British author Philip Reeve burst onto the American children's book scene with a stunning debut novel, Mortal Engines, that plunged readers into a futuristic world of traction cities with no moorings, inhabited by characters with no loyalties. With a background in comedy and cartooning, and trained as an artist, he first entered children's books as an illustrator on Scholastic UK's Horrible Histories and Murderous Maths series. Reeve's works share in common a cinematic portrayal of alternate worlds, whether he is projecting into the future or mining Arthurian legends. We caught up with him at ALA in Boston last month, his first trip to the U.S. In April, he will publish Fever Crumb (Scholastic, $17.99, 9780545207195/0545207193) for ages 12-up, a prequel of sorts to the Mortal Engines Quartet.
Comedy is quite mechanical. If you don't get a laugh when you want it or if it's not big enough, you can kind of tweak it a little bit and then, hurray, you get the laugh. Or not. Sometimes you realize it won't work and so you chuck it and do something else. It does teach you not to be precious with stuff. I didn't realize it at the time, but it was actually quite good training.
Did you know when you wrote Mortal Engines that it would continue as a series?
I think when you're not published, the only thing you can think about is getting published. I didn't have any plan in mind, I just thought, "If I can get this printed, that would be great, and then I can get back to illustration." It wasn't until it was out that Scholastic said, "What will you do next?" And I thought, "Oh, God, right." So after that, I kind of came up with two plans: one of which was the Arthur book, which became Here Lies Arthur, but then more ideas for the Mortal Engines world came into my head, so I ended up doing that first, and finishing up the quartet.
Did you start Arthur and then set it aside to finish the Mortal Engines Quartet?
Arthur was something I'd been thinking about for a long, long time. Soon after Mortal Engines was published, I sat down and wrote an early version of the first three or four chapters, and then decided to do other things, then came back to Arthur a few years later.
Here Lies Arthur was so timely when it came out in 2008. Did world events inform the book?I suppose the whole business of Merlin as a sort of spin doctor was very much inspired by what was happening in British politics at the time. Certainly the government that came in 1997, the Labor government that's been in power ever since, is a construct of spin doctors. In a way [Arthur] was quite a deliberate response. But beyond that I wasn't trying to be relevant to contemporary events.
There were a couple of things I had to change in Here Lies Arthur. I don't want to put myself too closely to contemporary events because even very big things have actually quite a short life. This is something I learned in comedy. Something could happen on a Monday and you go into your show on Thursday, and everybody's forgotten about it.
It seems that every major episode from Arthurian legend was addressed in your book.
A lot of what I'm trying to do is recapture the enjoyment I got from the books I was reading when I was 10, 11 and 12. Most of the books I was reading tended to be about boys. The boys had adventures, and the girls waited at home or stood and screamed and waited to be rescued. So if I could put girls into the center of the story, that's one way that I can stake my own claim to the territory.
What were some of your favorites?
Rosemary Sutcliffe's books were big favorites of mine and still are. Things like Eagle of the Ninth, books set mostly during the Roman and Dark Ages in Britain. Here Lies Arthur is hugely indebted to her in some ways--it's not her sort of book, I'm sure she would have hated it--but that world, that period, that sense of living in the landscape, the weather and grittiness of it I think I get a lot from her books. There's also fantasy--Tolkien and Fritz Leiber. And science fiction--Ray Bradbury, Asimov I read a lot when I was 12 and 13. That's clearly fed into the Mortal Engines Quartet and Fever Crumb.
It's interesting that you thought of Mortal Engines as a stand-alone book because there's so much of that world that continues to develop through the series. Did you feel it calling back to you?
Yes. When I finished Darkling Plain, and [the Quartet] was ended, I thought I'd probably invent another world to set stories in. But inevitably, the world of Mortal Engines has got all the stuff that I wanted to write about. Before, I'd been gradually building this world out geographically, but I thought it might be quite nice to build it out in time as well. You don't meet the same characters, by and large. There are different concerns, but anybody who enjoyed the first four I think will see how the world of Fever Crumb is going to turn into the world of Mortal Engines. Theoretically I could now fill up the time between Fever Crumb and Mortal Engines with new stuff. We'll see how long I can keep going before people get tired of it.
In Fever Crumb, the Scriven and the humans actually look different from each other. Were you raising questions about how we see others, how we jump to conclusions?
I don't try to raise things particularly. I'm just trying to tell an interesting story. Inevitably it's colored by the real world. The fear of other people is part of being human, from the earliest tribes of hominids. In building an imaginary world, you try to ground it in reality, and that's part of reality.
The thing about the Scriven, the speckled people that [the humans are] all frightened of and dislike, is that they are quite frightening and dislikable. This isn't some minority who'd been persecuted. It's more like the French Revolution, only with the aristocrats being actually a slightly different species. They have been hugely oppressive and cruel and disagreeable. They're horrible. But so are the other lot. I try not to go into black and white. That's how fantasy always used to be. I think it's probably changed, but the stuff I grew up on would be, "Here are the good guys and here are the bad guys, and they're going to fight and fight and fight until the goodies win eventually." I don't want to do that. I'd rather have lots and lots of shades of gray.--Jennifer M. Brown