I know that young adult fiction isn't a deep well to draw from but explain to me how this isn't the dumbest/most...

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youtube.com/watch?v=fupYIggOq38

Love the traction towns and the look of the world, annoyed about her scar but hopefully she's super fucked up under the mask. I figure that'd be an okay compromise, let the fucking executives have their poster without completely undermining the point of the character.

no

>but hopefully she's super fucked up under the mask
You know she won’t be. They’re going to Tyrion it up.

Get your nostalgic head out of your ass and tell me doesn't look fucking stupid you mong.

I'm holding out hope

Are you kidding? It looks fucking great.

I do wonder if they're even going to try to get as dark as the books were, but even if they don't and choose to make it more of a straight pulp adventure story instead, it'll probably still be fun even if it'll also be a case of some wasted potential.

It's either going to be a cut across the nose, half of a Glasgow smile or a superficial burn along a cheek or jawline.

Someone tell me what happens.

Because Warhammer 40k and Star Wars both exist, user.

Pulp adventure hunting ancient supertech macguffins across a world of moving cities that hunt and eat one another. It's pretty neat.

Yeah but like in detail. Get on with it, I've got time.

Man, I've not read the books in fuckin' years. I'm kinda hoping the movie will bother to remind me, although I guess I could find the audiobooks. YA fiction is often pretty good stuff to listen to passively, since it's simple enough that if you zone out and miss a chunk you'll never feel lost.

letmewikipediathatforyou.com/?q=Mortal Engines

>Mfw when the first book was awesome
>Mfw when the second book kinda descends into muh romance

Watching Hester completely fuck around because of it is fucking hilarious though

God, yes. The sooner the better.

I only read part of the first book in a bookstore (this happens a lot, for moderately convoluted reasons), but I found the “cities eating cities” thing deeply, viscerally disturbing, and I don’t really know why. To the point where the trailer is hard to watch.

It's a very immediate version of a more existential dread you feel if you live in a small town near a large city, especially one that's growing quickly. Remembering a strong local community but slowly seeing jobs go, people moving to the city, the culture changing, commuter neighbourhoods starting to outnumber the locals... The death of something you cared for and that you can't do anything about.

It's all of that boiled down to a matter of hours and days.

Background: due to cataclysms happening after a massive nuclear war, multiple cities turn to making their cities mobile to survive. They spread, grow by eating smaller cities, and make their own baby cities to follow an ideology of "Municipal Darwinism". They are blissfully unaware that this state of affairs isn't working out because all the cities are getting eaten up, but are unable to de-mobilize because then they'd be vulnerable to getting eaten themselves. Meanwhile, the communities of Asia form a society against the massive environmental damage left by the mobile cities. They call themselves the Anti-Traction League, and focus on keeping out the cities by defending a massive mountain in the Himalayas called the Shield Wall.

Story of the books is mostly focused on two people: the Nicest Dude Ever, and his girlfriend-then-wife Miss Supremely Fucked Up. They get caught up in the pulpy spy plots between agents of the cities and the League, who are hunting for ancient technologies that would tip the balance between the two factions. Albeit there's only four books and it's kinda hard to go into the plot without massive spoilers, and the way I describe it makes it sound lighter than it really is, and misses out on a number of character-driven subplots that form the story.

this series may have a dumb premise, but it is FAR from the worst, because Wraeththu exists.

Imagine a world where a hermaphrodite with acidic bodily fluids is born, and one day they get tired of being the only one of their kind, so they discover that by raping men, they can, about 10% of the time, successfully turn a man into one of them. (the other 90% of the time the man just turns into a melted pile of screaming flesh) hey then tell their new followers, "go forth and rape! Create as many of us as you can, but only men as women are icky." (women turn into a pile of screaming melted flesh 100% of the time)
oh and these hermaphrodites get MAGICK powers!

Essentially, after the 60 min. war, the environment is irrevocably damaged to the extent that earthquakes, superstorms, and volcanic eruptions are commonplace and within the most populated regions of the world, there remain few, if any, places where people are able to remain for a long enough time without being obliterated by natural disasters.

