This is a book that has lurked on the edges of my “I should add this to my TBR pile” mental list but somehow never made it on. I saw the trailer for the upcoming film version of it and knew it was something that my kid and I would both like, so I took the plunge. In terms of world building, it’s a unique one in the vast landscape of dystopian, steampunk, young adult fare. Hundreds of years in the future, we have somehow ruined […]
Moving cities that eat each other? Yep, I’m in.
I write haiku reviews for all the movies I see, so I’m going to continue that tradition for CBR10…
Mortal Engines
Steampunk interests me. I can’t quite put my finger on why, but I’ve enjoyed several steampunk films I’ve seen. Mortal Engines was the first steampunk novel I’ve read. When I first picked it up I had no idea that it was a steampunk motif. Halfway through it suddenly dawned on me that this is what a lot of people talk about when they say a steampunk novel. Mortal Engines is set in the post-apocalyptic future where cities are movable and travel around devouring one another […]
I’m not crying, you’re crying.
Sixteen years have passed since the events of Predator’s Gold and Anchorage is no longer on the move, having settled down at the edge of Vineland. Living on Anchorage-in-Vineland are Freya, Caul, Tom and Hester…and Wren, the baby that Hester was carrying who is now a bored 15 year old, longing for excitement. When a charming pirate – one of Caul’s old crew – turns up in Anchorage-in-Vineland looking for a valuable object, Wren seizes her chance for an adventure only for it to go […]
Not just for kids
Predator’s Gold is the second book in Philip Reeve’s Hungry City Chronicles, following Mortal Engines where we were first introduced to a world in which great traction cities stalk the land, preying on smaller or weaker cities. We catch up with Hester and Tom two years after the MEDUSA blast that destroyed Tom’s home city of London. Having taken the airship The Jenny Haniver as their own following the death of its badass previous owner, they’ve since eked out a life trading and travelling the […]
A tale of wheeled cities
“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.” …And from that opening sentence on, I was hooked. In the distant future, in the aftermath of the Sixty Minute War which put paid to the world as we know it, a system called Municipal Darwinism arose. Evolving out of the need to dodge the volcanoes and earthquakes that rocked the earth following the war, mechanical cities […]