Municipal Darwinism

What giants walk among us men...

I just finished reading the first book of Phillip Reeve's The Hungry City Chronicles, Mortal Engines. Once again, I was completely absorbed in the world that the author dreamed up out of his head. Basically, it's this post-apocalyptic future, millenia after the Sixty Minute War in which most of humanity wiped itself out with devastating weapons of mass destruction. Computers are things of history now, but cities are now built on giant traction wheels and trundle along the countryside. That introduces the astounding idea of Municipal Darwinism: bigger cities go along devouring smaller towns and villages, ingesting the smaller settlement and ripping it apart for raw materials. What a concept! To make the connection between the theory of evolution and urbanization, and transform it into this fantastic universe; truly the work of a genius.

I picked this book off the library shelf because the author's name caught my eye. Phillip Reeve, the illustrator of numerous Murderous Maths books, wrote a novel? But after reading the blurb on the jacket, I got hooked immediately. I never expected Reeve to be an author; I always thought he was an amazing cartoonist, the best one Murderous Maths ever had. (Why, Poskitt, why did you replace him with someone else?) I guess it just goes to show that there's no limit to what latent talents you might have.

And once again we are presented with the proposal that love conquers all. I have yet to read a book in which the main villain can love. Like Pullman, Reeve presents us another pair of protagonists who begin to love each other across the novel. Power of love. Never underestimate the power of love.

"Was this what falling in love was like? Not something big and amazing that you know about right away, like in a story, but a slow thing that crept over you in waves until you woke up one day and found that you were head over heels with somone quite unexpected...?"
The Edna Man