To deal with this challenge, humanity shifts towards nomadic empires for several centuries following the war, part of which includes mobile fortresses that are pulled by slaves or horses. Eventually, an inventor named Auric Godshawk develops titanic engines (recall that technology regressed due to the war) which allow for entire cities to be jacked up on treads or wheels and moved around, supplanting traditional nomadic empires which take more effort to mobilize.

London is the first traction city, created by the leader of a nomadic empire named Nicholas Quirke. This leads to a few eras of intense traction-ification of various major cities, and the emergence of 'municipal darwinism', where smaller cities (which rely on trading and mining) are eaten by the larger, which harvest the city itself as well as the resources it collected. Food production consists of large algal vats within the traction cities.

Not everyone likes this way of life, and there is a major faction called the Anti-Traction League, which has its strongholds in Siberia and Central Asia, which are unpopulated and weren't as affected by the 60 min. war. A large mountain range stretching from the Himalayas to the Arctic Ocean (presumably created by the war) protects the immobile settlements of the League, and the one way into these regions is through a gate that is protected by an airship fleet. The League uses airships as its primary means of warfare.

The story revolves around a lot of the advanced tech that remains from the war, and is sought after by many, including orbital directed energy weapons and robot stalkers.

Hope this clears things up.

Because our own world was at one point convinced that it was possible. In fact, right now we're in the middle of trying to make Solar Punk work even though in the future it won't amount to anything like what its advocates are hoping (not that it isn't advancing energy technology regardless), but that doesn't make it any less valid for the time we attempt to extract a workable infrastructure from it, just as concepts like the space cannons of the late 19th century were valid for their time.

It's just a small 3,000 person town. If anything the movie makes the traction cities far, far too small.

>I am interested in the upcoming movie, too

I just want to see my boy Shrike

I hope they don't fuck him up

British teeth.

>Main character
>Allowed to be disfigured in any but the most minor way possible
Nigga, you know it's gonna be a tiny scar that can only be seen in the right lighting.

>I have absolutely no imagination and any work of fiction that requires any suspension of disbelief triggers me

He'll look like the Clockwork Man from Dr. Who.

tbqh I really like YA novels when they actually have decent word building instead of being a pure self-insert shitfest, it just feels like they're willing to go way further with their settings than a lot of other novels that feel the need to really hold back on their worlds and keep them "relate-able"

The trailer for the filmed piqued my interest. Are the books still worth reading if you're an adult adult and not a young adult?

They're a lot better than Hunger Games at least. Hell, the main protags even age 15 years between books 2 and 3, so the young adults become actual adults. Just don't go in expecting some deep exploration about the nature of power and you'll be fine.

but why no kids?

/tv/ please

....It depends heavily on the rate at which battery technology improves, now. The better the batteries, the lower the capacity factor you need to make photovoltaic solar viable. Proponents have pointed out that battery technology is advancing faster than photovoltaic solar itself did.

A lot of people just find it hard to believe that hippy power can actually work.

It's just irritating because the books make it clear that Hester looks SERIOUSLY fucked up.

What's the point of small ones when a big one can chase it down?

>muh politics tract for kids

Oh no, Margaret Thatcher. How dreadful.

Wrong way round.

When the Traction Cities first went mobile, communities were faced with a choice: stay where you are and get eaten by the first city that comes along, or go mobile in whatever way you can. The smaller communities could only build smaller cities, so that's what you end up with.

It didn't last all that long, really, a few centuries at most, and the fact that it's entirely unsustainable is the point (though there were mining towns and such)

Welcome to nu/tg/pol/. Enjoy your arguments about anything except games.

Traction cities weren't designed for combat, they were designed to just be mobile population centers. The world was wracked with geological instability after the Sixty Minute War, meaning that populations and their assets had to become mobile in order to avoid being ravaged by environmental disaster.

Initially, this just meant that people lived in horse-drawn, slave-drawn or sail-powered houses and towers on wheels. However, after the development of steam engines and internal combustion engines, some people wanted to seize and take advantage of ancient technology that was still intact in cities. This led to gigantic, fuel-guzzling traction cities. In their constant hunger for resources and in order to keep moving, they turned to raiding and absorbing any static or traction-based settlement they came across.

The small traction cities aren't designed to avoid the big traction cities and they certainly aren't on a level playing field. The bigger the traction city, the better the traction city and the more greedy and resource-hogging the traction city.

