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Iron Council
- New Crobuzon, Book 3
- Narrated by: Gildart Jackson
- Length: 21 hrs and 4 mins
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Publisher's summary
Following Perdido Street Station and The Scar, acclaimed author China Miéville returns with his hugely anticipated Del Rey debut. With a fresh and fantastical band of characters, he carries us back to the decadent squalor of New Crobuzon - this time, decades later.
It is a time of wars and revolutions, conflict and intrigue. New Crobuzon is being ripped apart from without and within. War with the shadowy city-state of Tesh and rioting on the streets at home are pushing the teeming city to the brink. A mysterious masked figure spurs strange rebellion, while treachery and violence incubate in unexpected places.
In desperation, a small group of renegades escapes from the city and crosses strange and alien continents in the search for a lost hope.
In the blood and violence of New Crobuzon’s most dangerous hour, there are whispers. It is the time of the iron council…
The bold originality that broke Miéville out as a new force of the genre is here once more in Iron Council: the voluminous, lyrical novel that is destined to seal his reputation as perhaps the edgiest mythmaker of the day.
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By: Mark Hodder
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The Golden Queen
- The Golden Queen, Book 1
- By: David Farland
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 12 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Insectoid Dronons have slain the queen Semarritte, throwing into chaos the ten thousand worlds over which she reigned. Desperate to save mankind, Lord Veriasse, Semarritte's near-immortal consort, has created a new queen: Everynne, cloned from her dead mother. Born to rule, Everynne instead is on the run, often only one planet ahead of advancing forces of the invaders, who recognize that Everynne is a powerful rallying point for threatened humanity.
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KISS ME QUICK BIRDS
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 06-16-14
By: David Farland
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Rot & Ruin
- By: Jonathan Maberry
- Narrated by: Brian Hutchison
- Length: 13 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Fifteen-year-old Benny Imura lives in a world infested with zombies where, when a kid turns 15, he must get a job to continue receiving food rations. Benny has no interest in the family business of zombie killing, but figures he doesn’t have much of a choice. He’s tried out a bunch of other jobs, and hasn’t found anything he likes. But as Benny starts training with his brother, he learns things about being human that he never expected.
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Just when you thought it was safe.....
- By Amanda H. on 05-12-11
By: Jonathan Maberry
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The Red Wolf Conspiracy
- By: Robert V. S. Redick
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 19 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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The Imperial Merchant Ship Chathrand is the last of her kind. Six hundred years old, the secrets of her construction long forgotten, the massive vessel dwarfs every other sailing craft in the world. It is a palace with sails, a floating outpost of the Empire of Arqual. And it is on its most vital mission yet: to deliver a young woman whose marriage will seal the peace between Arqual and its mortal enemy, the secretive Mzithrin Empire.
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Not Bad, not great.
- By Aerindel on 10-15-09
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Darwinia
- By: Robert Charles Wilson
- Narrated by: Kevin Pariseau
- Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1912, history was changed by the Miracle, when the old world of Europe was replaced by Darwinia, a strange land of nightmarish jungle and antediluvian monsters. To some, the Miracle was an act of divine retribution; to others, it is an opportunity to carve out a new empire. Leaving an America now ruled by religious fundamentalists, young Guilford Law travels to Darwinia on a mission of discovery that will take him further than he can possibly imagine.
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Not much about Darwinia.
- By Clavaine on 10-02-09
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Way of the Wolf
- The Vampire Earth, Book 1
- By: E. E. Knight
- Narrated by: Christian Rummel, E. E. Knight (Introduction)
- Length: 11 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Louisiana, 2065. A lot has changed in the 43rd year of the Kurian Order. Possessed of an unnatural and legendary hunger, the bloodthirsty Reapers have come to Earth to establish a New Order built on the harvesting of enslaved human souls. They rule the planet. They thrive on the scent of fear. And if it is night, as sure as darkness, they will come.
On this pitiless world, the indomitable spirit of mankind still breathes in Lieutenant David Valentine.
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Its what you expect, and thats not a bad thing.
- By Kevin McLaughlin on 11-26-08
By: E. E. Knight
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The Orenda
- A Novel
- By: Joseph Boyden
- Narrated by: Ali Ahn, Graham Rowat, Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 17 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Christophe has been in the New World only a year when his native guides abandon him to flee their Iroquois pursuers. A Huron warrior and elder named Bird soon takes him prisoner, along with a young Iroquois girl, Snow Falls, whose family he has just killed, and holds them captive in his massive village. Champlain's Iron People have only recently begun trading with the Huron, who mistrust them as well as this Crow who has now trespassed onto their land; and her people, of course, have become the Huron's greatest enemy.
