Wildsea is a recognizably English world, but one seasoned with enough subtle differences to make it pleasingly new and intriguing. Reeve's is on top of his world-building game here. Soon enough, the Gorm goes from legend to kraken-ish reality, a cohort of Seaweed Men appear, as well as a sunken city and an irate Queen of the Deeps.
Andrewe drowns and Utterly takes over his job, at least until Will, Andrewe's brother, arrives from England. He's on the lookout for a legendary sea monster called the Gorm, who, so far, has never shown up. She was adopted and raised by Andrewe Dark, who has the ancestral, but boring, task of watching the western seas from a tower at sundown every night. Utterly Dark is also the name of a girl, a foundling who washed up on a beach in a basket on the island of Wildsea off the coast of England. In Utterly Dark, the setting is an alternate reality Britain in the early Victorian period(?). So where does that leave Philip Reeve, author of the Mortal Engines Quartet and a wide variety of other SF/F novels for the YA and JF crowd? I'd rank him as a princeling or dauphin, able to shape and populate living, breathing new worlds that fire the imagination without resorting to boxcar-sized info dumps. The kings and queens of world-building would be Tolkien, Mervyn Peake, Ursula K. And that's the unique thing about world-building otherwise good writers can be duds at that particular craft. Jemisin's The Fifth Season is very well-written but I couldn't finish it because the world-building was so threadbare. I can recall an SF novel set on a planet that was one big ocean and yet contained only one described type of fish. On the other hand, there are authors who pay as little attention to world-building as I do to maintaining my lawn. Frank Herbert and Iain Banks must have been enthusiastic hobbyists. These are the writers who probably spend their spare time building extravagant model train layouts. Some writers over egg their pudding by cramming details about customs, languages, laws, and zoology into their writing until their "world" begins to feel like a fussy, claustrophobia-inducing, overfurnished apartment filled with things and people who apparently got their names as the result of a tragic draw of tiles from a Scrabble bag. It's the keystone of sci-fi and fantasy novels, but in my reading experience it's the rare author in those fields who can do it well. It has also enjoyed a resurgence of popularity in the independent film scene of the 1990s, with several movies (Palookaville, Bottle Rocket) seamlessly blending the cliches of the crime thriller with comic appropriations.Let's talk about world-building. There have been some wonderful entrees in this genre from Hollywood (Larceny Inc., Beat The Devil, The Pink Panther series, Topkapi, Gambit), but it is arguably the European cinema, notably the English comedies from the Ealing Studios (Kind Hearts And Coronets, The Ladykillers, The Lavender Hill Mob, and the Ealing-influenced A Fish Called Wanda) and the farces in Italian cinema (Big Deal On Madonna Street), that have perfected the genre. Often the crimes are unsuccessful and/or bumblingly executed or are presented in such a lighthearted matter that one ends up rooting for the criminal to get away with their loot unscathed. The brains behind the jobs usually aren't that bright, or fail to take into account several factors which place the culprits in rather sticky situations.
A hybrid of the crime film and the comedy, playing the conventions of the crime genre (tough guys and gangsters, capers and heists, cops and robbers) for laughs.
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