All must remember this is the 6th civilization, counting our own as the 1st.

They keep blowing themselves to bits or being ground beneath ice ages or global warming.

I never read those books as a kid. The trailer for the film looks fucking awsome.

Maybe if you tried to have watch it in the spirit of watching some thing for fun rather than scoring maturity points.

I've got something to say to people who claim that the premise of Mortal Engines and its traction cities is ridiculous, flawed and completely fucking unsustainable.

You're right. It is. That's the point.

The system isn't supposed to be fair, it's called Municipal Darwinism

A lot of the smaller towns started as suburbs of the larger towns, built when there was a lot more prey to go around. When hunting got scarce, some of the smaller towns fucked off to try and do better for themselves.

The audiobook series becomes terrible halfway through the second book

How?

Is this thing good? Because the trailer for the movie looked cool, and I like the idea of cities eating other cities.

I enjoyed the books as a kid, no idea how they hold up these days but hopefully the film will be fun.

Man this series is probably the Darkest thing Scholastic has ever published.
I haven't read it in ages but I still remember all sorts of fucked-up shit happening. stuff like Child Abuse and prisoners being fed their own shit.
Even suicide bombers appear in the fourth book if I remember correctly.

The third and the fourth, yeah. The Green Storm uses flying bombs guided by human pilots.

Great series, trailer looks good, tentative hype, but what bums me out is the fever crumb prequel series is still, after 6 years since 2011, sitting on 3 out of 4 books completed.

Edge chronicles is a prime examplw of good, no, great ya books with a great world, art, writing and no classic ya trash elements

>Miss Supremely Fucked Up
I remember a scene where she ran out of ammo and killed a man with a typewriter while Tom cried in the corner.
Something about it dinging with every blow, shit was fucked up for a children's series.

If they call him Grike I'm going to mail them all letter bombs.

If you go back to Mortal Engines now the characters are probably the thing you'll still appreciate in it. The series does a lot of good work giving moral subtlety to its protagonists and antagonists (and I'll say that rather than "heroes and villains"). Hester is a singularly fucked-up individual, if not actually psychopathic then so traumatized as to effectively be for 99% of the people she meets. I mean she loves Tom and that's it. She doesn't love her own daughter; she's willing to burn a town full of innocents just to get Tom back and when they actually split she just goes right back to killing people for money and not caring a damn thing about it.

>being angry that fantastic things can happen
>on a board about organized playing pretend

You are a small, sad little thing.

>Even suicide bombers
Wren and Theo watching a city get bombed.
"They're tumblers."
"They must be bombs, they're exploding."
"They are tumblers."
"But you were a tumbler pilot!?"
"Yes."
I have miss remembered, but damn, that scene sent a chill down my spine.

You are bang on with your assessment there, Hester strikes me as probably suffering from PTSD (she watched her parents die then had her face slashed open by their killer, she then gets raised by (and learns all of her coping strategies from) a literal killing machine who keeps heads in jars and has no attachment to anything but his collection of mechanical things.
Tom is the first pure, innocent creature she has ever come across, he loses his home by the hand of his hero, while trying to be a hero so he's going to take a back seat on everything as he's too scared to fuck it up and Hester rules supreme anyway.

I don't know about that last part. Tom is more naive and takes the initiative less than Hester but he ultimately can hurt her much more than she can hurt him: the ending shows that Hester won't live in a world without Tom.

That's the point I guess. These individuals exist in the debris of the first book's villainy and tarnished reputation and they find each other and cling together against all the world. They really do love each other, despite how different they are, and that love ultimately is what lasts beyond them. Even Shrike regains some measure of his humanity in just understanding that.

I think it hit maximum fucked up for me when a side character (surgeon-mechanic Oenone Zero of the Resurection Corps) found her dead brother on her slab and had to recycle him into a Stalker (undead robot soldier), which is described in some detail. Also her reaction on finishing doing that is to go out and have a smoke.

>She stared at him while she mechanically pulled on her rubber gauntlets. She didn't want to Resurrect him, but she knew what would happen to her if she refused. Sometimes soldiers on the line tried to stop the Corps from taking the bodies of their comrades for Resurrection; the Green Storm denounced them as crypto-tractionists, and they were shot and Resurected with their friends.

