#predator cities

[bayou-lafontaine]

Are there any other Mortal Engines fans on here? If so, please speak up in the comments.

Im very surprised how little presence this fandom has online, the wiki is barebones, theres hardly any fanart and yet the books are popular enough.

Tbh i kinda want to make a CivilizationEx style Mortal Engines Lore YT channel.

Perhaps even foster some sort of community on Discord.

[360degreesasthecrowflies]

1st book review of 2026 - thoughts on Infernal Devices by Phillip Reeve

Just finished book 3 of Mortal Engines, Infernal Devices. Was very surprised to see the negative Goodreads reviews. I thought this one was just as solid as I remembered. I suppose this is one of those cases of an aggregator where everyone can review a book meaning we get an overfill of reviews like "I didn't like X character and thought they were mean therefore I'm giving the book 2 stars!" which is absolute ass-backwards logic. You mean the writer succeeded in giving you a strong emotional response to a character...

Spoilers for the full book under the cut

So, so much to say about this one, so I'll bullet it out for brevity:

Freya was better in this, though she clearly hadn't learned much despite becoming a schoolteacher and moral authority in the town

Tom was worse. Still loving of course but his worst moral impulses and tendency to see the best of people and total lack of suspicion despite living in a literal dystopian nightmare were his undoing once again. But that was the point of his character, to satirise that kind of moral hero that in another kind of story would have the plot and setting twist around on itself to validate his character and approach

Hester really amped up the bloodthirstiness in this one. But Reeve made it if not relatable per se, understandable. The people of Anchorage never really tried with her. Even the children, even her own child, were not discouraged from bullying, shaming and ostracizing her. She was not only one of the few adults in the community, but she was directly responsible for anyone in the city being free at all, and indirectly responsible for Anchorage even attaining the land it did at all in the first place by facilitating Pennyroyal to come to the city to even give Freya the idea of trying to reach the old continent. I enjoyed reading her as much as I did the first time I read this 16 or so years ago, although this time I was much more aware of how slightly concerning it was how comfortable she was with killing strangers - which is again meant to satirise the kind of action hero who only sees 'grunts' and 'people of value' and is happy to murder their way through any number of the former to get to the latter. How many soldiers or other lives were killed by heroes like Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, or Captain America and Iron Man, who might have had backstories and loved ones if only the camera had focused time on them like Reeve chose to on Hester's opponents?

Wren was pretty irritating, but that was the point of her. Though, she felt a little like a second bite for Reeve at making a Hester-like heroine who didn't have any of Hester's baggage (and apparently wasn't troubled by her own past actions like how she had bullied and belittled her own mother)

The setting was wonderful and Reeve introduced a great array of supporting characters. I was suspicious of Cynthia from the off although Boo Boo would also have made a great double agent

I liked what was done with Shrike

Dr OneOne Zero was a fascinating character and the scene where she had to dissect her own brother or else be killed herself was chilling to find in a book ostensibly aimed at a young audience; though not inappropriate, threading the line well without threatening to cross it. The kind of thing that probably causes a stronger horror reaction in adults than in children who can speed past it without thinking too much about the implications

A couple of references to Theo as 'The African' seemed a little out of place in what was otherwise a generally very mixed setting

The offhand references to catastrophic nuclear war and orbital weaponry were a bit too close to home in 2026

I really enjoyed how the story developed in general; the machine leadership was also a little chilling at a time in which AI is being pushed in everything

Pennyroyal spared again. Wren is too soft just like her father

You really get the feeling that things might have gone better for Hester if anybody around her had ever actually tried to properly listen to her without judgement and silencing or shaming her point of view; but unfortunately she has had the bad luck to be continually surrounded by characters whether heroic or villainous who want to rewrite the narrative and reframe her actions, choices and character, whether that's Pennyroyal, Freya, or Tom!

