Philip Reeve's Q&A "The Reevening" Part One

Philip Reeve's Q&A about the origins of Mortal Engines

The Mortal Engines Discord is a group of keen Mortal Engines and Railhead book fans who gather together to share their love of the worlds that Reeve has created.

One bright spark had the idea to invite Reeve over for a Q&A interview which he graciously accepted. Here's some of the best bits that related directly to the Mortal Engines series.

Crow-caller and the crew did an excellent job of making sure they had awesome questions pre-planned and keeping the moderation flow in check.

Some of the replies may seem slightly disjointed as there may have been some discussion from other Discord members that shaped the response but were not part of the original question.

Which was your favourite book in the mortal engines quartet to write? Which one do you think is ‘best’? Is there any particular scene/part/character you enjoyed writing best?

I think my favourite to write was A Darkling Plain, because I sort of knew I could do it by then, and for once I had a pretty good idea what would happen at the end. But I think the best is Predator's Gold - I didn't think so while I was working on it, because it kept going wrong and multiple versions were binned, but I think the struggle kind of paid off. (I should add that that I haven't read any of the books since they went to print, so I'm going on my memories of them.)

I heard that Hester was intended to be a kind person with a gruff exterior in ME, but later became the person she is in the later books. What inspired this decision, and would you change anything about ME to reflect it?

I think when I was writing ME I was working on the assumption that Hester was basically a good person who just happened to look awful, and once Tom saw past that all would be well. Which is fine as far as the first book goes, I don't think I'd change that. But as the story expanded into the second book I thought more about her and realised she'd be damaged in ways which couldn't really be fixed.

And I quite enjoyed seeing how bad I could make her, while hopefully retaining our sympathy. She's my favourite character, I couldn't have written the three sequels without her.

Many books and movies end with typical happily ever after moments, however, each part of the Predator Cities quartet ends in loss. Mortal Engines ends by having an entire city going supernova, killing almost all the characters except Tom & Hester. Predator’s Gold ends by having Tom getting shot. Infernal Devices ends with Hester leaving Tom. A Darkling Plain ends with the death of Tom & Hester. Why didn’t you have typical happy endings for these books?

I didn't deliberately set out to have a down ending on all the books, and I hadn't realised I had till you mentioned it! (PG is quite 'up' I think - they arrive safely in the new world...) I generally try to balance any darkness and despair with some hope - these are kids books, after all, I didn't want to be too depressing. But I guess I didn't want endings where all problems were sorted and everyone lived happily ever after.

Well, clean cut endings can work! But the important thing is that the ending has to be right for the story, and the M.E. stories were too murky to have happy-ever-after endings. I do find that, as I get older, I prefer happier endings, though - I don't think I'd write those books in the same way now.

Something I’ve always appreciated about Mortal Engines, Fever Crumb (and Railhead) is the diversity present in the characters- LGBT relationships in Fever crumb and Railhead, as well as international/racially diverse casts. Time wise it seems you’ve had more diversity as you’ve gone on. Is there any particular ‘reason’ for this?

Re. the diversity question, that's not something I really think about consciously. I guess London in the first book is very white, at least on the upper tiers where Tom starts out, and part of the story is about him venturing out and meeting all sorts of other people & learning that they're not the barbarians he's been led to believe... And that process continues in the later books, as we travel to other parts of the world.

Re. Railhead, conscious in the sense that I was trying to imagine a 'good' future (no 60 minutes war here, just expansion across the galaxy, all watched over by machines of loving grace). So obviously racism & sexism & homophobia wouldn't be a thing any more, and I assume that demographically if you fast-forwarded the human race by a few thousand years you'd end up with mostly brown people, so I made that the default setting whenever I brought in a new character. I'm very glad it worked for you, Jack!

Fever's bisexuality simply came from me wanting to write about having a crush on someone - which was as close as I ever got to romance when I was a teenager- only Fever was too ratyional to nurse a hopeless crush on some young man, she'd just tell him. So I had her fall for Cluny, which was against her own 'rational' upbringing and the rules of Cluny's rather retro society. And that seemed to work.

Was there anything specific that inspired your idea for the traction cities/particular characters/the ME world in general? Like anything in your life or perhaps a character/world in other works that inspired you?

Yes, inspiration arrived from all sorts of places, but usually kind of indirectly. And usually once I'd rewritten it a few dozen times, it was changed beyond recognition anyway. So Valentine started out as the sort of boo, hiss villain Alan Rickman used to play in 80s movies, but gradually he developed a conscience and became a very different character.