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Thoughtful and interesting, if not always gripping
- By David on 06-15-14
By: Joseph Boyden
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SilverFin
- Young Bond, Book 1
- By: Charlie Higson
- Narrated by: Nathaniel Parker
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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What does it take to become the greatest secret agent the world has ever known? In this thrilling prequel to the James Bond series, readers meet a 13-year-old schoolboy whose inquisitive mind and determination set him on a path that will one day take him all over the world, in pursuit of the most dangerous criminals known to man.
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A Pleasant Surprise
- By Troy on 09-17-15
By: Charlie Higson
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The Mortal Tally
- By: Sam Sykes
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 24 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Cier'Djaal, once the crowning glory of the civilized world, has gone from a city to a battlefield and a battlefield to a graveyard. Foreign armies clash relentlessly on streets laden with the bodies of innocents caught in the crossfire. Cultists and thieves wage shadow wars, tribal armies foment outside the city's walls, and haughty aristocrats watch the world burn from on high. As his companions struggle to keep the city from destroying itself, Lenk travels to the Forbidden East in search of the demon who caused it all. But even as he pursues Khoth-Kapira, dark whispers plague his thoughts.
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Great Middle Entry
- By Casey on 04-15-18
By: Sam Sykes
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A Shadow on the Glass
- The View From the Mirror Quartet, Book 1
- By: Ian Irvine
- Narrated by: Grant Cartwright
- Length: 21 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Once there were three worlds, each with their own human species. Then, fleeing out of the void came a fourth species, the Charon. Desperate, on the edge of extinction, they changed the balance between the worlds forever. Karan, a sensitive with a troubled heritage, is forced to steal an ancient relic in repayment of a debt. It turns out to be the Mirror of Aachan, a twisted, deceitful thing that remembers everything it has ever seen.
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Not quite good enough.
- By Scott S. on 03-13-12
By: Ian Irvine
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Can living artwork die?
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The 20th Century's New Weird History
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What William Gibson did for science fiction, China Miéville has done for fantasy, shattering old paradigms with fiercely imaginative works of startling, often shocking, intensity. Now from this brilliant writer comes a groundbreaking collection of stories, many of them previously unavailable in the United States, and including four never-before-published tales - one set in Miéville’s signature fantasy world of New Crobuzon.
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Graze Into It
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In a remote house on a hilltop, a lonely boy witnesses a profoundly traumatic event. He tries - and fails - to flee. Left alone with his increasingly deranged parent, he dreams of safety, of joining the other children in the town below, of escape. When at last a stranger knocks at his door, the boy senses that his days of isolation might be over. But by what authority does this man keep the meticulous records he carries? What is the purpose behind his questions? Is he friend? Enemy? Or something else altogether?
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Only Feeding the Darkness
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Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen's Calorie Man in Thailand. Under cover as a factory manager, Anderson combs Bangkok's street markets in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping to reap the bounty of history's lost calories. There, he encounters Emiko...Emiko is the Windup Girl, a strange and beautiful creature. One of the New People, Emiko is not human; instead, she is an engineered being, creche-grown and programmed to satisfy the decadent whims of a Kyoto businessman.
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Good and also Frustrating
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Always Coming Home
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Midway through her career, Ursula K. Le Guin embarked on one of her most detailed, impressive literary projects, a novel that took more than five years to complete. Blending story and fable, poetry, artwork, and song, Always Coming Home is this legendary writer’s fictional ethnography of the Kesh, a people of the far future living in a post-apocalyptic Napa Valley.
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Anyone who would give this a bad score is boring
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Area X
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Dive into the mysteries of Area X, a remote and lush terrain that has inexplicably sequestered itself from civilization. Twelve expeditions have gone in, and not a single member of any of them has remained unchanged by the experience - for better or worse.
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Book 1: intriguing! Book 2: Zzzz. Book 3: WTF!
- By KR on 02-03-15
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New Spring
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For three days battle has raged in the snow around the great city of Tar Valon. In the city, a foretelling of the future is uttered. On the slopes of Dragonmount, the immense mountain that looms over the city, a child is born, an infant prophesied to change the world. That child must be found before he can be killed by the forces of the Shadow.
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Read it after reading others in the series
- By Stacy Fair on 12-13-07
By: Robert Jordan
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Babel
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- By: R. F. Kuang
- Narrated by: Chris Lew Kum Hoi, Billie Fulford-Brown
- Length: 21 hrs and 46 mins
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1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel. Babel is the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as its knowledge serves the Empire’s quest for colonization.