>Her assistants were staring at her, so she said, "Scalpel. Bonesaw. Rib-spreaders" and set to work. She opened [her brother]'s body and took out his internal organs, replacing them with engines, battery-housings and preservative pumps. She cut off his hands and replaced them with the steel hands of a Stalker. She cut off his private parts. She took out his eyes. She took off his skin, and wired a mysterious net of electrodes into the fibres of his muscles. She opened his skull and fitted a machine the size of a peach-stone into his brain, then watched him writhe and shudder as it unspooled wire-thin cilia down his spinal cord, connecting to his nervous system and to the other machines she had installed... When she had finished she handed him over to a junior surgeon-mechanic who would fit the exoskeleton and finger-glaives."

Oh, and it's mentioned that her tutor at the Stalker Works had "wandering hands", that she had to endure to reach to her position as surgeon-mechanic to Stalker Fang.

As children's books go, they're pretty fucking dark

I seem to remember that his was the last body who didn't 'talk to her'.
I feel like Tom doesn't mean any of the pain he deals to her, he's a puppy unaware that his bite can now draw blood, his claws and excited leaping up can now hurt people.
Hester runs straight back to killing because she was emotionless the last time she did it, maybe if she does it again she'll forget Tom.
She's also just straight up good at it.

Yeah, after him the dead start getting chatty, asking for the war to end.

Tom I think does know to a degree, incidentally - when he sees Hester's disregard for their daughter, iirc he's like "that's fucked up, and as probably the only person who can effect you emotionally I'm letting you know that by leaving". At least, that's what I recall.

Maybe I'm misremembering, it's been a long time since I read them.

I think Hester was the first character I ever wanted to help. The problem I had was I read these at a very young age (Mortal Engines when I was no more than 11), and it was so far beyond me in terms of the darkness. Everything was fucked (fine, all good stories have this) and there was absolutely no hope of it not being fucked. From the start I had the sense that this would not end well for anyone, and that kind of existential bleakness didn't sit well with me at all. I wanted someone to tell Tom and Hester everything would be fine, but I knew it couldn't be.

Also Shrike was fucking amazing, the bit about him being the last of the Lazarus brigage and talking about the Tesla guns gave me chills. Probably still will if I can find it again.

can we stop calling FANTASY STORIES FOR PRETEENS "young adult fiction" already?

I mean some of it is fucking great and all but for fuck's sake it's not aimed at young adults it's aimed at tweens.

But that's literally what the genre is called

that's literally what nobody should ever call it.

But it's what the genre is called. Nothing you or anyone else can do is going to change that. It's too well established by this point.

it's a marketing thing, no self-respecting teen wants to read children's' books, so they use the term 'young adult' to indicate their target demographic without pissing off said demographic

I've actually been looking for this series for ages, haven't read it since highschool so the name escaped me, glad to finally remember it

At least he'll be played by Stephen Lang

He's listed as Shrike, thankfully

imdb.com/title/tt1571234/

I remember there was a scene where Hester sees the poster for Pennyroyal's book and sees a herself depicted as some bimbo with a barely noticeable scar and gets all irritated. I feel like the movie is going to do exactly that, and not get the irony.

That's going to be deliciously ironic, I just hope that they don't try to combine all the books into one film.
I legit cried when Shrike layed them out to rest, don't remember how old I was but I remember tears rolling down my cheeks. Probably the first time I'd been emotionally moved by a piece of art as it were.

Thank fuck for that.

It was a really done moment.

I usually get annoyed at deaths in fiction, so many of them seem entirely arbitrary and just played for cheap drama, but Mortal Engines was one of the series which kept me invested enough to care about the characters and their perils, and every death felt meaningful and emotionally affecting, especially in that damn finale.

