Monday, January 09, 2012

The Mortal Engines series

Let's save some time and assume I'll read all of these eventually, although now I've only read the first two. I got Maxima the first one for Christmas and she liked it so much she used her Christmas gift vouchers to buy the next two. I'd have read the third except she's plodding through them slowly herself. In an hilarious aside, we learnt yesterday that Minima has struggled through book one when she was in Tunisia last summer - you could've knocked us over with something quite light when she told us. She's normally so anti-fantasy and science-fiction. But she had nothing else to read when her friend had dropped off for the night, so she succumbed. And hated it.

I'm not completely sold either. It reminds me of a bunch of other stuff, ideas slightly cobbled together, and it lacks a little bit of that character depth you need in books of this sort, otherwise it's just cool imagery. Cool here means, like, steampunk. Which is so wow. Second book gets better though. Bonus points for author not being afraid to kill characters. And of course for concept, which is municipal darwinism in extremis and literally so.

It's being filmed, apparently - what isn't, these days? It'll probably end up loud and annoying. 

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