I felt sad for what happened to Uncle even though he was not a good man

Going in to the final book... Hester is really the one I care about the most still. She's the most interesting character. I feel like Anna Fang and Fishcake are going to end up fucking something up in a major way though. And Tom is going to cause things to go badly as well.

At least Hester and Wren got to briefly reuinte happily. That might be Wren's last happy memory of her mother.

I think what gets me about some other readers' (re)views of this series is that... a lot of what Hester says, she doesn't actually mean as fact. She just doesn't know the words to process her own feelings because she's never been taught and everyone around her assumes she does know and is being deliberately unhelpful or blunt because she wants to. This book revealed she can't read as fast as a regular adult. She wasn't schooled or educated. She lives by her wits because she has to. She literally has a physical disability and may well also have brain damage from her childhood disfigurement. Yet she's constantly held to an educated neurotypical standard and punished harshly both physically and morally by those around her when she doesn't meet it. Reading this book I see a woman with severe untreated post-natal depression who sees herself as a weapon because that's the only thing those around her have ever let her be.

Which is probably why she gets on so well with Shrike who was made the same way.

[nestofstraightlines]

A few years ago I created a fan-design for a cover for a book I love, Mortal Engines. I really liked it, and I always wanted to create one for one of its sequels too.

Infernal Devices isn’t the direct sequel, it’s actually the third in the quartet, but it’s set to a large extent in (the Municipal-Darwinism-future version of) my silly beloved hometown, Brighton. So it’s the other one in the series that I yearned to base a design on.

Appropriately enough it ended up being this year, when I came home from my usual city of residence, London, to isolate with my family back in Brighton, and started thinking about a permanent move back to the city, that I picked this project back up. The last few weeks have been characterised by me mulling over flat listings and drawing this.

Philip Reeve also comes from Brighton. He went to the same Junior school as I did, I found out! And he wrote Brighton in a way I think only born-and-bred Brightonites would understand, with a kind of vicious affection. Maybe that’s the way a lot of people feel about their hometowns. But Brighton does have a very unique image and character and this thing where it’s not the kind of place you come from, it’s the kind of place you visit or move to. Coming from Brighton is a bit like coming from Disneyland.

So I really appreciate his depiction of Brighton in all its tacky, beautiful, self-satisfied, generous glory and I’m delighted to feel I have finally drawn something to represent that.

[layaart]

it’s been a while since I’ve drawn Hester............ might make this into stickers??

[thisnorthernboy]

The Illustrated World of Mortal Engines.

This summer I was lucky enough to be asked to contribute some illustrations for this fantastic guide to the world of Philip Reeve’s novels. I produced over fifty black and white illustrations for the book, and they sit alongside work from Ian McQue, Amir Zand, David Wyatt, Maxime Plasse, Aedel Fakhrie, and Philip Varbanov. It was a joy to work with Philip Reeve, Jeremy Levett and Jamie Gregory at Scholastic UK on this. Bit of a dream job.

You can buy the book here.

All my illustrations for the book were drawn on cartridge paper with Copic SP Multiliners and a Kuretake No.8 brush pen.

Buy prints of my work here.

You can find more of me, and of my work, here… Facebook Instagram Wordpress Twitter

If you like my work you can, if you like, buy me a coffee (Ko-fi) to keep me going!

[anagrammaddict]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Sometimes, in Hester’s half-sleep when her limbs are leaden as coal scuttles and her thoughts are arrows strung on bows but never released, she suspects that Anna never really fell, that the infamous red aviator coat was wrapped around nothing, a rag spun into a steaming abyss.

After all, didn’t Valentine open her up when he stuck his dagger into her stomach? He cut her open and he cut her loose. He let her out in a red spray of wind and of course she took flight.

:

full fic here

.

[pleas3pretendimnothere]

ARE YALL LOOKIN AT ANNA FANG CUZ IM LOOKIN AT ANNA FANG AND I CANT STOP LOOKIN AT ANNA FANG

[the-mortal-engines]

LONDON HUNTING