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The novel language lovers have been waiting for
- By LisaLee on 09-06-22
By: R. F. Kuang
What listeners say about Iron Council
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Elijah Church
- 03-24-22
Amazing work
A bit tangled up in the politics at times, this is still an engaging and enjoyable read/listen. Juda Low and Cutter are great characters, depth and development. This is a Mieville novel, so it is full of creative imagery and concepts. There are gems in the writing and the word play- this is well worth your time. The narrator was marvelous.
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- Robin
- 12-26-16
excellent work! a great end to a great series.
smdh fight vyvbbinibnomomomo minin inonomovdt ghmkklkcbnjkcn you hjj ujj hjj jjjyzd ddb fgnb ujn GB n jjmm
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- PNWAdventurer
- 03-13-22
Difficult to connect to
China’s work is difficult to connect to on this one. I do realize that he takes us on a journey of the dark, strange, uncomfortable and abstract with all of his works so it might seem odd to expect to connect. However, I do find that I am normally invested in the outcome of the story for his characters and fascinated by their journeys. I made it all of the way through this book without being able to rally anything more than a mild curiosity about the story arc (which I ultimately found utterly blah) and no particular interest in any of the characters. The narration is well done if not stellar or compelling.
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- Tim
- 03-11-16
Very Close to the First
The first book in this trilogy was my very first introduction to China Mieville. I dug "Perdido Street Station" and read almost every book from this author after that. It took me a few years to finish New Crobuzon Trilogy because I didn't believe that he could beat "Perdido Street Station." I thought that "The Scar" was well done, but not better than the first.
After starting this series three years ago, I finally wanted to finish the train saga with "Iron Council." The last book is my favorite in this series. I think that the "Iron Council" is far better than the second and very close to the first. I liked the drama from the council,more monsters, remade, the train and realism of each characters.
Mr. Mieville has a special talent of approaching science fiction and fantasy in a different way. It's almost addicting to read any of his books.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Nat M. Zorach
- 11-27-18
loved the first two-- this one was a struggle
Iron Council has some clever new ideas, but its characters have less depth and less quirk than the previous two books.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Jefferson
- 02-06-19
“we were, we are, we will be.”
Following Perdido Street Station (2000) and The Scar (2002), China Mieville's third Bas-Lag novel, Iron Council (2004), occurs at least 20 years after the events of the first book. All is not well in New Crobuzon, the powerful, vast city-state featured in Perdido Street Station. The city has been locked in an endless war against Tesh, a rival city-state on the other side of the world where the laws of physics and magic are different; horribly wounded veterans are sapping morale; the brutal militia are clamping down on insurrectionists; factions (like the xenophobic bowler-hat wearing Quillers) are attacking inhabitants they dislike (like the scarab-headed Khepri); and gangsters are ever active.
What is the Iron Council? It takes many pages to find out. That's because we first read a lot about a merchant called Cutter in the wilderness leading a small band of insurrectionists on an epic journey trying to catch up with the man he loves, Judah Lowe, a powerful golemetrist seeking the Council, and then about a naïve laborer called Ori in New Crobuzon leaving his all talk and no action ("too much yammer, not enough hammer") dissident group to join the rebel crime lord Toro. Then we plunge into a lengthy flashback (the best part of the novel) relating how about twenty years ago Judah became an idealistic autodidact golemetrist. Eventually we learn that a visionary New Crobuzon tycoon was pursuing his holy mission to push his Transcontinental Railroad Trust across the continent from coast to coast when the workers (including Remade slave laborers), camp followers (including prostitutes), and assorted TRT scientists and mages, mutinied over absent pay, took the train, and turned it into a “feral perpetual train,” pulling up track behind and laying it down before, unbuckling the past and making the future, making a contingent moment of railroad, “a rolling democracy. A Remade arcadia”: Iron Council.
The novel is full of Mieville’s fertile imagination, usually at work making monstrous chimera, whether natural or artificial. His chimerical imagination drives his approach to genre, as this novel combines genres like epic fantasy, science fiction, horror, western, exploration adventure, political fable, crime caper, and same-sex romance. Technology rubs shoulders with thamaturgy, “normal” humans kiss Remade humans, and divine and semi-divine beings show up now and then.
I like his exploration of the science and magic of golemetry (an intervention in the natural still state of inanimate matter so as to shift it into another form that moves with a kind of sentience), his conception of the perpetual train “renegapolis,” his audacious attempt at a climax interruptus, his politicizing of things like love, theater, war, justice, and capitalism, his avoidance of cheap sentimentality, his refusal to make his readers feel good, but instead to challenge them and provoke them and stir them up in constructive ways.
