Hungry Cities Chronicles

Reeve, Philip. Hungry Cities Chronicles (US title). The Mortal Engines Quartet (UK title, not to be confused with the S. Lem work Mortal Engines). Mortal Engines (begun in 1980s, published 2001), Predator's Gold (2003), Infernal Devices (2005), A Darkling Plain (2006).[1] Publisher: Scholastic (various locations).[2]

MORTAL ENGINES (film) released in 2018, directed by Christian Rivers, Peter Jackson one of three script-writers and five producers, and a moving force.[3]

Novels, primarily, discussed in Meghann Hillier-Broadley's "Predator Cities in the Anthropocene: Reading the Anthropocene in Philip Reeve's Predator Cities Quartet," SFRA Review #328, which see.

Wikipedia entry on the film, based closely on the first novel, states the premise:

Following a cataclysmic conflict known as the Sixty Minute War, the remnants of humanity regroup and form mobile cities, called "Traction Cities". Under a philosophy known as "Municipal Darwinism", larger "predator" cities hunt and absorb smaller settlements in the "Great Hunting Ground", which includes Great Britain and Continental Europe. In opposition, settlements of the "Anti-Traction League" have developed an alternative civilization consisting of "static settlements" (traditional, non-mobile cities) in Asia led by Shan Guo (formerly China), protected by the "Shield Wall". Relics of 21st-century technology such as toasters, computers, and smartphones are valued by historians as "Old-Tech."

For the conceit of moving cities, cf. and contrast James Blish's Cities in Flight tetralogy (1955-62) and Kim Stanley Robinson's Terminator city, at the terminator on Mercury, in 2312.[4]

As identified by Predator Cities in the Anthropocene|Meghann Hillier-Broadley]], relevant also:

The philosophy of technological collapse Reeve’s presents emphasizes the steampunk philosophy that “modern technology [is] offensively impermeable to the everyday person” [...]; some desire to “return to an age when . . . machines were visible, human, fallible, and, above all, accessible” (Onion 145).* [Notes] Steampunk’s desire [of] an accessibility to technology that is “available to the disempowered: women, children and members of the working class” (152). In Predator Cities, much of the technology becomes accessible to the disempowered. ("Anthropocene" p. 8).
* Onion, Rebecca. “Reclaiming the Machine”. Neo-Victorian Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, Autumn 2008, pp. 138-163.

As the series concludes, Reeve demonstrates the dangers of an overreliance on technology to control the earth’s resources, but he also suggests that it may serve as a means to correct the current ecological crisis; the techno-critical trappings of steampunk provides a safe space for contemporary issues to be discussed by removing the constraints of modernity and highlighting that humans are not a separate entity from nature, we are part of its fabric and must exist in a reciprocal relationship in order to maintain a sustainable, habitable planet. ("Anthropocene" p. 9)

RDE, finishing, 16Sep20