Philip Reeve

British author of the Mortal Engines steampunk quartet, whose vision of mobile predator cities consuming each other on a post-apocalyptic Earth was adapted into a Peter Jackson film.

Philip Reeve is a British author whose debut novel Mortal Engines, published in 2001, introduced one of the most extraordinary and original world-building concepts in modern young adult science fiction: a post-apocalyptic Earth where cities have been mounted on enormous wheels or tracks and roam the landscape in a Darwinian system of “Municipal Darwinism,” with larger cities hunting and consuming smaller ones for their resources. The image of London, a vast traction city, rumbling across a devastated Europe toward a moving prey town is unforgettable.

The Mortal Engines quartet — which continues with Predator’s Gold, Infernal Devices, and A Darkling Plain — follows Tom Natsworthy and Hester Shaw across this extraordinary world, from the moving cities to the static settlements that resist them, through airship battles and ancient technological secrets. Reeve’s world-building is extraordinarily detailed and internally consistent, and he refuses to simplify the moral landscape: the mobile cities are monstrous in their predation but also possessed of genuine civilization and beauty.

The series won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and the Nestlé Children’s Book Prize and was adapted into a film produced by Peter Jackson in 2018. Reeve has also written the Larklight steampunk trilogy, set in a Victorian solar system, and the Railhead science fiction series. He is one of the most inventive world-builders in British children’s and young adult literature, and his best work rewards adult readers fully as much as its intended young audience.