Abstract
This article discusses Philip Reeve's young adult science fiction novels as literary collages. It explores the ways in which the author uses postmodernisms to introduce big ideas and construct a compelling futuristic world that combines fast-paced adventure with the bildungsroman.
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Notes
For example, fish and monkey carcasses were sometimes sewn together to create mermaids.
See Levy (2006). Mendlesohn does not dispute Levy’s assertion, but argues that this tendency, more pronounced in some novels than others, means that some YA novels cannot be considered “full science fiction.” See Mendlesohn’s article, “Is There Any Such Thing as Children’s Science Fiction?: A Position Piece.”
Simmons’s Shrike is a mystical creature “more than three metres tall” with fingers like “chrome scalpels”, and “a face part steel, part chrome, and part skull, teeth like a mechanized wolf’s crossed with a steam shovel, eyes like ruby lasers burning through blood-filled gems” (Hyperion, 1995, pp. 79, 222). Both creatures may be named after the shrike, a bird commonly called the “butcher bird” because it impales its prey on thorns or barbed wire.
Simmons also associates his creature with Grendel and Frankenstein’s monster, but his purpose is to heighten the violent and bloody characteristics of his creature.
Len Hatfield, Hollins University Graduate Program in Children’s Literature, personal communication about Mortal Engines and Predator’s Gold, June 27, 2005.
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Dawson, J. “Beneath their cheerful bunny faces, his slippers had steel toe caps”: Traction Cities, Postmodernisms, and Coming of Age in Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines and Predator’s Gold . Child Lit Educ 38, 141–152 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-006-9019-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-006-9019-z