Previous SFF Author: Rod Rees
(1966- )
Philip Reeve is a UK author and illustrator. You can read excerpts of his novels at THE HUNGRY CITY CHRONICLES Website or THE LARKLIGHT Website. Or learn more about teh author at Philip Reeve’s website.
Today Fantasy Literature welcomes Philip Reeve, whose most recent novel, Railhead, is accruing rave reviews (including ours). Jana chatted with him about Easter eggs within his novel, his thoughts on grimdark, and more. One lucky commenter will win a copy of Railhead!
Jana Nyman: I recently discovered that Railhead is being adapted to film, so congratulations are absolutely in order! How excited are you to see your novel morph from page to screen?
Jana Nyman | Philip Reeve | Free! | Author Interviews, Giveaway! | 9 comments |
Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve
In the years beyond the 30th century, after life as we know it is destroyed in the Sixty Minutes War, the world is divided into three: the Static communities, who live in farms and buildings firmly stationed on the earth, the aviators, who travel the Bird Roads in the sky, and the Traction Cities, the giant cities on engineered wheels who live by the Municipal Darwinism — the big cities devour the little cities for their resources. And the biggest Traction City of them all is London,
Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 3 | Philip Reeve | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Predator’s Gold by Philip Reeve
We Will Unleash a Storm that will Scour the Earth.
It had been a while since I’d read Philip Reeve’s first installment in the Hungry City quartet, and so my memories of the events that happened in Mortal Engines were a little hazy. However, nothing could make me forget the imaginative post-apocalyptic world that Reeve had created, in which massive Traction-Cities trundled across the wastelands according to the laws of Municipal Darwinism; eating any smaller city that crossed their paths.
Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 5 | Philip Reeve | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Infernal Devices by Philip Reeve
It has been sixteen years since the events of Predator’s Gold, and the Traction City of Anchorage has been peacefully settled on the Dead Continent for years, undisturbed by the war that rages throughout the rest of the world between the adherents of Municipal Darwinism and a terrorist faction of the Anti-Tractionist League.
Okay, if you haven’t read the previous two books in THE HUNGRY CITY CHRONICLES, then you probably didn’t understand a word of that sentence.
Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 5 | Philip Reeve | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | no comments |
A Darkling Plain by Philip Reeve
Whatever becomes of us, we’ll be together…
I read the first installment of THE HUNGRY CITY CHRONICLES back in 2003 with Mortal Engines and now I finally come to the end of the four-part story with A Darkling Plain. There is still a prequel to enjoy, but for all intents and purposes, this is the last chapter of Tom Natsworthy and Hester Shaw’s adventures in a world filled with airships, traction cities,
Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 5 | Philip Reeve | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Fever Crumb is a prequel of sorts to Philip Reeve’s fantastic HUNGRY CITY CHRONICLES, which started with Mortal Engines. I say “of sorts” in that it’s set in the prehistory of the HUNGRY CITY CHRONICLES world, but far back enough in time that Fever Crumb doesn’t act as a direct lead-in to the larger series: instead of giving us more of the same characters, it sets up the major concepts and incipient events of the series.
Bill Capossere and Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 3.5 | Philip Reeve | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | no comments |
You Can’t Murder the Truth!
The second of the prequel trilogy to Philip Reeve’s wonderful Hungry Cities series continues Reeve’s imaginative, exhilarating, unpredictable story of life in a post-apocalyptic world where seagulls have rudimentary communication skills, people live in houses that can be hoisted up and down hillsides, and an ominous event known as the Downsizing has left technology beyond the understanding of the human population.
In this brave new world lives Fever Crumb, an engineer who has left the city of London in order to join the traveling theatre known as the Lyceum,
Rebecca Fisher and Bill Capossere´s rating: 4.5, 5 | Philip Reeve | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Scrivener’s Moon by Philip Reeve
What is to Become of Fever Crumb?
Once again I come to review a Philip Reeve book, and once again I’m astounded to find that no one else seems to have anything to say about it. It’s also gotten to the stage where it is getting harder and harder to write coherently about Reeve’s books when all I want to do is squee indiscriminately. Every time I open a book in THE HUNGRY CITY CHRONICLES, I know without a doubt that I’m in for a fantastic read,
Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 5 | Philip Reeve | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Night Flights (2018) by Philip Reeve is a collection of three short stories set in the world of the MORTAL ENGINES QUARTET (also known as the HUNGRY CITY CHRONICLES), and focuses on the character of Anna Fang, a fearless aviatrix. Its timing seemed to be connected to the release of Peter Jackson’s filmic adaptation of Mortal Engines, the first book in the series, and Reeve’s touching dedication at the front of the book confirmed this.
Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 4.5 | Philip Reeve | Short Fiction, Young Adult | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Illustrated World of Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve
The film adaptation of Mortal Engines may have been a disappointment, but at least its release led to more material from Philip Reeve — not only this book, but a series of short stories starring Anna Fang, and new reprints of the original MORTAL ENGINES quartet. So it all works out well!