Reeve's then posted this picture that inspired London:

Reeves then shared some more thoughts on Hester's origins and the inspirations for Anna Fang's character:

Thinking back 25 years... Hester started out as a character in a low budget movie I made - Deadly Ernest, mentioned way back up this thread - I had a friend who'd done one little movie for me and had a very beautiful face, and I thought what shall we do with her next - I know, we'll make her Lee Van Cleef.

So she became an enigmatic female gatling gun slinger in what I now realise was a sort of proto-steampunk story. And that character kind of bumbled on into the next thing I wrote, which was the 1st draft of Mortal Engines.

But I started thinking OK, she's living by wits in the badlands, she probably won't be all that beautiful - and the hero falling out of his city and into love with a BEAUTIFUL GURL isn't all that interesting - so maybe she should be ugly. And Hester kind of came from there. Anna Fang is basically Han Solo, but she's also Strider from LOTR, of course!

In your interview with The Sheehab (which I really enjoyed reading!) you mentioned that when you write, you know what world you want to explore and you just jump in from there, generating scenes and characters that you don't always end up using. Can you tell us about any of those unused scenes and characters?"

I guess in the course of all four Mortal Engines books anything that was any good got used. Usually when I cut a scene its because it slows things down or doesn't advance the story, or takes it in the wrong direction, so I try and fillet out any useful images or scraps of dialogue and use them elsewhere.

There was a whole abandoned novel after Mortal Engines, about a raft city (Brighton) escaping across the Atlantic from the Green Storm. I binned that, but the basic idea became Predator's Gold, and Brighton reappeared in ID, so it wasn't completely wasted. There are a bunch of Anna Fang back story bits which got bumped from book to book and never quite fitted in anywhere, but other than that I don't think there's anything readable lying around.

Edit: It appears Reeve has taken these 'story bit's and turned them into a short story collection called Night Flights.

I'm sure you've heard this a lot, but what is the status of fever crumb four? do you think with the interest from the movie we might finally see it in print?'

No, I think FC4 is past resurrecting now. In so far as I had a plan, I was planning to end it with London getting on the move, and when I sensed that Id have trouble getting it published I made that happen in bk 3 instead, so 4 would have been an odd book even if I had written it... And I decided not to: I started doing my books with Sarah McIntyre instead, and then Railhead, both of which I've really enjoyed, so I think I want to keep moving forward. Plus, I think there's something quite nice about the Fever quartet being unfinished...


Shrike Concept art by the very talented Peter Yea.

1 comment fever crumb, mortal engines, philip reeve, railhead

↠ What was the Sixty Minute War in Mortal Engines?

What was the Sixty Minute War?

The Sixty Minute War was a global battle that took place thousands of years before the events of the Mortal Engines Quartet and the Fever Crumb Series.

The 60 minute name conveys that the war took only an hour to begin and end - this was due to the speed and efficiency of the weapons of mass destruction used.

This is because of the way nuclear war scenarios work.

Say Country A decides to wipe out Country B. B can detect the launch of A.

They have time to understand that even though their country is about to be wiped out, they can get their own bloody revenge on Country A.

So they will launch their their own missiles at Country A ensuring that it is destroyed too. This is called mutually assured self destruction.

While the former Soviet Union played brinkmanship games with the US (think the Cuban Missile Crisis) no country has crossed the line as they know there's a large chance that they will lose everything themselves (Hiroshima and Nagasaki aside as only the US had such weapons at the time).

So in the book and movie of Mortal Engines, there was of course a 'cold war' between various nations that directly led to the war's start. The mutual self destruction concept played out and when the first strike was launched, the other nations responded in kind.

And once the arms were deployed, some from the land, some from orbiting satellites in space and may be the odd submarine, the so called 'war' was over and done with in an hour.

This was the classic doom's day scenario leading to a desolate Earth where most of humanity was destroyed. In Reeve's novels North America became known as The Dead Continent and thought inhospitable for human life.

Two of the weapons were known as the MEDUSA, which features in the first novel and the second, ODIN, is first featured in the third novel of the Predator Cities Quartet, Infernal Devices.

The ODIN weapon was used by Stalker Anna Fang in A Darkling Plain to great effect when she went on a rather magnificent rampage and destroyed all in her path.

The original novel also noted at page 7 that 'tailored virus bombs' were also used. We can only imagine the horror that those weapons delivered on to Earth's population.

MEDUSA on London City

What is the Dead Continent?

The Dead Continent is the name given to what we would considered modern North America.

