This series was originally jointly on my blog and Philip Reeve’s, but his has been overrun with malware so all four posts are now on my own site: Part 1 Part 3 Part 4 

I’m immensely chuffed to announce that the Illustrated World of Mortal Engines, the actual, factual, physical, gorgeous, expanded and wonderfully illustrated version of the Traction Codex Philip Reeve and I worked on together back when I was at uni… launches TOMORROW (though it’s turning up in bookshops and letterboxes already). I haven’t talked about it here yet, because honestly I haven’t talked much about anything other than travelling since I started getting real jobs which don’t like you talking about them online. But it was Very Cool to do.

To commemorate the launch, and talk a bit more about the process of creating the book, I’ve put together an A-Z of the Illustrated World. The first part is on Philip’s blog here, and there’ll be two more after this one. Had a look at the first part? All settled? Read on…

Part Two: G-M

G is for Green Storm…

…who readers will know are very important in the later books, but are most conspicuous here by their absence.

The IWOME developed through a long period of writing, hashing out ideas and improving the general structure. One of the issues which emerged, which we never really found an answer to, was that going into the Storm and their war with the cities was a big distraction from the original story of Mortal Engines. Worse, due to the limit on the length of the book and the time pressures of getting illustrations for all the other new stuff in, there wasn’t really time or space to do the Green Storm War justice. So the Storm, and the war, are alluded to but don’t feature heavily in the IWOME.

But! We have the early drafts of lots of material – hydrofoil swarms and shaped-charge lancers, the Battle of the Bay of Bengal, increasingly grotesque and ludicrous applications of Stalker technology – and on the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft side, a heap of mad flying machines, armoured fighting towns and an effort to create the Longest Possible German Compound Noun (“Traktionstadtsgesellschaftstandardausgabeverteidigungsreihenfeuerpistole”). Perhaps, one day, we’ll get to come back to them, and the world will see a beautiful professional illustration of the abortive “Stalker walrus”.

H is for Historians and their Disagreements

The phrase “Historians disagree” will be familiar to any readers involved in academia. In the real world, if Historians Disagree, it means right now someone in an archive somewhere is furiously typing up the latest volley in a protracted battle of books and monographs with other people in other archives, all of which will then be glibly summarised in one sentence by an undergrad who’s skim-read half of them. (Possibly, they also will say that the aforementioned battle has generated more heat than light, or something like that.)

But when writing a fictional history, it’s a marvellously useful phrase. Historians will Disagree when we want to allude to something the reader already knows but people in the WoME don’t, or when we haven’t written the relevant backstory but want to speculate on it, or when we have two or three equally good ideas for what might have happened and want to use all of them…

We owe the Historians of the WoME a great deal, and gave them Puerto Angeles for their trouble, a cheerful historian party city where the museums and the samba clubs are both 24/7.

I is for International Productions

The IWOME travels widely across its fictional world, but the people who helped create it are spread all across the real one! Many of us, like Philip, are based in the UK, but work came in from as far afield as France, Bulgaria, Iran and Indonesia (an artist from the USA was going to be involved but couldn’t participate in the end – I’m told this was due to a commitment clash rather than finding out what happened to their homeland in the books.)

I think it’s a real shame we may never get everyone who worked on this book into a room together – but such an international cast of creators is a cool, strange part of putting something like this together in the modern networked world. (And hats off to poor Jamie Gregory, who had to stay up late and work with people in all these timezones!)

I is also for Influences, and I thought up a great long self-indulgent post about all the stuff which in some way made it into the IWOME, but it was too mechanical and not very funny. So I’ll just mention Simon Winder, whose description of the actual Schloss Runkelstein/Castel Roncolo in Danubia painted such a compelling and side-splitting picture it earned its own tribute city (well, fort). If I’m ever able to write observations half as canny and funny as his, I’ll be very happy.

J is for Jokes…

…which are Very Important. The IWOME isn’t really a “reference book” for other books – we worked hard to make it something which people will actually enjoy reading in its own right (there’s not much point in writing it, otherwise), with the same sense of humour that runs through the Mortal Engines books. There are… well, quite a lot of bad puns.

Actually, the hardest part in all this was reining the jokes in – humour is important, but it also has to be something that works even if the reader doesn’t get the joke (some of the punchlines are pretty obscure); a jokey double meaning is bad if it makes the original meaning too hard to understand. (Philip has discussed in-jokes in his splendid Railhead A-Z.) And some had to be pruned because they were too gratuitous – we toyed with a mitre-shaped Traction Vatican City, with a lot of popes called Urban (white smoke from the exhaust stacks when a new one was elected) but it was just Slightly Too Silly. So please appreciate the horrible jokes, because there are plenty more on the cutting room floor.

K is not for Characters, but will have to do

There’s plenty going on in the IWOME with all these maps, cities, wars, histories and amusing pictures, but what about the people who inhabit them? There are loads of little character portraits throughout the IWOME, illustrated by the excellent Ian McQue (I hadn’t really realised before this book Ian was a dab hand at character art as well as all his robots, flying ships and traction cities.)