The Illustrated World of Mortal Engines (2018) is a standard tie-in volume that comes with many a book franchise,
Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 3.5 | Philip Reeve | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
A new MORTAL ENGINES story? What bliss!
The first book set in the dystopian world of Philip Reeve’s mighty Traction Cities since Scrivener’s Moon was published back in 2011, Thunder City (2024) ends up being something of an oddity within the overarching scope of the series. Unlike the three prequels, which delved into the genesis of the Traction Cities, or Night Flights,
Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 4 | Philip Reeve | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Here Lies Arthur by Philip Reeve
Here Lies Arthur is a YA deconstruction/demystifying of the King Arthur legend. And a pretty thorough demystifying at that. Philip Reeve doesn’t simply knock Arthur down a peg or two from chivalric magic-sword-wielding king of the Round Table, say, by making him simply a Roman general or an English chieftan who rallies the locals against the Saxons. No, Reeve takes him all the way down; in this incarnation Arthur is a small-minded petty brigand whose major qualities are that he is: boorish,
Bill Capossere´s rating: 2.5 | Philip Reeve | Stand-Alone, Young Adult | SFF Reviews | no comments |
No Such Thing as Dragons by Philip Reeve
No Such Thing as Dragons, by Philip Reeve, is aimed at a somewhat younger group than his excellent Mortal Engines series, though it has moments that might be a bit beyond that younger target audience.
Set in a medieval time period, No Such Thing as Dragons follows a young mute boy named Ansel who is sold by his father to Brock, the famed itinerant dragon-slayer. As Ansel soon learns,
Bill Capossere´s rating: 3.5 | Philip Reeve | Children, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
If the idea of a heist aboard a sentient train traveling at faster-than-light speeds appeals to you; if said heist involves assumed identities, the theft of a very old and valuable artifact, and a criminal thumbing his nose at a family-run corporation/empire; if you like believable romance and honest-to-goodness fun, then Philip Reeve’s latest YA novel, Railhead, is for you. (If none of that appeals to you, read on anyway: I may be able to change your mind.)
In a galaxy filled with novelties like sentient trains who travel at faster-than-light speeds on specially crafted rails through K-gates stationed on nearly a thousand worlds and moons,
Jana Nyman, Rebecca Fisher and Bill Capossere´s rating: 5 | Philip Reeve | Stand-Alone, Young Adult | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
Black Light Express by Philip Reeve
Black Light Express (2017) is Philip Reeve’s just-as-good-as-the-first-book follow up to Railhead, continuing the exhilarating romp while expanding the universe and its inhabitants, as well as digging a bit more deeply into the hidden history of the created world and offering up some more page time to some of the first book’s secondary characters. Warning: there will be some inevitable spoilers for book one (you can just stop here with the take-away that I recommend the duology).
Bill Capossere, Jana Nyman and Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 4.5 | Philip Reeve | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | no comments |
With Station Zero (2019), Philip Reeve brings to an end the RAILHEAD trilogy begun with Railhead and Black Light Express, and if it’s not a perfect conclusion, it’s pretty darn close, leaving you at the end with a sense of satisfying, even gratifying, resolution tinged with a lingering bittersweetness that makes the final result all the more richly rewarding. With this Cosmic Railroad trilogy (not an official title) and his earlier PREDATOR CITIES/MORTAL ENGINES work,
Bill Capossere and Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 4.5 | Philip Reeve | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Utterly Dark and the Face of the Deep by Philip Reeve
Philip Reeve has been one of my favourite authors for a while now, even though most of his stories are slightly outside my preferred genres. I loved Railhead, which was science-fiction, and Mortal Engines, which was dystopian – so imagine the weird squeaky noise of excitement I made on discovering that his latest book was not only in my genre wheelhouse (fantasy, of course) but which bore the captivating title of Utterly Dark and the Face of the Deep (2021).
Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 5 | Philip Reeve | Children | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |
Utterly Dark and the Heart of the Wild by Philip Reeve
In his review for Skye McKenna’s Hedgewitch, Reeve said: “there are only two sorts of fantasy story: the ones that feel fake and the ones that feel real. It’s hard to explain the difference but you know the real ones when you read them.”
I know exactly what he’s talking about, because he writes the real ones too. His depiction of Faerie – that ancient place where all the fairy tales come from – captures its mystery and danger and uncanny beauty as it also exists in books like Neil Gaiman’s Stardust and Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter and Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell,
Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 5 | Philip Reeve | Children | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Utterly Dark and the Tides of Time by Philip Reeve
Utterly Dark and the Tides of Time (2023) is the third and final book in the UTTERLY DARK trilogy, and the reason I left it this long (I read the preceding books exactly one year ago) is simply because I didn’t want it to end. Once a Philip Reeve story is over, it can’t be read for the first time ever again, so you have to savour them while they last.
And in this case,
Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 4.5 | Philip Reeve | Children | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Previous SFF Author: Rod Rees
Do it! One of the best things I've read in recent years.
This reminds me. I want to read Addie LaRue.
We’re in total agreement David!
I felt just the same. The prose and character work was excellent. The larger story was unsatisfying, especially compared to…
Hmmm. I think I'll pass.