As the center of the  American Empire, it was a key target during the infamous Sixty Minute  

By the time of the late Traction Era, it was regarded by many humans as a barren, irradiated, desolate and unhospitable land, lost to time.

Professor Nimrod Pennyroyal claimed to have adventured and explored the Dead Continent and wrote a very popular book about his travels.

The truth was a few people where in the know - many of the parts from the MEDUSA weapon where sourced from the continent.

In Predator's Gold, the novel finished with Tom Natsworthy and Hester Shaw deciding to settle in Vineland, an area of the Dead Continent that was discovered to be habitable and sustainable in the long-term.

As to what the author Philip Reeve had to say about what he thought was going on:

"I think it's actually highly unlikely that the US is a 'dead continent' - however badly knocked about it was, it would have been re-seeded with plants and animals by the time of Mortal Engines. So I expect Valentine and other explorers have missed a lot of thriving low-intensity settlements and secret airbases.

I was thinking of secret airbases full of pirate airships etc, but who knows - maybe there are whole underground societies which went into deep bunkers when the bombs started falling and are still waiting for the all clear."

If you think this concept from Philip Reeve's book was interesting, check out his theory of municipal darwinism.

1 comment dead continent, fever crumb, medusa, mortal engines, mortal engines quartet, odin, sixty minute war

An experiment with an A.I. to create The Shrike

As a fan of the Mortal Engines book series, I was recently playing around with OpenAI's Dall.E, an AI system that generates images from textual descriptions.

My focus was on one of the most intriguing characters from the series, the Stalker known as Shrike. I was excited to see what Dall.E would come up with based on my description of this mysterious character. 

At first, my prompts were not specific enough and I was disappointed with the results. But after a few tries, I finally managed to give Dall.E more descriptive inputs and I was blown away by the results. 

The images that Dall.E generated were exactly crazily close to what one could imagine the Shrike may look like for a book reader. 

My initial chat prompt was "the shrike creature from mortal engines with green eyes". It would seem the AI interpreted the definition of Shrike as the bird:

 

So I updated the prompt to make it clear I was talking about a man / robot:

"the shrike man  / robot AI from "mortal engines" book with green eyes"

I then focused on what The Shrike's face could look like:

"the shrike man  / robot AI from "mortal engines" book with green eyes - scary and ugly face"

I then tried out:

""the shrike" from the "mortal engines" novels. He is a man with a robot body. Evil green eyes with a nasty looking face. whole body image. His hands have knives for fingers. He looks haunted and hours away from death."

These works were pretty cool and in a sense will give concept designers a run for their money. Still, nothing beats Nick Keller's original Mortal Engines concept art!

Leave a Comment shrike

How the Mortal Engines movie is different from the book

How the Mortal Engines film is different from the novel

To get a movie of a book made and onto the silver screen, the narrative of the plot more often than not needs to be changed.

This is for reasons of time, storytelling and pacing.

Because let's face it books and films are very different mediums and while people can get really upset that their favorite parts of their most favorite books don't get included in the movie, the reality is most changes are necessary.

Some characters get cut out of the script completely (Think Tom Bombadil in Lord of the Rings ) or two or more characters get morphed into one. Even whole endings can change, such as the Watchmen's Giant Squid ending being changed to Doctor Manhattan taking the fall.

Scriptwriters Philipa Boyens, Fran Walsh and Peter Jackson, having won an Oscar for their adaptation of The Return of the King, know a thing or two about taking original works and getting them up on the silver screen.

For instance, the character of Faramir in The Two Towers had to be altered.

Here's what Boyens had to say about it:

"If you're trying to up the tension, you don't have your main characters captured by someone who sort of interrogates them, but, not really, who then offers them a cup of tea and says, 'I'll do anything I can to help you.' It's death on film. And it's not just the effect that the character out of the book has on Frodo and Sam's journey, it's the effect that character has on the Ring.

You've just been desperately trying to establish that this is the most evil thing ever created, it's tearing apart the mind of your main character, it's reduced this other character to this miserable creature Gollum, and now you come along someone who says, 'I would not touch this thing if it lay on the highway.' You've just stripped the Ring of all its power."

Which should demonstrate she knows what she's doing.

The movie, of course, retains plenty of similarities with the book and indeed we're sure that many an English teacher will ask her students to do an essay which compares and contrasts the two mediums. Hey kids!

And so it is with Mortal Engines that the movie had to change a few things in the book.

Here's a few of the key changes and why they were necessary.