Mieville can write. When he gets going on a poetic riff, whether sublime or profane, he really goes: "Elsie remembered the air burials she had heard of among northern tribes, women and men of the tundra, who let their dead rest in open coffins under balloons, sent them skywards through the cold air and clouds, to drift in air streams way above the depredations of insects or birds or rot itself, so the stratosphere over their hunt lands was a catacombs, where explorers by dirigible encountered none but the frost mummified dead."
He fashions myriad cool, grotesque, and or beautiful things, like a monk who literally trades something he/she knows in return for something hidden or lost, the Stiltspear marsh people who chant their prey still, a "susurrator" who controls people by whispering in their minds, five-fingered military handlingerer parasites who wear animal or human bodies, elementarii who command elemental monsters, kinetiphage motion demons who gorge on sounds, and golems made of shadow, light, air, sound, and time. Mieville details all those and many more with a feverish poetic flair.
In fact, that becomes a problem. As Cutter muses at one point when he’s traveling through the Cacotopic Stain, a dread unmapped region where land and air and time are sick, “where monsters are made . . . a viral landscape . . . of pathological parturition," "We don't even see it no more. . . You can get used to the most monstrous absurdity." So Mieville's profligate imagination for monstrous chimeras begins to numb, as when he describes a sublime and scary moonlight elemental and then botches it by making it a fish-bear-rat-horned-firefly-deathmoth thing.
Moreover, although New Crobuzon is a vivid creation, a vibrant and decadent city with districts, towers, trains, repressive government, and motley population comprised of garden variety humans, arcane races (including cactus people, aquatic people, and beetle people), the Remade (criminals sent to punishment factories to gain all manner of grotesque animal, insectoid, and machine appendages), and singers, scientists, thamaturges, laborers, dissidents, merchants, militia, and so on we have been there before in Perdido Street Station, and its coolness wears a little thin here. And although Cutter and Judah are great (and sf-fantasy novels could use more homosexual or bisexual main characters like them), Iron Council hosts fewer compelling characters than Perdido Street Station and The Scar.
People who like Mieville’s first two Bas-Lag books should like this one. People new to Mieville should start with either of the earlier books. People who like weird sf that melds multiple genres, who like to view the world as a political creation, and who appreciate rich prose should like this book.
The audiobook reader Gildart Jackson does a professional job voicing all the many different kinds of characters in different kinds of moods.
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8 people found this helpful
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- A
- 09-30-17
Heavy hitting but ultimately a storyline miss
Written in his classic way - this story aims for lofty narrative ambitions but falls well short of China's other great works (thinking of The Scar & Perdido Street Station).
Still full with the awe and magic that runs through his work, here I found myself uncaring about the plot, lives, motivations and ultimately the fates of the characters we encounter.
While a nice addition to Bas Lag's world-building, this is a read for fans of the series, but a pass for others not initiated in the world
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2 people found this helpful
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- Dennis
- 08-11-16
Quite good
I loved this book, more than Perdido St Station but much less than The Scar. It did seem like a bit of a reuse of the idea of The Scar, a mobile renegade utopia of quasi-criminals constantly on the run through the wilderness, instead of the sea. However I found this to be compelling because of Judah. His relationships and talents and demeanor seemed very real and I thought his bisexuality was well handled. We need more representation in fiction as real people, it wasn't the only character point for him as queerness sometimes can be.
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- Eleonora Kapow
- 04-06-21
Apocalypse fiction
I have a thing for apocalypses, and have wallowed in the Fallout games and the Mad Max movies as much as anybody. But I think we should rethink the genre of post-apocalypse fiction, which the afore mentioned examples tend to be classified under. I think it might be more accurate to view post-apocalypse as a sub-genre of apocalypse fiction. Stories in which The Apocalypse is the true protagonist. Iron Council with its two forerunners is a great example of this. While they are actually written as a trilogy, the concluding novel stands perfectly on its own with the two other novels as great world-building companions. Iron Council is the true master piece of the trilogy. It rubs shoulders with other great works of apocalypse fiction such as The Cage of Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky and the Book of the New Sun series by Gene Wolfe. It is carried by melancholy and beauty and poetry and comments also on History and how we read it, with a stern look at the Great Men of History fallacy. It also gives voice to the disenfranchised and outcast and voiceless with heartbreaking consequence. This is no doubt my best read this year.
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- Makinzie Knox
- 02-04-22
Can someone tell China to please please make more?
I can't believe China did me like that. The emotional toll on all of that betrayal. I'm mostly upset because no other series will ever be as good as the Bas Lag Trilogy and I'm beyond upset that there is no more to read (aside from a few side shorts).
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