cities have their original names with titles like "Traktionstadt" (traction city), "Jagdstadt" (hunter city) and "Panzerstadt" (literally "armoured city", recalls Panzer, German for tank) added, such as Panzerstadt-Weimar. Bilingual Bonus.
 * Shoutouts involving vehicle names include:
 * The 13th Floor Elevator, Thaddeus Valentine's armoured airship, is named after a sixties psychedelic rock band.
 * The Flying Ferrets fighter Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Machiney is named after a popular song involving a bikini.
 * The airship Shadow Aspect is named for an archetype in Jungian psychology.
 * The airship (and centuries earlier, boat) Jenny Haniver is named after the nickname given to fake mermaids often seen in curisoity shops. Fitting, as both vessels are actually made of scraps from others.
 * The Green Storm airship Hungry Ghost is named for a traditional Chinese festival.
 * The Green Storm airship The Sadness of Things is named after a painting.
 * The limpet Ghost of a Flea is named after a painting by William Blake.
 * The limpet Naglfar was a ship in Norse mythology made of the toenails of the dead.
 * The "Mokele-Mbembe", named for an African legend about a (relatively) small jungle sauropod.
 * Then there's the passing mention of the Hari Potter cultists in Fever Crumb, as mentioned in Future Imperfect...
 * The Green Storm parallels the Cultural Revolution; this is most apparent in some of the slogans and revolutionary songs that are named.
 * The actors at the travelling theatre in A Web of Air worship a goddess named Rada.
 * Some of the ancient technology- the 'seedy', a shiny round platter, as well as references in popular books to 'eye-pods' which stored music on thousands of tiny gramophone records. Also the buses in Fever Crumb require the passengers to buy the shell of an oyster in order to ride one.
 * Single Woman Seeks Good Man: Already there in the first book but especially apparent in the following ones, where Hester is head over heels for the nice Non-Action Guy Tom Natsworthy.
 * Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism. Way, way over towards the "cynicism" end. The very, very few optimistic characters (Tom, Wren, possibly Oenone Zero) are shown again and again to be completely out of their depth, while the pessimists, nihilists, slave-dealers, compulsive liars, juvenile delinquents, mechanical horrors and violently depraved psychopaths are in their element. And somehow, it WORKS.
 * Small Name, Big Ego: Nimrod Pennyroyal.
 * Social Darwinist: As in Municipal Darwinist. Survival of the fittest city.
 * Stalker with a Crush: Yes, Shrike, but it's close enough (and the Incredibly Lame Pun writes itself).
 * Street Urchin: The Lost Boys are half Oliver Twist, a quarter Jack the Ripper and a quarter Stingray, living in a submerged city and looked after by "Uncle", a delusional Fagin-esque techno-wizard in pink bunny slippers with steel toecaps. They're really not very nice people at all.
 * Taking You with Me: . And HOW.
 * Talking Is a Free Action: Tom manages to say "A Nuevo-Mayan Battle Frisbee!" while seeing one in flight. "Gasps" it, too.
 * Temporary Love Interest: Kate Valentine, who and Freya Rasmussen for Tom. Also, Wolf Kobold for Wren.
 * That Man Is Dead: "I am not . We are wasting time. I wish to destroy cities."
 * The Chick: Tom and Wren Natsworthy, probably the only main characters who aren't happy with theft, violence and casual murder.
 * In the first book, Katherine Valentine and Bevis Pod, in contrast to most of the Londoners.
 * In the second and third, Freya Rasmussen, in contrast to Hester.
 * Tin Man: The Engineers are revealed to be this in Fever Crumb. Most of the time they're The Spock but when it matters they've got their sensitive side even if they don't really know how to deal with it. Hell compared to the cutthroats and ruffians that take up most of London's screentime they're practically The Chick. Which is ironic, as Fever Crumb is the only female Engineer, EVER.
 * Together in Death: Invoked by Hester at the beginning of the second book..
 * Tomboy and Girly Girl: Philip Reeves likes to contrast Hester with a much more feminine character in each book: Katherine Valentine in the first, Freya Rasmussen in the second and the third, and even Hester's daughter Wren in the third and the fourth.
 * Tragic Villain:
 * Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: Inverted with Tom and Hester. She's the ugly one and he's considered handsome.
 * Underwater Base: Grimsby.
 * Used Future: Played believably, once you accept the basic premise is cities eating each other.
 * Villain Protagonist: Hester Shaw, though it all depends on how you see the Anti-Traction League as opposed to London. By the end of the book she's . In later books, she.
 * Waif Prophet: Oenone Zero.
 * World Half Empty: The basic premise is living on a giant mobile city, eating cities smaller and slower than you and running away from bigger ones. If your city gets taken by a bigger and meaner one, it will be taken by force, completely looted, stripped down for raw materials and its population enslaved.
 * In the third and fourth books, the antagonism between Traction Cities and the Anti-Traction League turns into a total war between the Traktionstadtgesellshaft, a union of militarised German cities and their allies, and the Green Storm, a band of psychotic air-pirates who overthrow the previously peaceful League leaders and turn it into a totalitarian state obsessed with the annihilation of cities. Aboard any Traction City, even non-militarised pleasure cities, you're liable to be blown apart by man-piloted heavy bombs, fleets of giant airships and psychotic undead cyborgs armed with finger-blades; fighting for the Green Storm, you're likely to be either piloting one of the bombs or attempting to fight conventional battles against war-rigged mobile cities, and if (when) you die on the battle lines, may have the bad luck to get your corpse turned into one of the aforementioned psychotic undead cyborgs and have to do the whole stupid thing again.
 * Wretched Hive: is described as this.
 * Yandere: Hester in the second book onwards.
 * Zeppelins From A Post-Apocalyptic Future: Heavier-than-air flight has all but died out and been replaced by airships. However: Ornithopters and gyrothopters have just been reinvented in A Darkling Plain, used effectively by the Flying Ferrets. In A Web of Air, heavier-than-air flight is achieved by Arlo Thursday.