Sixty Minute War
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The Sixty Minute War is a fictional event in Philip Reeve's Hungry City Chronicles. It is a cataclysmic conflict which is deliberately left vague, but was evidently fought between the American Empire and Greater China. It is likely that the Middle East was involved, as this region has been reduced to a flooded maze of atomic craters.
The name suggests that the war took only an hour to begin and end, presumably due to the widespread destruction caused by the massive amounts of weaponry deployed.
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[edit] Aftermath
Most human technology was lost during the conflict, and the world collapsed into a post apocalyptic state.
Following the war came a period of immense geological instability, as earthquakes, tsunamis, glaciers and volcanos swept across Earth. It is uncertain whether this was an unfortunate coincidence, or directly caused by the Sixty Minute War (since weapons technology was greatly advanced at the time of the war, this is not out of the question). The isthmus linking North and South America was destroyed by Slow Bombs[1], volcanoes sprouted up in Europe and new oceans and mountain ranges were formed.[2]
North America was reduced to a radioactive wasteland[3], along with much of eastern China. The surviving Chinese fled into the Himalayas and formed a new civilisation that would later become Shan Guo, leading nation of the Anti-Traction League.
This destruction led to the so called "Black Centuries", an era presumably similar to the Dark Ages. During this period, barbaric nomad tribes wandered Europe.
After these centuries (almost certainly no earlier than 5000 CE), Nicholas Quirke founded London, the first of the Traction Cities and this led to the rise of Municipal Darwinism and the Traction Era.
[edit] Remnants of weaponry
The scale of the war meant that nuclear and biological weapons, some deployed upon orbital platforms, were utilized to great extent. More powerful weapons were also used or at least developed; the "American Empire" is mentioned in passing to have possessed weaponry capable of somehow drawing power from parallel universes.[4]
Several items featured in the series are deadly relics of the conflict, including a directed-energy weapon called MEDUSA which is later mounted upon the Traction City of London. This weapon (and the computer that controls it) was recovered by a group of explorers from an ancient military base on the American continent. MEDUSA later misfires and self-destructs, destroying London with it.
Another featured weapon was the orbital device known as ODIN (acronym for Orbital Defence INitiative) which was featured in Infernal Devices and A Darkling Plain. The activation codes for this superweapon were located in the "Tin Book" and were written in a military code. The Tin Book was said to have been salvaged from the dying crew of an American nuclear submarine before being copied out by future generations. ODIN itself is activated in A Darkling Plain, and appears to be some form of energy beam weapon. It destroys several traction cities (including Manchester) as well as Green Storm static cities. Fortunately it is destroyed before it can be used to trigger supervolcanoes and wipe out humanity.
[edit] References
[edit] See also
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| Books: | Mortal Engines, Predator's Gold, Infernal Devices, A Darkling Plain |
| Characters: | Tom Natsworthy, Hester Shaw, Wren Natsworthy, Shrike, Anna Fang, Nimrod Pennyroyal, Theo Ngoni |
| Organisations: | Traction Cities, Traktionstadtsgesellschaft, Anti-Traction League, Green Storm |
| Other: | Municipal Darwinism, Sixty Minute War, Stalkers, Jenny Haniver |