Hester's facial scar change

Let's start with the most 'cosmetic' change.

Hester Shaw is not ugly!

In the book she is described as "" whereas the movie softens this dramatically. Yes, Hera Hilmar sports a scar but it's nothing so horrid as one can imagine that Hester wears.

She even has two working eyes!

Anna Fang

Anna Fang’s (played by Jihae) introduction is considerably more action-packed than the novel. She has considerably more on screen time in terms of her 'book pages' time and she is more involved in the final stages of the film - she even dies on London.

Tunbridge Wheels

To help streamline the story into a cogent 2 hour film the pirate town and what happens to Hester and Tom is cut from the film.

Dog

Katherine Valentine's dog called DOG is not in the film.

Of gods and banana?

Look carefully for modern artifacts in the Museum and keep an eye out for the Minions! They are in a section called "Deities of Lost America".

In the novel the humans have mistaken Mickey Mouse for a god. Due to ownership rights, the Minions have been subbed in.

The characters are older than portrayed in the novel

What's that saying about making movies, never work with kids and animals? This big budget movie needs to appeal to a broad audience, and while the novel is Young Adult, Christian Rivers needed to make his movie appealing to a mass audience. So while Tom and Hester are young, the actors playing them are not.

Jackson said of this change "We've changed the book a bit in places. We've aged it up. The book is written for quite a young audience, to some degree, you know? And I just don't think anybody wants to see another teenage dystopian movie any time soon. So, it's one of the reasons why we've aged it sort of up, and we cast it a bit older. Tom and Hester in the book are younger... We had made it a little bit more adult."

Captain Khora and Nils Lindstrom, Yasmina 

The book has small roles for these two friends of Anna Fang yet they have been fleshed out in the movie to give Shrike more time to beat them up!

Magnus and Thaddeus

In the novel Magnus Chrome is the overarching bad guy where Valentine does his dirty work. It would seem that Hugo Weaving's character looms larger of the film than Magnus Chrome.

In the film, Valentine seizes control of London by killing Chrome. In the novel, they both die in the same room as London explodes.

Airships

Airships now have jet propulsion, because it makes for a better spectacle. 

Guild symbols

It would seem the movie characters do not have their respective guild symbols permanently attached on their foreheads like they do in the novel. Instead it appears they show their demarcations by use of symbols on their clothing.

The Ending

A vastly changed ending for the movie which works well.

Tom does not kill Shrike, He's effectively taken down by the Anti-Traction League and a few well placed shots by Anna Fang flying the Jenny Hanniver. This serves as an opportunity for Shrike to forgive Hester for leaving him, freeing him from her promise (the concept of him turning her into a Stalker was still at play from the novel).

Valentine is not killed on London, he is killed by London after he crashes on the 13th Floor Elevator which was shot down by Tom. The wheels of London crush him just as he thinks he's survived his final clash with Hester.

Anna still dies at the hands of Valentine but it is on London.

Katherine Valentine - well played as a character but went simply nowhere in terms of plot, like you could cut the character (and Bevis) and have no consequence to the ending of the movie, which is completely different to the ending of the novel. In the novel, Katherine dies, in the book, she leads the people of London to the shield wall.

Other points of difference

• Salthook was renamed Saltzhaken
• Anna Fang does not have red teeth
• The books are not obviously a play by play from the Star Wars plot.

Leave a Comment fran walsh, lord of the rings, novel to movie, peter jackson, phillipa boyens

How the opening of the Mortal Engines film is basically the start of Star Wars

When I was a young lad my dad brought home a copy of a film called Star Wars.

I knew nothing about this movie and I had no idea what I was about to see.

As you probably know, the film famously starts with a chase. Darth Vader's Star Destroyer is chasing Princess Leia's Tantive IV in a bid to regain the plans to the Death Star.

It was amazing and left a lasting impression on myself and many a viewer due to the size of what was been shown - the ship was massive in comparison to the smaller ship.

I could not help notice how director Christian Rivers appears to have made an homage or reference to Stars Wars in the Mortal Engines trailer. We, of course, are assuming the trailer is the start of the movie, based on the first page of the book (and its famous first line)

Here's how the Star Wars opening plays out:

The trailer for Mortal Engines is also a chase, one that mirrors the iconic Star Wars start in that the traction city of Salthook is framed by itself, wheels blazing just like the lonely Tantive IV.

Then, the city of London, slowly but surely comes into screen, showing that the chase is on, consuming the entire screen, just as it wants to consume Salthook.

