The Hungry City Chronicles (series) by Phillip Reeve

I should start out with a confession: I’m a sucker for all things Victorian. I love the era’s bizarre mix of the uselessly beautiful and offhandedly cruel, crammed into overdecorated parlors and buried in their countless repressions and taboos. Such a tiny sliver of the world’s population – the white, middle-class English-speakers – trying so hard to make every aspect of their world just so. I suppose that appeals to the control freak in me; I smile at the idea of the little household despot, with her breath-defying corsets and 42 gazillion-piece place settings, who will run her home just as Caroline Beecher’s book dictates or die trying. Less charming was the way that same tyranny was applied in a global setting: colonial powers subjugating people far too old to be sent back up to the nursery after tea.

Phillip Reeve takes one of the viler Victorian notions, Social Darwinism, and gives it a science fiction twist: welcome to Municipal Darwinism, where whole cities borne on treads and wheels hunt down smaller, less “fit” towns, tearing them apart for material resources and humans to enslave. The system was devised after the Ancients (back in the twenty-somethingth century) caused widespread destruction in the Sixty Minutes’ War, leaving North America an uninhabitable wasteland and Europe and Northern Africa as the great Hunting Ground.

To Tom Nastworthy, Apprentice Historian (Third Class) in the power traction city of London, this is simply the way the world is. And for that matter, as the world should be. Sure, prey is getting a little scarce, and a head-to-head battle between two large cities would lead to devastating losses for both sides, but what alternative is there? Become like the Anti-tractionists in Southern Africa and Asia, where people live on the ground, like animals?

Unthinkable. But when a chance meeting with a strange, disfigured girl explodes into violence, Tom finds himself stranded on the bare earth and questioning everything he once thought true.

Thanks to the loss of much of the Ancient’s technology, the world has a sort of steampunk feel; argon lamps light most scenes, gas-propellant pistols are fired. Heavier-than-air flight has just barely been reborn; airships are the standard mode of travel. And unlike Reeve’s series for younger kids, Larklight, the Victorian social mores are not so stringently applied: not even the prissiest of young ladies falls prey to the vapors, and while the grittier details of life are not explicitly stated, neither are they so carefully hidden. Much of the tale is spent traveling, in the fast-moving towns outrunning the larger cities, on the ground on foot, and via the Bird Roads by airship. Not much call for that 42-piece place setting anywhere.

The lack of excess window dressing from the Social Darwinists’ era makes the ties to our own time that much more apparent: while there are no traction cities yet, the attitude that finite resources can be wasted as if infinite (provided you’re willing to take more by force from someone else) could lead to a world much like the empty mud landscape of the Hunting Ground. While each books recounts a single adventure (Tom’s, and later, others) the four books together tell the tale of a dangerous idea.

While there’s plenty of interest in the events of the story, that characters are what really make this series great. Little by little, whole people are built from words. Character permeates every moment — by the fourth book, I could read a paragraph of landscape description and recognize instantly from whose eye I was seeing this desert or that city, based on the rhythm and language alone.

There were moments too where the characters nearly overwhelmed the story; I felt I couldn’t bear to keep reading. Knowing what happened next wasn’t worth witnessing the awful things human beings do to one another, over and over again. While there are triumphs of the good, both large and small; while the villains do always suffer, they cause suffering for the heroes in equal measure. Harder yet to accept is the number of characters, whose actions sometimes have life or death consequences, who are neither good nor evil — just stupidly self-interested. Much like the real world – and entirely out of keeping with the thick layer of moral instruction piled on so many books for teens.

While no book or series is right for everyone, this is a mind-grabbing and challenging read, for adults who think they won’t like a teen book, genre readers who think they won’t like sci-fi, or anyone unafraid to gasp aloud, laugh openly, and weep wretchedly – sometimes within ten pages of one another. And though the feeling is not as intense as with some other reads (The Things They Carried comes to mind) I can say with certainty: I am better for having read these books.

——-

The titles in order: Mortal Engines, Predator’s Gold, Infernal Devices, A Darkling Plain.