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"[Science fiction] has become big business, where books are merchandised and promoted and distributed and placed on sale like slabs of bacon or cans of soup."
- Frederik Pohl
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| Traction City | ||
| Cities re-engineered as enormous, lumbering machines. |
A Traction City can be huge - an "Urbivore" with millions of inhabitants, to villages that move using small engines or sails.
Big Traction Cities are built in tiers like a wedding cake; the poor live next to the tracks and engines on the bottom, and the upper classes enjoy their mansions at the top of the city.
| It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.
In happier times, London would never have bothered with such feeble prey. The great Traction City had once spent its days hunting far bigger towns than this, ranging north as far as the edge of the Ice Wastes and south to the shores of the Mediterranean. But lately prey of any kind had started to grow scarce, and some of the larger cities had begun to look hungrily at London... ...lookouts on the high watchtowers spied the mining town, gnawing at the salt flats twenty miles ahead... [the] mining town saw the danger and turned tail, but already the huge caterpillar tracks under London were starting to roll fostering faster. Soon the city was lumbering in hot pursuit, a moving mountain of metal which rose in seven tiers like layers of a wedding cake, the lower levels wreathed in engine smoke, the villas of the rich gleaming white on the higher decks, and above it all the cross on top of St Pauls Cathedral glinting gold, 2000 feet above the ruined earth.
 (Traction city) |
| Technovelgy from Mortal Engines,
by Philip Reeve. Published by EOS in 2003 Additional resources -
|
Most cities have attachments called "Jaws" to catch prey and drag it into the Gut of the city. Here the prey is stripped, melted down and used as fuel. Its inhabitants then become members of the predator city, or even taken as slaves.
For a much earlier take on the basic idea, see the steam-powered houses from Henry Loudon's 1828 classic The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century.
Thanks to Alex Mair for contributing this item.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Mortal Engines
More Ideas
and Technology by Philip Reeve
Tech news articles related to Mortal Engines
Tech news articles related to works by Philip Reeve
Traction City-related
news articles:
- Garbage-Eating Factories Now, Voracious Cities Later
- CV08 Suburb-Eating Robot Concept
- EATR - DARPA's Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot
- Very Large Structure - A Megamachine
| Amazon Will Send You Heinlein's Knockdown Cabin |
| Elegant Bivouac Shelter Produces Water And Electricity |
| AI-THu Shapeshifting Transformer Home |
| With Mycotecture, We'll Just Grow The Space Habitats We Need |
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'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
'It's so light that you can set it up in five minutes by yourself...'
'Heavy penalties... were to be applied to any one found driving manually-controlled machines.'
'Buy a Little Dingbat... electropen, wrist watch, pocketphone, pocket radio, billfold ... all in one.'
'... an elastic, tinted material that had all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.'
'It is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature...'
