Thunder City will be published in the UK on 26th September - twenty three years after the original Mortal Engines.
I'd thought I was finished with the world of the Traction Era, because I thought if I wrote another Mortal Engines story I was likely to end up just repeating myself. Which I have: Thunder City features airships, assassins, city chases, flying towns, Stalkers, and lots of other stuff from the earlier books. But in order to shake things up a bit I've set it about 110 years before Mortal Engines starts, so no one in that book has been born yet, and the world the action takes place in is slightly different.
It's the tail end of the Golden Age of Traction, when chivalric rules governed how cities pursued and consumed each other. By the time Thunder City starts those rules are starting to fray a bit, and there are predator towns and scavengers which behave very poorly, but the larger and older cities still act pretty sportingly.
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| A predator town, behaving very poorly |
The conflict with the Anti-Traction League and its allies has cooled to a sort of armed truce. Travellers in the Mediterranean can still view the romantic ruins of the giant pontoon bridge which the Zagwan Empire constructed across the Straits of Gibraltar when it launched its war against the mobile cities, but that was centuries ago; Zagwa is now a fading power (having exhausted all its strength on building giant pontoon bridges etc) and the main opposition to Municipal Darwinism comes from the mountain nations of the East. The mad mayor of Hamburg has recently announced a plan to attack the Anti Traction League's great stronghold of Batmunkh Gompa, but he won't succeed - his city's deck-plates will be among those decorating the Shield Wall when London arrives there a century later. The only part his half-baked scheme plays in the story is that when our heroes go looking for mercenaries to help them they can only find a rubbish one who was too old and drunk to join the Hamburgers' crusade.
Airships have established themselves as the main form of inter-city transport, but they don't fly as high or as fast as the ones in Mortal Engines, and they're not much use for warfare as they're too explodey and not yet armed with rockets. Stalkers (like Mr Shrike from the original books) are banned and largely forgotten, although on the raft resort of Margate sinister entrepreneur Dr Mortmain stages fights between human gladiators and reanimated, armoured chimeras...
...which is where Thunder City begins.
If you're in the US, there's a hardback edition - hooray! But you'll have to wait until November - boo!
Cover artwork is by Ian McQue, cover design by Jamie Gregory. The little predator towns are my own drawings, and don't appear in the book.
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