READER 2// Future Worlds : Philip Reeve,
Mortal Engines (2001)
INTRIDUCTION P:373-374
·
Mortal Engines finds a place
here as an example of modern science-fantasy fiction for children.
·
Reeve's work is
as an invoking a dystopian the future.
·
Reeve's
exercise in dystopia imagines eco-catastrophe and resultant global warfare, a world
destroyed by the greed of capitalism and blighted by the urban.
·
It features
twinned protagonists, Tom Natsworthy and Hester Shaw,
who live in a lawless post-apocalyptic world inhabited by roving cities which predate up each
other in a blasted landscape.
·
Mortal
Engines is notable for its elegiac casting of historians as
unlikely heroes against engineers and scientists who, as a body, represent the
mistakes of both the past and the present; and it is also notable
for its unusually dark sensibility,
killing off a high percentage of those characters who would in children's fiction conventionally survive into a happy ending.
·
Like The Other Side of Truth, Mortal Engines thus has a strongly foregrounded political agenda;
and like them, too, it places faith in the
resilience and uncorruptedness of children.
Carnivalizing
the Future: Mortal Engines
Kay
Sambell
P374-386
Kay Sambell
considers the history of children's science fiction and dystopian fiction with
special reference to Mortal Engines. She argues that Reeve establishes new possibilities for
children's science fiction by endorsing a new form of comic child-heroism which at once critiques adult incompetence and allows
for the hope
of survival and regeneration.
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·
Science fiction is dominated
by authorial fears about: violent/inhuman social
political worlds young
people seem likely to inherit.
·
Post-apocalyptic depicting horrifying visions of hostile societies that are shockingly indifferent to
injustice, oppression, persecution and the suffering of masses.
·
The future is typically represented as a
terrifying nightmare that child readers must strive to avoid at all costs. The
authors pull no punches in depicting brutally enforced
inequality, horrifying violence and the systematic dismantling of individual
rights in their future worlds.
·
Dystopia form for children is used to make serious and daunting comment on where we are really going as a society.
Its primary purpose is to puncture old myths and dreams,
by proving, in the form of a literary experiment, what human aspirations and ideals are really likely to mean
for the future of mankind.
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