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Goddess in the Stacks (553 KP) rated Mortal Engines (The Hungry City Chronicles, #1) in Books

Dec 25, 2018  
Mortal Engines (The Hungry City Chronicles, #1)
Mortal Engines (The Hungry City Chronicles, #1)
Philip Reeve | 2004 | Fiction & Poetry, Science Fiction/Fantasy
8
6.9 (8 Ratings)
Book Rating
Through this entire book, I kept thinking "this feels like Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets." It's a completely different setting, and a different plot, but it had the same atmosphere. Rollicking action, fantastical premise, crazy setting, huge machines with entire worlds within them. I loved Valerian - it may not have been a critically great movie, and I don't think the leads had much chemistry, but the movie was just FUN. And that's how Mortal Engines is, too.

It's a crazy world, where cities have become mobile - think Howl's Moving Castle - and they chase each other across a barren world, devouring each other for resources in a social order they call Municipal Darwinism. Some cities, like London, are huge, with six main levels, not really counting the Gut, or the center of the machinery. Other towns are small, one or two levels crawling along trying to avoid the notice of the larger, faster cities. The peoples of the Traction Cities think people who live in statics (stationary cities, or, horror of horrors, right on the ground!) or people who are part of the Anti-Traction League, are crazy barbarians. And then there are the airship captains and crews, based out of the one floating city.

It is a crazy steampunk world, and Tom Natsworthy stumbles into a conspiracy plot by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But as he travels with Hester across the wasteland, trying to survive their pursuers and avert catastrophe, he learns more about her, and more about how the world actually works.

I absolutely adore the last two sentences of the book, and I'm going to post those here because they aren't terribly spoilery. And they're fantastic.

"You aren't a hero, and I'm not beautiful, and we probably won't live happily ever after," she said. "But we're alive, and together, and we're going to be all right."

This book is the first of a quartet, and Reeve also wrote a prequel trilogy, so there's actually three books before AND after this book. I'll probably check my library for them, because I REALLY enjoyed this book.

You can find all my reviews at http://goddessinthestacks.com
  
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David McK (3801 KP) rated Mortal Engines (2018) in Movies

Sep 18, 2021  
Mortal Engines (2018)
Mortal Engines (2018)
2018 | Fantasy, Sci-Fi
5
6.7 (57 Ratings)
Movie Rating Watch
Cyberpunk sci-fi movie that should really have been a series, set in the far future centuries after the cataclysmic sixty-minute war and where there are now two main kinds of settlements: the 'traditional' (here, viewed - at least initially - by the main protaganist as barbaric) and mobile: giant cities (London is one) powered by some form of locomotion, who pursue a philosophy of Municipal Darwinism ie hunt down and consume smaller cities to provide supplies and materials.

The problem, however, is that this movie just tries to pack too much into its runtime; too much if the action from the source book on which it is based, with the result that the characters never really seem to develop all that much and, in some cases, are given short shrift (which is why I feel a series would have been better).

Good effect, though.