Scriviner's Moon

By Philip Reeve

Another book in a series, and to be honest, a series that's gone a little bit off the boil.
The first book, Mortal Engines, has one of the best opening lines I've read in a long time. "It was a cold blustery day in April and the city of London was in pursuit of a small mining town across the dried up bed of the former North Sea."
Pretty much the whole concept's there, predatory mobile cities, environmental collapse, add in airships, killer cyborgs and heroic archeologists hunting the technology lost in the Sixty Minute War and you've got a great adventure setting. I'm vaguely surprised that there's no roleplaying game, and I've been known to storyboard the amine or perhaps comic. It really would make a stonking Studio Ghibli flick.
But that's mainly the first book, which lead off a quartet about the end of the era of mobile cities, followed now by another set at the very start. Three books in (Fever Crumb, A Web of Air, and now this) and London has just about been rebuilt as the first mobile city, as reactionary forces join in an attempt to destroy it in the cradle. There are journies into the wilderness, chases, lost civilisations, murder a betrayal.
All you'd want from a rollicking adventure story.
In the end one world dies and a new one is born, which might or might not be the end of the tale. Perhaps there's comething to say about the birth of the Anti-Traction League, but I'm not certain it's needed.
To write a script for the comic or not? I can't draw, but it might be interesting as a learning exercise. Obviously an IP violation, especially if posted here, but it's not like many people read this drivel.