What's your favourite book in the series?

That’s an impossible choice, because four is a small enough number that picking a first place means you have to pick a second place, which means that you might as well pick a third place, leaving one last. That’s also a cop-out answer.

I’m tempted to say A Darkling Plain (4th), purely because I love how everything ties together at the ending despite the tragedy of the main characters we’ve followed from the start. Also because it’s so much better written than the first book- which isn’t badly written at all, but it’s so much more comfortable with itself and feels less like a children’s book to me.

But thinking about any of them makes me think about certain parts of them. I love the first book because it’s where it all begins and it introduces the concepts and the characters that we later see more on. We see Tom start to realise that he’s not a hero and Hester realise that she’s not hopeless, and we get Anna Fang and Valentine and Crome and the showdown in the museum with the historians, which is still one of my favourite parts of the series to be honest. I like contained safe societies with their bizarre rules that make sense to them, even though you’ve got Tom and Hester going off and doing their own thing, London is still there with its own problems and plots, and as something aspirational for Tom to return to and for Hester to finish her unfinished business. In theory, anyway.

I love the second book too, because it introduces a whole new contained safe society that we don’t even get to see in its hayday, just the dregs of it after a horrible tragedy that left it limping along and all these different characters are picking up the pieces. I love Freya and her trying to come to terms both with her sudden inheritance, and at the same time learning to discard it. I love and hate Pennyroyal! I love the Green Storm, and Sathya and what drives her, and the Stalker Fang. I love Grimsby and the whole concept of it and how funny-disturbing it and Uncle are. I love the brutality of the northern cities, and the brutality of Hester and the excuses she makes for herself to be the way she is now, and the fact that she was so close to being a better person and decided instead to just jump off the tightrope and be awful and tell herself that it’s how she should be, because that’s a hundred times more interesting than how you expect her character arc to go at the start.

This answer is getting long. But tough, I love the third book. Both of the previous two could have ended after the last page and the main character’s individual stories more or less wrapped up (while the world carries on descending into chaos)- you can believe they had a happy ending of sorts afterwards. And this confirms that they did, more or less. And then with Wren you have the echoes of Tom finding his life dull and dreaming of adventure, and then as soon as she’s thrown into adventure realising pretty quickly that she’s made a mistake. Pennyroyal is still being Pennyroyal, Hester continues on down her downwards spiral that she’d put on pause for the time being, Tom realises that he’s got problems of his own, Shrike is back! The Green Storm is back! Essentially we realise that while the happy ending was going on with the main cast, a lot went on elsewhere, and we’re thrown back into the middle of it and left to pick up the pieces as we read about Theo and Oenone and ODIN and what’s become of Grimsby. We get the Jenny Haniver back! It’s maybe the most in-between book, in that it doesn’t wrap itself up and reaches across to the next one, and it expands a lot on what we already know and introduces more questions and plots than it answers and wraps up. To the extent that I keep forgetting exactly what happens in Infernal Devices and what happens in A Darkling Plain, so I can’t fairly separate them. They feel to me like book 3, parts 1 and 2.

But okay, I’ll go for ADP. And its fifty different plots and the way it picks up all those points from previous books that you thought were finished with but weren’t. All the characters that you thought were done for that weren’t, from all over the place. New locations (or newly-visited locations) and concepts as well, too, along with going back to the old. Desert ships. “Have you been to a Harvester before?” kills me every time I read it, as does The Thatcher. I’m easily amused. And we finally get our happy endings- even for the two we followed from the start, which shouldn’t be happy but the way that it’s treated feels satisfying somehow. We saw them at their start and now we see them at their end. The final sentence and what it means for how the entire series was told.

…and then there’s of course the short stories. And the prequels, which I also really like, even though I know they’re not to everyone’s taste. But I always did like the Guild of Engineers, and I love a bit of extra worldbuilding and background as well as a new-but-not-quite setting. And Nintendo Tharp is probably my favourite character name in the entire Mortal Engines world.

WE ARE TWO OF A KIND, YOU AND I. I KNEW IT AS SOON AS I FOUND YOU THAT DAY ON THE SHORE.

How can a society so advanced, so scientific, be so stupid?

Welcome to London.

This is something that didn’t really sink in until my latest reread (probably like my 10th of the series!):

the romantic cumulation at the end of mortal engines is Hester overcoming her abandonment/trauma/self hatred and feeling comfortable with tom and accepting he really does care about her. This is their first and only kiss in the book, and it is a kiss on the forehead and a long hug

this means so much to me. it’s such a gentle, sweet thing, and refreshing to see a romantic relationship that starts slow and is much more about… you know, character development

Shrike and Hester because i got hyped by the Mortal Engines trailer and had to re-read the book..and draw some….art

“Don’t be sad anymore.”

See, I said you’d come back for me.

It still fucks me up that Shrike was originally going to be named Shreck

David Wyatt’s covers for the Mortal Engines series by Phillip Reeve, which is awesome and deserves way more love.

Cast out

One of the best fucking things about mortal engines is thst you expect Hester to reform. It plays into all the narratives. She ends the first book with the man she loves and I expected her to improve morally. Hell, at the start of the book she is trying to keep a lid on her temper. But when tom falls in love she takes the low road and sells the city. She was given another choice though. She settles down, has a kid, and lives in peace for 16 years. But when they’re out of anchorage she is still Hester Shaw. Morally grey and angry as all hell. End of the third book is her last chance, go home and pretend nothing is wrong or run. Again she picks the worse of two options. She becomes a mercenary and arguably a worse person than she started as. Hester becomes more and more morally grey, fraying towards dark. It is so unique to see a character be given the chance to redeem herself and not take it. You expect her to become a better person but she doesn’t. She ends up a worse person than ever before. That woman is a downward spiral I love it.

Marks of the four major London guilds, as depicted in the Mortal Engines film.

Clockwise from top left: Guild of Historians, Navigators, Engineers and Merchants.

Mortal Engines as Tweets (pt.1)

Saw the Mortal Engines movie last week. The visuals were amazing!! :D but a tad sad that they changed the story and characters… Have been inspired to do a few drawing based on both the book and movie :)

It’s a great time of the year to remind everyone that Philip Reeve wrote a short story about Hester and Shrike’s Christmas Midwinter adventures. Complete with adorable illustrations by Sarah McIntyre.

Read it here.