Some people, like Thaddeus Valentine and Freya Rasmussen, are familiar; some, like Madzimoyo Khora, give familiar names a bit more of a background, and some are brand new, like Woolloomooloo Smith (credited with introducing Australian culture to the Great Hunting Ground). Some of them address unanswered questions (like how Anglish-speaking cities in the Hunting Ground have ready access to tea when presumably all the good tea plantations are in League territory – Lakdas Weerasinghe, captain of the blockade runner Invisible Worm, will be very happy to answer that). Others, like pioneer air rustler El Condor, or Niccolo Tornatore, the Doge of Brighton’s arch-rival Venice, are just there as people and stories who can give a little more human texture to the world.

L is for Jeremy Levett

which is to say… me. I’m far too self-conscious these days to write this sort of thing about myself, but Philip had some kind words…

M is for Maps

Maps of fictional worlds are very popular, from Tolkien’s Middle-Earth to Keith Thompson’s world of Leviathan, based on actual First World War propaganda-y maps.. However, the WoME has a slightly complicated relationship with them. One problem is that Traction Cities, the primary landmarks, move around. Another is that committing to a map leaves you a bit boxed in story-wise as to where things can or can’t be (I remember Brian Jacques had to keep extending the Redwall map in new directions to tell new stories).

So the maps we do have in the IWOME are mainly places that don’t feature heavily in the story (there is a map of the general shape of the Great Hunting Ground, but it’s very scuffed-up): southern India, South America, Australia. We were given a lot of help creating them by cartography expert Lowtuff, a regular on the Mortal Engines Discord server, who gave a lot of detailed thought to plausibly answering mad questions like “what if we just tilted the whole continent west a lot?” and produced excellent outlines which our artist Maxime Plasse turned into the final maps.

An interesting issue we discovered with the maps, playing around with sea levels and continental plates, is that you can do some absolutely horrible things to continents and and they still don’t actually look that different. Take Nuevo Maya here: most of the important rivers have completely changed course, a million square miles of slightly salty pampas have risen out of the sea, the Falklands are no longer islands and the Panama isthmus is no longer anything… but it’s still instantly recognisable as South America. But, put it side by side with an actual map of South America, and you’ll see quite how different they are.

One which came together particularly well at the eleventh hour is the Dead Continent. Many of its coasts are guesswork, and the interior is a great black patch of terra(/or) incognita, with the only light cast by the paths of scientific expeditions – some of which come back, while some head inland and are lost in the darkness.

_{Pictures in order: Green Storm Soldier, Panzerkampfstadt and Green Storm Tumblers, by Philip Reeve (all originally for the Traction Codex); Bookshelf, by Aedel Fakhrie (due to multi-language printing issues, this hasn’t quite been done justice in the printed version, so here’s the original); Danubia cover pinched off the book’s Amazon page – READ IT; Traktionturnieren by Philip Reeve; Captain Khora, Smoke Jaguar and Lakdas Weerasinghe sketches by Ian McQue (the final versions are in the IWOME!); selfie with 12″ railway gun, by me; Nuevo Maya map, cartography by me and Lowtuff, final art by Maxime Plasse.}

This series was originally jointly on my blog and Philip Reeve’s, but his has been overrun with malware so all four posts are now on my own site: Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

The Illustrated World of Mortal Engines is published this week. It was written by me and Jeremy Levett, with Jeremy doing the bulk of the actual work while I just fired suggestions for weak puns at him from Dartmoor and Iceland. It’s also lavishly illustrated by what can only be described as a glittering galaxy of star illustrators.

To mark the completion of this epic project, we’ve compiled the following A-Z guide…

Part One: A – F

A is for Art

A very important part of the Illustrated World is right there in the title: ILLUSTRATED. The original Traction Codex had a number of lovely drawings by Philip (some of which we’ll be putting up in these blogs – only one made it into the final IWOME), but the IWOME has seven different artists from all across the world: Aedel Fakhrie, Ian McQue, Maxime Plasse, Rob Turpin, Philip Varbanov, David Wyatt and Amir Zand. Ian and David have already been involved in Mortal Engines before (both have done a set of covers, Ian illustrated Night Flights and David illustrated Philip’s Larklight series). These artists all have quite different styles, and you can find at least four different versions of London in the IWOME.

Jamie, the design chap at Scholastic, managed a great back-and-forth of illustration briefs, sketches and final artwork between us and the artists to make everything just-so. It was very cool seeing the ideas we came up with given form by such skilled artists, especially when some of said ideas were really quite silly…

It was an interesting process: a number of times an artist came back with something that wasn’t exactly what we imagined but was actually better. Some needed a bit of changing, and a couple of pieces took ages of back-and-forth email to get right. But hopefully, you won’t be able to tell which…

B is for Black Centuries
“…a savage age, when life was cheap, and most people would happily have sold their own children for a tin of rice pudding.”

The Black Centuries occupy most of the time between the world we have now and the world of Mortal Engines. They’re a period of horrible upheaval and universal misery, punctuated by lots of localised problems which made moving around all the time a logical way of life. They’re also a Dark Age about which very little is known or understood, as people were too busy eating radioactive cockroaches and worrying about runaway climate change* to write much down.