I'd forgotten about that, and you just know it's going to happen - I'd say she should be at least as bad as that poison chick from Wonder Woman, but you know she won't

>That's going to be deliciously ironic, I just hope that they don't try to combine all the books into one film.
Please dear god no. But knowing Hollywood, if anything they'll make 5 movies out of 4 books. The last one is pretty much long enough to warrant it, I guess.
>I legit cried when Shrike layed them out to rest, don't remember how old I was but I remember tears rolling down my cheeks. Probably the first time I'd been emotionally moved by a piece of art as it were.
Same. I think that was the first time a book ever made me cry. And the ending was top notch. I think I read the last quarter of the book or so in a single sitting because I was so hooked, and it was so satisfying to just know that all that hardship, all that darkness and death was all followed by something less terrible in the end.

The biggest thing for me was that they were remembered. That who they were, and what they had done, the story of all they had achieved would be passed on, so people would know their story. It gave the existence of the books this extra level of meta-narrative meaning, to me at least. He speaks the first line of the first book at the very close of the last. You are literally holding the story Shrike tells, to keep their memories alive.

What I'm hoping is that they're keeping the scar in reserve for a big reveal, for those who don't know the story at least. So they keep the face unmolested above the bandanna, she just looks like some steampunk explorer/adventurer type. Then she tries to assassinate Valentine, Tom intervenes, BOOM scar reveal! Audience gasps. If I remember correctly Tom didn't notice anything wrong with her face before the mask slipped so they may be taking that narrative angle.

>Read a concept synopsis
How the FUCK does it "eat" other cities? What does that mean? Are the raw materials reduced to some slag people build from? Did putting wheels on the city make it sentient? What on God's Green Earth is this?

Oh shit I'd forgotten about that. Thinking about it again gave me chills. That whole sequence was beautifully written, the image in my head was absolutely perfect and clear. The slowly increasing pace of the seasons, the eventual blur of years and decades and untold amounts of time, life blossoming around him, Shrike noticing the flowers being left on him and slowly waking himself up until one day the march of time stops and he scares some poor shepherd come to pay respects to the ancient guardian of the valley, and then passing on the stories of the past. I could see that translating extremely well to film, and with proper treatment I would watch a movie of the fourth book just for that scene.

Watch the movie trailer linked in the thread. A big old hole in the big city opens up, the little city is skewered and dragged inside, where its people are forcibly integrated into the workforce (alternatively, enslaved) and the whole structure is dismantled for parts and materials.

The book series is exploring that exact thing, granted the timetables are not realistic but it's not a goddamn realistic story for fuck sake. By the time the main characters meet MD as a strategy is dying out due to resource scarcity.

I'm really nervous about the movie. The fact that they're centering the trailer on the girl and seems to be told from her viewpoint and the fact that she has either no scar or very reduced scars, make me VERY nervous that we're gonna get an "Inclusive" version where the main character is Hester, who has had all her flaws removed and is fighting an evil white man.

Predator cities have 'jaws' that are used to latch onto other cities or that open up to swallow smaller cities whole after dragging them in. Once the jaws have either latched on or closed around a smaller city that has been absorbed, the swarms of engineers and soldiers in the cargo area set about pacifying the population of the captured city, siphoning its fuel and dismantling it a piece at a time, to stockpile the raw resources and then move on. The population of the captive city is either absorbed into the predator city's, enslaved or killed.

Watch this for an example of a big city eating a tiny city:

They wouldn't do that, not if they had any sense. It'd ruin the romance angle, which is going to be a big selling point to some audiences.

Read the thread mang.
They literally engulf other cities if small enough or rip off smaller parts of bigger prey to process piecemeal. There's a scene early in the book with an immobilised big city being torn apart piece by piece by a large group of smaller towns. In the books and the trailer you can see the jaws are massive and filled with gigantic rotating blades.
The city isn't sentient, the people driving it are.

To be fair, you have to have a high IQ to understand that a kids book about cities eating each other isn't meant to be realistic because fucking hell, when did things get this bad?

>What on God's Green Earth is this?
That's a fun choice of words, given that the force opposing the mobile cities in the later books vows to "Make the world Green again!" (via suicide bombers and undead robot soldiers)

"Eat" in this case is a purposefully visceral way to describe the smaller mobile city being captured (lifted in via mechanical "jaws"), its infrastructure disassembled, resources stolen and the population absorbed/enslaved into the larger city. If it sounds and feels wrong and unsettling, that's the whole point (with the extra impact from what says as well) - the system of "municipal darwinism" is not nice or sustainable