Predator Cities Literary Analysis

The genre of Dystopian novels has lately ridden the success of titles like The Hunger Games, Maze Runner and Divergent but in the early 2000’s there was a book series called Predator Cities written by Phillip Reeve. In this series the earth had been changed drastically after a terrifying and total modern war that lasted a mere sixty minutes, nations do not exist in the formal sense and cities exist as giant city-states that move on tracks. Life and death hangs in the balance through a system known as “Municipal Darwinism” but how well does it compare to the idea of Social Darwinism that existed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Social Darwinism is the ideal that like animal, persons, groups, and races are also subject to the same laws of natural selection created by Charles Darwin (Social Darwinism). One of its main tenants was that of the well-known phrase “Survival of the Fittest” that you survive or more specifically succeed in life by the qualities

In the book “Municipal Darwinism” is based heavily on the idea of “Survival of the Fittest” that being the bigger cities destroy the smaller ones and grow bigger and survive while the smaller ones get destroyed and die. The connection is meant to be very direct but it has a deeper meaning in my mind it connects that just like in our real world and in the one created in the novel, people believe these ideas and systems to be right, just and fair. Even though we know today and how the characters in the novel figure out that the systems are very broken and do not promote long term benefits to humanity. In the book the system starts breaking down because of hundreds of years under this system the so called food chain has been heavily depleted and cities begin going after other sources of fuel and resources sparking another furious war in the novels world putting humanity once again in the