What is the concept of 'Municipal Darwinism' in the Mortal Engines movie and book?
Municipal Darwinism is the 'technological ecosystem' by which most of the world works in the Mortal Engines novel and movies. It's the dominant political and economic ideology that shapes the post-apocalyptic world, dictating a brutal way of life for the inhabitants of the great mobile cities.
It's basically a clever and darkly satirical play by author Philip Reeve on scientist Charles Darwin's survival of the fittest concept from his theory of natural selection.
However, instead of biological species competing over generations, Reeve applies this principle to entire cities, which have been mounted on colossal engines and caterpillar tracks, turning them into mobile predators.
A Brutal Zero-Sum Game
You need to add the twist that this entire system is a zero-sum game, meaning there can be only one winner, kind of like The Highlander. In economics or game theory, a zero-sum game is a situation where one person's gain is equivalent to another's loss, so the net change in wealth or benefit is zero.
In the world of *Mortal Engines*, this is taken literally. For a predator city like London to gain fuel, resources, and scrap, a smaller town must be captured and entirely consumed. The gain for one is the total annihilation of the other. There is no cooperation, no trade, and no mutual benefit, only consumption.
The concept is meant to be taken with a hint of tongue-in-cheek, black humour. The characters within the predator cities discuss "The Great Hunt" and the "eating" of smaller towns with a kind of detached, quasi-religious fervour, ignoring the horrifying reality of what they are doing.
This serves as a sharp satire of ideologies like manifest destiny and unchecked capitalism, where relentless expansion and consumption are framed as natural and necessary, regardless of the devastating cost to others.
Think of the concept as 'there's always a bigger fish' from Star Wars. Every fish is looking to get a meal but in the end, only the biggest fish will dominate and survive. Municipal Darwinism is this principle applied to civilization itself.
But what does the biggest fish do when there is no food left?
Therein lies the rub and the central, fatal flaw of the entire ideology.
The 'Law' of the Land and the Gut
The traction cities are the 'municipal' part of the concept.
They are organized communities, often with complex internal laws and customs. For instance, the city of London is rigidly structured into four main guilds (Engineers, Historians, Navigators, and Merchants) and follows a social structure reminiscent of an Elizabethan hierarchy.
However, the law between cities is simply the law of the jungle: eat or be eaten.
In general, the larger 'predator cities' look to consume smaller cities for their resources. This process is called a "hunt," and when a city is caught, its assets are stripped in "the Gut," the massive disassembly section at the city's base.
Physical resources are used for fuel or re-utilised within the city. Scrap metal is melted down, and valuable "Old-Tech" (artefacts from our own era) is salvaged by the Historians' Guild.
Humans living in the captured cities can be enslaved to work in the predator city's engine rooms or, in the most chilling extension of this philosophy, used as a source of protein and eaten.
That's right, eaten.
The novel Fever Crumb, a prequel to the main series, confirms this grim practice, showcasing the ultimate logical endpoint of an ideology that reduces everything, even human life, to a consumable resource.
The Unsustainable Engine
The main theory of Municipal Darwinism is a predator and prey cycle; if the bigger city or town is faster than the smaller, the smaller town will be caught and then be eaten.
But if the smaller town is faster than the bigger town, the bigger town risks running out of fuel and thus losing its prey or even facing attack itself in a reversal of fortune. This creates a perpetual arms race of speed and weaponry.
While in the context of the book's universe, this form of Darwinism has existed for thousands of years since the cataclysmic 'Sixty Minute War', its nature as a zero-sum game means it is not a sustainable means of living in the long term. Resources are finite.
As the big cities consume all the smaller ones in their hunting ground, they must venture further into depleted territories, burning more fuel for less reward.
The meaning of the title of Mortal Engines is that all the cities' engines are indeed mortal. Eventually, there will be nothing left for them to consume, and they will run out of fuel, fail, and die, just like the humans who lived on them.
Indeed, the title 'Mortal Engines' is a direct reference to a quote from William Shakespeare's Othello, where "mortal engines" refers to deadly cannons. Reeve re-purposes the phrase to suggest that these entire city-engines, the pinnacle of this future society's technology, are fundamentally instruments of death and are themselves fated to die.
And in part, that's the irony about the book's ending.
Resistance and an Alternative Way of Life
One must bear in mind that not everybody believes in this concept. The ideology of Municipal Darwinism is primarily practiced on the "Great Hunting Ground" of what was once Europe.
Many people living in hills, islands, and other static settlements choose not to live the traction city 'lifestyle', and they determinedly seek to form self-sustaining cultures based on agriculture and trade.
And there is of course, the whole Anti-Traction League thing at play... The Anti-Traction League is a powerful confederation of static nations that actively opposes Municipal Darwinism. They can see the endgame and that it ultimately means death for all and the complete destruction of the planet's remaining ecosystems.
That's why they seek to sabotage and destroy the big cities, knowing if they can stop their spread, their own territory would be safe. Their radical extremist wing, the Green Storm, employs terrorism and fanatical warriors to fight a violent war against the mobile world, believing that the Tractionist way of life must be eradicated at any cost.
I don't recall the reference to eating people, do you remember about where in the novels it was mentioned? i read all 7
ReplyDeleteI vaguely recall it was a one off line early on in the first novel. Will check when I'm close to my copy.
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