Mortal Engines Quartet
2001-2006 series of four books by Philip Reeve
The Mortal Engines Quartet (Hungry City Chronicles in the United States), also known as the Predator Cities Quartet, is a series of epic young adult science fiction novels by the English novelist and illustrator Philip Reeve. He began the first volume of the series, Mortal Engines, in the 1980s, and it was published in 2001. Reeve then published three further novels, Predator's Gold (2003), Infernal Devices (2005), and A Darkling Plain (2006).
The series is set thousands of years in the future, after the Sixty Minute War has devastated Earth. It tells the stories of young adventurers in the Traction Era, when moving cities roam the wasteland, attacking and devouring each other for resources. The novels have won a number of awards, including the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize in 2002 for Mortal Engines, the 2006 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, and the 2007 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Young Adult Fiction for A Darkling Plain.
A companion piece entitled The Traction Codex was released in 2011, and was expanded into The Illustrated World of Mortal Engines by Reeve and Jeremy Levett and published in 2018. Additionally, a collection of short stories set before the series called Night Flights was published the same year. A prequel series, Fever Crumb, set 600 years before the events of the Quartet, was published between 2009 and 2011. In March 2020, Reeve said, "too much time has passed since I wrote the other books, it's hard to go back to that world" and that he did not intend to publish further books related to the Mortal Engines universe.
The public source identifies “Mortal Engines Quartet” as 2001-2006 series of four books by Philip Reeve. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Mortal, Engines and Quartet.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7239605. VIAF identifies the subject as 7300149619462804010009. The Library of Congress control number is no2017067660. 1 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2001, 2003, 2005 and 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mortal Engines Quartet” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.