The Fever Crumb trilogy: Philip Reeve

This trilogy is a prequel to Reeve’s Mortal Engines series. You may have heard of this latter series now that there’s a movie out based on them, with a screenplay written by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh (who were screenwriters for the Lord of the Rings movies). The movie isn’t bad, but the books themselves are terrific YA science fiction, set in a far future world in which cities like London have become mobile, mounted on vast traction engines, roaming the plains of what used to be seas in search of prey. In some ways this is an outrageous, perhaps absurd concept, but Reeve makes it work.

Anyway, as I say, the Fever Crumb trilogy is a prequel and the events pre-date those in the later tetralogy and movie.

Fever Crumb

The first book, called simply Fever Crumb, is set in London long before the events of Mortal Engines. We meet with young Fever Crumb, the adopted daughter of Dr. Crumb, one of the city’s Engineers. The background of the story is that for centuries London was controlled by the Scriven: people with strange markings on their skin, which they attribute to their god, the Scrivener, who they say has written on their bodies to mark them out as superior to ordinary humans in every way. However, the Scriven were largely infertile and so over the years their numbers declined to the point that they could be overthrown and slaughtered by ordinary humans. This revolution occured not long before this book opens.

Fever herself was found abandoned as a child by Dr. Crumb, and there is the suspicion that she herself is part-Scriven. She has no skin markings, but her eyes each have a different colour. That’s enough to mark her out as different to many. Raised by her father in the guild of Engineers, she has learned to discard emotion and seek a rational approach in everything she does. This approach, however, becomes more and more problematic as her life goes on.

At the same time, London is coming under threat from some savage bands from the North who travel about on huge motorised vehicles and who are advancing on the city en masse. The authorities are scrambling to find effective defences.

As part of this, Fever becomes caught up in a plot to dig up a secret vault of some old Scriven technology and put it to use. Under threat from several directions, Fever begins to have strange flashbacks of times long past. Does she have some connection to the Scriven after all?

Hugely imaginative and entertaining.

A Web of Air

The second book in the series. At the end of the previous book, Fever has escaped pursuit in London and has taken up with a travelling theatre, which voyages over great distances putting on shows. She becomes the theatre’s resident electrician, using her engineering background.

As the story opens, the travelling theare has arrived in the city of Mayda (“Mayda at the World’s End”), which is built on the inside of a steep-walled crater (possibly caused by an asteroid strike). Here she becomes involved with a young man called Arlo who is trying to re-discover the long-lost secret of heavier-than-air flight. Strangely, many other people who have attempted this have had unexplained fatal accidents or have been found dead of unknown causes. Someone or something is trying to suppress this knowledge. Others, of course, are trying to gain such knowledge for themselves.

Fever finds herself at the heart of this conspiracy and at deadly threat.

The author does a great job in handling this plot and showing Fever’s character development as she finds her rationalist, engineering background in conflict with new emotions as she is unable to control her romantic attraction to young Arlo.

Scrivener’s Moon

In the final book, London is now aboard its vast traction engines and is almost ready to begin its wandering future.

Fever and her mother travel north to investigate reports of an ancient pyramid which may contain a store of technology. On their way, however, they fall foul of a rebellion against the new masters of London. Fever finds herself a prisoner of a primive group of people led by a charismatic young woman called Cluny Morvish who is having visions of a mobile London coming to destroy the tribes of the north. They have thus joined with the rebels to march on London and destroy it before it can begin to move.

Fever begins to suspect that Cluny’s visions are not prophesies from the gods but are due to the same cause as her own disturbing flashbacks: technology implanted by her Scriven grandfather. She persuades Cluny to help her investigate the ancient pyramid.

With her emotions still struggling against her rationalist upbringing, Fever finds that she is falling in love with Cluny. Disasters befall them and Fever finds herself caught in the middle as the two sides violently clash on the battlefield.

Hard to do justice to the fairly complicated plot of these books! But I enjoyed reading the whole series and may now go back and re-read the Mortal Engines quartet.

(By the way, I love these covers by Ian McQue).

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