The Great Hunting Ground on the Mortal Engines world map
The Great Hunting Ground is the biggest hunting ground in the world, and is the main setting of Mortal Engines and A Darkling Plain.
Geology[]
The Great Hunting Ground stretches across most of Europe and part of Asia. Due to the constant movement of Traction Cities, the ground has been reduced to vast muddy, scarred terrain. Even the hills and trees have not escaped destruction; mining towns crush them in their path or eat them for minerals, making the dismal plains even duller.
Tractionists refer to the region as the 'bare Earth' or 'Out Country', which they fear and loathe. Dozens of devices have been made to cross this grim expanse, such as Pink's Screw-Propelled Mud Wagon (travel by airship is impractical across long distances). However, trekking across the Great Hunting Ground on foot isn't impossible, as fugitives - sometimes entire communities - manage to survive on these barren plains.
History[]
Europe, historically Europa, is a landmass part of Afroeurasia, one of the three (arguably four) continents on Planet Earth.
Europe covers the British Isles, the Iberian Peninsula, Scandinavia, and the Northern Mediterranean coast before the Sixty Minute War
Europe saw the rise of imperial powers from around the 1200s (AD, pre Traction/TE, now historically destroyed since the Sixty Minute War) onward which built massive overseas empires. Centuries later, Europe was heavily populated (as shown in the image at the right) and arguably a superpower (under the European Union).
Although Europe was technically not a party to the Sixty Minute War, it appears either the American Empire or Greater China (perhaps both) bombed Europe, as they did with the nearby Middle East to the southeast. A Slow Bomb strike also hit the Alps - the only confirmed damage visible into the Traction Era. Perhaps Europe did indeed survive the initial conflict but was affected by nuclear fallout carried by air currents from other countries and overall changes in the environment.
One such notable change was that the North Sea and most of the English channel dried up, turning into forested plains and marshy land respectively. The Raffia Hat Civilizations were noted to have emerged during the Dark Centuries.
After the Black Centuries, Europe witnessed a coordinated recovery following the renaissance of the African Spring Cultures a hundred years earlier. Tractionism began in Euope (with London in the old British Isles), leading to the fall of the previously powerful African nation of Zagwa.
At the dawn of the Second Traction Boom, the Great Hunting Ground encompassed much of Europe (known at the time as Europa, another ancient name for Europe), then later much of Russia (and therefore Western Asia) as Tractionism and Traction Cities spread across the world.
"Out-Country", and London's tracks.
The name Europe/a was quickly forgotten, and soon merged into the ever-expanding Great Hunting Ground, which, by the events of Mortal Engines, would stretch from roughly where Portugal/Spain used to be all across the north of Asia toward Shan Guo.
References[]
- The Traction Codex, glossary and timeline; glossary describes the 'mud wagon'.