Walking City - in Fiction

In Fiction

• The four novels in Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines Quartet (Hungry City Chronicles) include large mobile Traction Cities that travel across the world, devouring each other to gain fuel and other resources.
• A massive city travelling along equatorial rails around the planet Mercury is the setting for a minor part of Blue Mars, the last book in the Mars Trilogy of Kim Stanley Robinson. The city is pushed along by the slight yet powerful expansion of the rails as the close-by sun shines on them (with the city always just staying within the planetary night), moving the city once around the planet every 88 Earth days. The same city appears in Robinson's early novel The Memory of Whiteness.
• There is a similar arrangement in Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire, where Nomad City avoids Athega's light by continually moving over the surface of Nkllon.
• In Alastair Reynolds's Absolution Gap, vast cities circle the moon of Hela to keep the planet Haldora in view, in case "the Miracle" – the momentary disappearance of Haldora – occurs again. The mobile cities are called Cathedrals and are devoted to worship of the Miracle, which they believe is God's message to humanity.
• In Christopher Priest's novel Inverted World a city on a "hyberbolic" planet is continually moved on rails to keep it at a particular location—which itself moves—where conditions are "normal".
• Greg Bear's novel The Strength of Stones is set in the declining years of a planet of motorized cities that ejected their inhabitants.
• Storm Constantine's novel Calenture takes place in a world of mobile cities that fly, walk or move on wheels, guided and powered by "pilot stones".
• The computer game Starcraft features an interstellar empire of humans that use collections of mobile buildings to assemble ad-hoc cities in space and on land.
• In Dark Heresy, a roleplaying game set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe the city of Ambulon on the planet Scintilla is build on the back of a giant walking machine, found there by the imperial settlers. It roams the planet's wastelands, mining and harvesting natural resources which then are delivered to other cities.
• In anime Chrome Shelled Regios, Regiois is Large Mobile cities created by humans to live after Earth atmosphere became too polluted to live