Mortal Engines Wiki
Register
Advertisement

Earth, known as the world by the Traction Era, is the third planet from the Sun. It is orbited by ODIN,[1] and a few other satellites (that have mostly fallen out of the sky by then).[2][3]

Description[]

During the Sixty Minute War, Earth was ravaged by nuclear, asteroid-based and energy weapons. After the planet recovered, its continents were almost all realigned, but with lots of holes, such as craters, in them.

Centuries later, Magnus Crome expressed a plan to turn the Earth into a mobile planet, extending the idea of Tractionism to space, to consume other planets. [4]

It was once vaguely believed that the Ancients settled other planets, although they were presumably destroyed in the War (if it, let alone Ancient civilization, ever reached interplanetary space, given satellites orbiting like ODIN), died out or were forgotten due to lack of contact from Earth, or never made it that far. Hence the assumption that if any had survived - probably not, then they would have called home by now [the high Traction Era, at the time of writing].[5]

History[]

Coming soon...

Gallery[]

References[]

  1. A Darkling Plain, Chapter 35: "Uplink"
  2. Mortal Engines, Chapter 13: "The Resurrected Men"

    "Except for the ones that aren't really stars at all. Some of the really bright ones are mechanical moons that the Ancients put up into orbit thousands of years ago, still circling and circling the poor old Earth." - Hester Shaw

  3. Predator's Gold, Chapter 26: "The Big Picture"

    If you could look down on the world from somewhere high above – if you were a god, or a ghost haunting one of the old American weapon platforms which still hang in orbit high above the pole – the Ice Wastes would look at first as blank as the walls of Hester’s cell; a whiteness spread over the crown of the poor old Earth like a cataract on a blue eye. But look a little closer, and there are things moving in the blankness.

    And if you were a ghost, up there among the endlessly tumbling papers and pens and plastic cups and frozen astronauts, you might use the instruments of that old space-station to peer down through the waters into the secret halls of Grimsby, where Uncle sits watching on the largest of his screens as the Screw Worm pulls out of the limpet pens, Caul at the controls, Skewer for crew, carrying Tom Natsworthy away to Rogues’ Roost. - Narrator

  4. Mortal Engines, Chapter 34: "Idea for a Fireworks Display"

    Crome smiles. "Do you really think I am so shortsighted?" he asks. "The Guild of Engineers plans further ahead than you suspect. London will never stop moving. Movement is life. When we have devoured the last wandering city and demolished the last static settlement we will begin digging. We will build great engines, powered by the heat of the earth’s core, and steer our planet from its orbit. We will devour Mars, Venus, and the asteroids. We shall devour the sun itself, and then sail on across the gulf of space. A million years from now our city will still be traveling, no longer hunting towns to eat, but whole new worlds!"

  5. IWOME: So advanced was the technology of the Ancients that they built these hybrid settlements almost everywhere, from the bottom of the oceans to high up in outer space; some records and tales have it that the Ancients actually settled other worlds beyond this one, although surely if any had survived they would have written home by now

Advertisement