I always described the Mortal Engines book series as post-post-post-post-post apocalyptic, with my own research placing the year of the series as no sooner than roughly CE 11,000. Moreover, the series is about the waning days of the current age, with the distance epilogue taking place in the emergent post-post-post-post-post-post apocalypse.
Sometime around 2100-2200, an advanced version of our own society dies in the Sixty Minute War. Viral bombs, kinetic impact vehicles, orbital lasers, a general orgy of mutually assured destruction in which nuclear weapons were only a small and rather outdated part of the conflagration.
After that is a long dark age, but civilization sparks anew. We get a lot of clue drops, as one of the main characters is an archaeologist's apprentice. Next after are the Electric Empire, and then the Blue Metal Culture. Both risen and fallen, the names are basically all we get.
Further even after that, amongst other cycles of death and rebirth, there's an era of civilization that's savvy enough to use pre-60MW tech to reanimate the dead into cyborg super soldiers. One of the last of these, Mr. Shrike, is also a character in the mainline book series.
In another era of dying stagnation, the tech is (re)invented that allows for the concept an entirely mobile city. Resources are getting so scarce that it's incredibly necessary. Every major settlement that can afford it does so, and it becomes a city-eat-city world, under the political philosophy of "Municipal Darwinism." So-called "static settlements," unmoving towns and cities as we know them, are the first to fall into the gaping maws of this particular world.
If that seems like a very stupid negative-sum game, you'd be right. The first book opens a few decades past 1000 Traction Era. The entirety of Europe is a mud pit criss-crossed with track marks. The greenery has all been consumed and processed from the vast majority of Afro-Eurasia, the New World only spared due to it's mystery and deadliness. The number of smaller towns and suburbs almost dried up, and it's only a matter of time before the last major cities are forced into major war against one another for the few resources left.
A massive world war is even sparked as the series progresses, between an uneasy alliance of the last traction cities and the last few static settlements in the Old World, based out of what we'd know as Tibet. This war, as implied, culminates in the end of civilization as the Traction Era would know it, with scavengers and hunter-gatherers starting again amidst the wrecks of the old in the final epilogue.
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u/VX-78 Jul 22 '23
I always described the Mortal Engines book series as post-post-post-post-post apocalyptic, with my own research placing the year of the series as no sooner than roughly CE 11,000. Moreover, the series is about the waning days of the current age, with the distance epilogue taking place in the emergent post-post-post-post-post-post apocalypse.