It will be all right, Tom. Wherever we go now, whatever becomes of us, we’ll be together, and it will all be all right.
That’s impossible,′ said Fever, Engineerishly.
Its a town eat town world.
And isn’t that what all boys want and all men, too? Just to be taken seriously?
I don’t think we are cut out to be evil sorcerers, brothers,” said Fentongoose. “If we were truly evil, we would not feel such sorrow at the deaths of our friends. We would just go, ‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’ or something.
She wanted to stop, but she was riding a wave of memory and it was carrying her backward to that night, that room, and the blood that had spattered her mother’s star charts like the map of a new constellation.
The one thing worse than an enemy is a friend turned false.
But we’re alive, and together, and we’re going to be all right.
I still feel, as I did when I was six or seven, that books are simply the best way to experience a story.
I was fascinated by The Lord of the Rings from about the age of eight, and that lasted well into my teens.
Moving cities are a fairly hoary old sci-fi trope – I seem to recall they were always cropping up on Doctor Who when I was young, though I may be misremembering.
Even tiny children looking at a picture book are using their imaginations, gleaning clues from the images to understand what is happening, and perhaps using the throwaway details which the illustrator includes to add their own elements to the story.
As a child I always steered clear of science fiction, but in the autumn of 1977, the bow-wave of publicity for the first Star Wars movie had already reached me, so I was eager for anything science-fictional.
I used to be very fascinated by Victorian stuff, and my best-known books, the Mortal Engines series, have a sort of retro, Victorian vibe, despite being set in the far future.
That’s what History teaches us, I think, that life goes on, even though individuals die and whole civilizations crumble away: The simple things last; they are repeated over and over by each generation.
Fever jumped aside just in time to dodge the shower of urine, and stumbled into the path of a religious procession – celebrants in robes and pointed hats whirling and clapping and chanting the name of some old-world prophet, ‘Hari, Hari! Hari Potter!’
An Engineer is no match for a Historian with his dander up!
It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.
Godshawk looked surprised, the way that people generally do when you ask them philosophical questions in shrubberies in the middle of the night.
That’s the trouble with a story spinner. You never know what’s real and what’s made up. Even when they are telling the truth, they can’t stop themselves from spinning it into something better; something prettier, with more of a pattern to it.