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. A predator town, behaving very po...
Reviews and ruminations by Philip Reeve, author of the Mortal Engines series, the Railhead trilogy, Here Lies Arthur, Goblins, and The Legend of Kevin, Pugs of the Frozen North, etc, with Sarah McIntyre.