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Mortal Engines: Twenty Years On

I got thinking in the night about the early versions of Mortal Engines . I don’t have them any more - they filled an ever-growing stack of notebooks all through the ‘90s and you can’t hang on to that stuff forever - I just keep a few scraps, which I’m reproducing here. So I’m quite vague on a lot of the details now. I remember the world was quite different from the world I eventually ended up with, but I can’t recall how the story worked (or didn’t work) within that. It was called Urbivore or Hungry City in those days, and the most obvious differences were that it wasn’t set in the future and London never crossed the North Sea (which was still a sea, so how could it?). Every version started with some variant in the same first line - it was a nice day and London was chasing a small town of some sort. The setting was a sort of parallel world where Traction Cities had arisen fairly early in the industrial revolution. I can’t remember if it was set in Victorian times, or in a present da

Twenty Years of Mortal Engines

Mortal Engines is twenty years old today - it was published on 16th November 2001. Above is some celebratory artwork Sarah McIntyre has done for the occasion. And publisher Scholastic are marking it with new editions of the whole quartet featuring a snazzy silver anniversary roundel (but retaining Ian McQue’s cover art, which is one of the best things that’s happened to the series. I don’t talk about Mortal Engines much these days because it was so long ago. (I started working on various early iterations of it sometime in ‘91 or ‘92, so this is mor like the thirtieth anniversary for me - at that time I never really imagined it would get published, let alone that people would still be reading it in 2021.) Looking through it a few years ago I was struck by how much of a spoof Mortal Engines is - I’d forgotten that it really started out as a kind of parody of action/adventure stories. Sustaining that over 300 pages (more like 700 pages in the early versions) meant that the characters h

The Adventures of Sir Lancelot

The last Arthurian film I looked at wa s a bit of a washout, and I wasn’t expecting anything much better from The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, a British TV show from 1956. But to my surprise, it turns out to be rather good! It shows fairly regularly on Talking Pictures TV I believe, but the first ten episodes (of a total thirty) are easily found on YouTube. It was made at Nettlefold Studios, Walton-on-Thames, by the same production company responsible for that Robin Hood series with the annoying theme song (‘Rubb’n Hood, Rubb’n Hood, ridin’ through the glen’ etc. Sir Lancelot has its own annoying theme song in the same style (‘In days of o-old, When knights were bo-old…’) but it doesn’t come in until the end credits of each episode, so that’s all right.) It apparently re-uses some sets and costumes from Robin Hood too. It’s very much in that classic Hollywood-Merrie England style I’ve talked about before, but it’s probably the best example of it I’ve watched so far for these blogs: it’

Here Lies Arthur

With this blog currently mostly concerned with Arthurian Cinema for some reason, I thought I should do a post about my own contribution to the legends, my 2007 novel Here Lies Arthur. Cover art by Ian McQue I thought of this book around the same time I started work on Mortal Engines , and started writing it pretty much the moment I finished A Darkling Plain . My thinking was that, having written so much about the future, it would be nice to write about the past for a change. Actually it wasn't as radical a change as I'd imagined - post-Roman Britain, with its grubby inhabitants living among the ruins of a lost civilization, felt just as post-apocalyptic as the Traction Era. The background is largely based on I stuff I read back in the 'eighties when Arthur was my big obsession. It's set at some unspecified point in the late 5th Century, when the former Roman province of Britannia is facing raids by Irish, Pictish, and Saxon invaders, while local warlords carve out t

The Spaceman and King Arthur

Mark Twain’s book A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur was published in 1889 and has been filmed several times - I’ll be looking at some of the other versions soon. This attempt, directed by Russ Mayberry, dates from 1979, and tries to bring the story bang up to date by making the hero an astronaut. When I went looking for it on the Disney channel I found it hiding out under an assumed name, like a snitch in the witness protection programme. It’s alternative title is Unidentified Flying Oddball, which is an absolutely terrible name for a film, and a completely inappropriate one for this film, but it does give the viewer some idea of what they can expect… Our hero is a horribly chipper NASA robotics expert called Tom Trimble (Dennis Dugan). Accompanied by his android double (?) he’s piloting an experimental space shuttle-y thing that somehow ends up going back in time the way experimental space shuttle-y things do (??) and landing in Arthurian times. Then things develop al

The Kid Who Would Be King

The Kid Who Would Be King is a 2019 film from writer-director Joe Cornish which imagines 21st Century school kids taking on the mantle of Arthur and his knights. A ny synopsis will make it sound like a rather generic children’s story, and I suppose that’s because it is , but for the most part it’s a likeable one and bounces along pretty entertainingly. Alex (Louis George Serkis) is our Once and Future Tween. He finds Excalibur embedded in a lump of concrete in a building site like enchanted rebar and, having pulled it out, is contacted by an eccentric teen Merlin (Angus Imrie) who explains that the ancient evil once harnessed by the sorceress Morgana is on the rise again because the world is so divided and conflict-ridden. (I must confess, I had some trouble with this - is the world really more divided and conflict-ridden than it was in the Cold War? Or the 1930s? Or 1914? Where was Morgana in 1939? Loafing about in her cave I suppose… I do wonder about the wisdom of constantly tel