“Mortal Engines” by Philip Reeve, translated by Rei Anno
Many my friends of SF recommend reading this book. It’s great entertainment, although it is published as juvenile novel.
After a kind of armageddon, destructions at the earth’s crust and chaotic climates are common in the world, and the cities should not be fixed at a point. The cities have caterpiller and move by themselves.
1000 years passed. Cities `eat’ each other, grow, and die. People seek tools and technologies before armageddon, called oldtech, to reconstruct the civilization.
This setting is so nice to me. BTW, I think `eating each other’ as a kind of metaphor, but cities can eat other cities by their own jaw and fangs. IMHO, this style is SF.
The story is just an ordinary juvenile, but Reeve write it well. The hero is a trainee in (moving) London, and meets a girl assassin who wants to kill his master, and then falls from London by his master. Who is the assassin, and why? What happens in London?
This book also includes a nice description arousing imaginations about huge cities moving with crawler, free traders transiting between cities by airships, fixed cities hiding castles on Himarayan higher peeks.
My friends, and I, feels like Studio Ghibli anime. Visual reminder is similar, and so entertains us.
“Mortal Engines” is the first part of a sequel. In Japan, the remains are not translated yet, I’m waiting them.