Sure there are some differences between the ME film trailer and the opening of Star Wars such as the two eyed Hester Shaw inter-cuts but the concept and referencing or homage is absolutely there!

Mortal Engines itself is no stranger to Star Wars - the character of Anna Fang was in part inspired by by Han Solo! 

Learn how many words Darth Maul says in Star Wars The Phantom Menace.

Leave a Comment christian rivers, mortal engines, star wars

↠ What are 'Stalkers' in Mortal Engines?

What are the Stalker Soldiers in Mortal Engines?

CAUTION: EPIC SPOILERS BELOW FOR BOTH BOOK AND FILM


The Stalkers of Mortal Engines are a kind of 'universal soldier' / Robocop combatant, that can be programmed for warfare and assassination.

Stalkers and their variations play various parts in each of Philip Reeve's Quartet of Mortal Engines, Predator's Gold, Infernal Devices and A Darkling Plain.

What are the origins of the Stalkers?

Stalkers originally were designed as mechanisms for humans to transfer their consciousness from one body to another, thus defeating death. The human mind could literally be saved to the hard drive and then transferred into the body of another human.

It was long after the events of 60 Minute War that 'old technology' was adapted to make Stalkers into emotionless monsters to serve at the whim of their masters.

Often referred to as 'Resurrected Men' Stalkers were originally built by the Nomadic Empires that battled each other across the volcano maze of what was once Europe long before the Traction Cities Era began.

The Nomadic Empires built Stalkers by recovering dead bodies from the battlefields, placing them in laboratories and then bringing them back 'life' by using 'Old Tech' machines that were physically connected to the dead body's nervous system. 

This practice continued on to the Traction City Era.

The bodies were also operated on so internal organs were no longer necessary. The designers also would graft on a metal carapace to the body. Weapons could be implanted into the body and the use of claws was a common feature. 

In the film, Shrike did not have claws, whereas he did in the novel.

The best subjects were taller specimens and they looked a scary sight with their glowing green eyes that all Stalkers had.

Stalkers are generally considered emotionless automatons, only acting at the will of their Masters.

Once a dead human is resurrected as a Stalker, they have no feelings, displays no emotions and they will not have any memory of who they were before they died. Any past memories are jumbled messes and lost glimpses of their former life.

In Mortal Engines, the City of London manufactures its own Stalkers.

The London Guild of Engineers builds new Stalkers from dead prison convicts at their experimental prison in the Deep Gut. These particular Stalkers are not considered as refined as the infamous 'Shrike' due to the use of less sophisticated stalker-brains, the devices used in the brains and nerves of Stalkers.

The origins of these Resurrected Men, begin to be explained in the first prequel in the Mortal Engines series, Fever Crumb. Scrivener's Moon expands on the details as well,

Shrike was played in the film by Stephen Lang.

What is the Shrike in Mortal Engines?

The 'Shrike' was the first Stalker to be mentioned in the original Mortal Engines book.

His character was under the control of the Mayor of London Traction City, Magnus Chrome. Chrome used the Shrike to find Hester Shaw and Tom Natsworthy and he was ordered to kill them.

At face value, this seemed a straightforward plot point however it was later revealed that The Shrike had once looked after Hester in a past life.

Due to his emotionally retarded state, his own goal in life was to turn Hester into a Stalker like himself, so they could live together forever.

In terms of memory retention, Shrike appears to be the exception to the rule as was able to recall his past life as 'Kit Solent' shortly before his death at the hands of Tom Natsworthy by the sword. Kit Solent's tale and how he became a Stalker of the Lazarus Brigade was covered in the prequel novel, Fever Crumb.

In the film Shrike is played by veteran actor Stephan Lang - you may remember him as the evil general in Avatar.

>> Stuck for yeast when making beer? You can ferment your beer with baker's yeast! <<

Are Stalkers invulnerable?

Stalkers are heavily protected by their armour but vulnerable to small arms fire and hand-held weaponry.

Due to their 'programming' they do not feel any pain as their nervous systems are rendered. This means they are pretty handy in hand to hand combat as even if their opponent is able to stab them or cause injury, they will not feel it and be able to continue to fight and thus increasing their chances of winning.

In Mortal Engines, Tom Natsworthy did manage to kill the Shrike Stalker with a sword by impaling it through his neck. The Shrike was however suffering from some performance issues as he'd actually been run over by a Traction City!



But there's a reason Stalkers are known as Resurrected Men....

Anna Fang as a Stalker in the sequel novels

In Mortal Engines, Anna Fang was Tom and Hester's rescuer from the Shrike when he originally caught up with them on Airhaven.