The properly-worked-out history of the Mortal Engines world is a self-contained timeline lasting around a thousand years, with the Fever Crumb books happening halfway through, and the Mortal Engines quartet at the end. But something which often comes up in online discussions is: how far in the future? What’s 1TE in AD? We never worried about an exact answer to how long the Black Centuries lasted – some people within the world of Mortal Engines think they know, but some of them are also convinced people coexisted with dinosaurs.

From a narrative point of view, the Black Centuries are a very useful way of drawing a thick (black!) line underneath the world-that-was and setting the scene for something else. But how many Centuries there really were is open to interpretation…

* This is a suggestion, as well as a descriptor.

C is for Canon…

…and Continuity, and Contradiction, and all those other words about the ambiguity which creeps into worlds written across many years or spread across different media adaptations.

Ambiguity is quite fun and, from a writing perspective, can be very useful! But it can also be pretty frustrating when the pieces don’t fit together. We’ve done our best to make it all work, but it’s probably inevitable there’ll be a list of “Differences between the IWOME and the Mortal Engines books” up on the (really very good!) Mortal Engines wiki soon.

The IWOME should be seen as an “in-universe” book, one whose writers don’t know everything (as you’ll see from entries like Anchorage). It’s quite possible they’ve got things wrong. So if the IWOME contradicts the books, the book is the one that has it right.

Relatedly, C is also for the Traction Codex, the little ebook which the IWOME was partly built from. The IWOME uses many parts of the Codex but doesn’t invalidate it – if there’s a direct contradiction, the IWOME takes precedence, but if there’s something mentioned in the Codex but not in the IWOME (Sydney’s cork fenders, for instance) they’re probably still there!

(Oh, and while we’re at it, the short story Traction City Blues in Night Flights supersedes the World Book Day story Traction City. There were some specific requirements for the World Book Day book; this is the short story without them, and is quite a bit closer to the original idea for the story.)

All sorted out? Excellent.

D is for Danundaland

Australia, along with much of sub-Saharan Africa, wasn’t hit as hard in the 60 Minute War as America, Europe or China, although it still suffered heavily from the war’s indirect effects.* Not having quite the same geological upheaval or tempestuous weather, there was no practical reason for Australians to embrace Tractionism – but, when the word reached the continent they did, with enormous enthusiasm.** Much like actual Australia, evolution has led to all sorts of bizarre specialist creatures unknown anywhere else.

Australian cities, from the billabong-dwelling bunyips to the flying-squirrel-like drop-boroughs, are often so heavily adapted as to be unrecognisable to visitors from the Hunting Ground. But as they say on the proud city of Darwin (which regularly reconfigures itself for an advantage over the leaping/burrowing/semi-submersible/intermittently airborne predator towns of the great red interior,) the Australian city is more highly evolved…

* Nevil Shute’s On the Beach is a disturbing tale of death creeping down to Australia from an apocalyptic war in the Northern Hemisphere, although even the weapons of the Sixty Minute War weren’t as all-destroying as the radiation cloud Shute imagines.

** Having lived in the Outback for a little while I’m not hugely convinced that it would take that much to turn it from a huge, barren expanse full of absurdly large vehicles driven by cheerful sunburnt people into, well…

E is for Exploded Diagrams

One of the things we had in mind when putting together the IWOME were all those interesting Dorling Kindersley visual dictionaries and books of cross-sections. These books show things like a vehicle or a castle, often with cutaways so you can see what’s going on inside, with all the individual parts and their functions labelled.

Doing something like for an entire city is very ambitious, but the hugely talented Philip Varbanov stepped up and created some beautifully detailed illustrations, including the Jenny Haniver and three different stages of London’s history. (And arguably Ian McQue’s gorgeous picture on pages 186-7 is a very exploded London…)

F is for Film

The IWOME is not a film tie-in – it’s based on the books and follows their “canon”. Airships have propellers rather than great big Podracer jets, Engineers are bald and Hester Shaw has one eye. But the people behind the film are very clearly big fans of the series, and (from what we’ve seen!) the world they’ve created is very faithful to that of the books. Hopefully, people who haven’t read the series should still be able to appreciate the IWOME (although they should of course then run off and read the books!).

We also owe some thanks to Peter Jackson, Philippa Boyens, Christian Rivers and all the other people who’ve worked on the film- without it, and all the attention it’s drummed up, the IWOME would probably never have happened. We look forward to seeing it on the big screen!

F is also for Aedel Fakhrie, who has illustrated a variety of things in the IWOME – Old-Tech items and artefacts, vehicles and cities in the IWOME. Aedel hails from Indonesia and owns 17 cats and a cool jacket.

Aedel’s mechanical details, creative city designs and earthy, lived-in colour schemes make for some really distinctive art, and contrast nicely with the black and white cities of Rob Turpin and Philip Varbanov. His Tin Book of Anchorage is fantastically detailed, and his Bunyip is a particularly creepy machine you can absolutely envision roaring unexpectedly out of a billabong (an earlier version with legs was rejected for being slightly too terrifying.)

You can find his Instagram here, his artstation page here and his Twitter here.