Despite her heroics, Fang was ultimately killed by the dastardly Thaddeus Valentine in a sword fight.

In Predator's Gold it was revealed that a splinter group of the famed Anti Traction League called Green Storm had recovered Fang's body and applied the Stalker Resurrection techniques to it.

Green Storm had intended that the revived Anna Fang would lead them in battle against the remaining Traction Cities.

Eventually, the resurrected Fang stalker would take part in many battles and features in Infernal Devices and A Darkling Plain where her character wreaks some pretty spectacular havoc using the ODIN device.

Shrike fan art

Extra for Experts (spoilers):

• Stalkers are sometimes referred to as 'Jaegers'
• All Stalkers have green glowing eyes
• Stalker tech can be used on animals such as birds and even whales
• In some American versions of Mortal Engines Shrike is named 'Grike'.
• Shrike is named after the bird of the same name.
• Shrike is actually the narrator of the Mortal Engines books as discovered in the final paragraph of A Darkling Plain. 

Leave a Comment anna fang, grike, kit solent, london, shrike, stalkers, stephen lang

What is the MEDUSA weapon in Mortal Engines?

BOOK AND FILM SPOILERS BELOW

How does the Medusa weapon work in the Mortal Engines books?

MEDUSA.

In Mortal Engines, MEDUSA was the ancient Old-Tech super weapon that the Mayor of London city, Magnus Chrome tried to use to breach the Shield Wall.

Magnus intended to use the Medusa weapon against the Walk so that he could take London City through to the fertile hunting grounds beyond the wall.

But what exactly is the Medusa and how is it used?

Does it make you turn to stone if you look at it too long?

MEDUSA is a 'ground-based' weapon.

It is stated in the Mortal Engines novel as taking up the whole of the inside of St Paul's Cathedral, where the Guild of Engineers had rebuilt it under complete secrecy.

Philip Reeve described as having a huge, metallic hood shaped 'like a cobra's hood'. It fires a beam of energy (either sourced from outside the real universe, or the cities generators), resembling a "cat-o-nine-tails", at targets up to two hundred miles away.

The firing coordinates are input via a control panel at the base of the firing mechanism.

In the Mortal Engines novel, the Medusa was never actually used as intended.

It was accidentally destroyed by Katherine Valentine who was mortally wounded during her noble attempt to sabotage it. She succeeded somewhat - the Medusa was unable to be fired by Magnus Chrome but it did over heat, blow up and destroy the city of London with it.

The resulting explosion killed most of the thousands of people living in the city, many of them innocent.

A concept idea: The Engineers prepare Medusa for firing

So where did the MEDUSA  weapon come from?

The weapon was originally deployed in America during the infamous Sixty Minute War, the one which turned planet Earth into a post-apocalyptic wasteland from which the traction cities eventually evolved from. This is not to say the Medusa was the only weapon used that caused the destruction. The satellite systems known as ODIN  also wreaked a fair amount of damage.

Many thousands of years after the great War, London secretly made archeological expeditions to the Dead Continent and gathered the pieces of Medusa from an old Brothal base and re-assembled it inside the St Paul's complex.

In a key plot point which echoed a generation,  Thaddeus Valentine (working for Magnus Chrome)  had years before the events of the book, sort to obtain the computer control system of the Medusa. A fabulously complex item of technology even by the standards of scientists from the pre-war era,

Valentine tracked it to being in the hands of Hester's parents, found them and killed them. During this horrible moment, he also scarred Hester with his sword, both physically and of course mentally.

So what is the plot of Mortal Engines in relation to Medusa?

Katherine Valentine spends most of the first part of Mortal Engines trying to figure out what MEDUSA is. Then, when the city of London is being chased by the city Panzerstadt-Bayreuth the roof of St Paul's Cathedral lifts up and destroys the predator city with a blast of pure energy from the weapon.

The successful use of the weapon serves as proof of concept to Magnus Chrome and it further adds to his resolve to breach the Shield Wall.

Magnus' plans are ultimately foiled when MEDUSA system overloads with energy and explodes, obliterating most of London with it.

The movie version plays out quite different - Medusa is actually fired on the wall before it is destroyed by Tom.

Here's some points on how the book is different from the movie.

Concept art of Medusa being opened above Saint Paul's Cathedral by Jaekyung Jaguar Lee. Medusa firing art design by Peter Yea.

Leave a Comment dead continent, katherine valentine, medusa, weapons