Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
I’m trying to hopefully finish The Iron Council now, which is the third book in China Miéville’s Bas Lag series, which I stopped around 250ish pages last time because something something kept forgetting to charge my e-reader, blargh
Anyway, I had to start over from the beginning, and now that I’m reacquainting myself with this world, I am reminded that the following things exist in it:
Frog people who do magic with water, from Slavic mythology
Cactus people
A certain type of evil parasitic being which consists of two hands, a right hand and left hand, which implant themselves in lifeforms of literally any kind, for example in the early parts of this book there is one where one of the hands implanted in a human and the other one in a monkey. The hands mind-control their hosts, and IIRC they each confer a different set of powers to them, and right hands always work in conjunction with a left hand, although not necessarily the same one. If I remember from the first book correctly, one of the hosts is a high-ranking government official, or was, I forgot if he died or not
The government of this world deals with criminals by giving them grotesque steampunk alterations which are supposed to serve the dual purpose of both being useful for society, and also being painful, humiliating, or otherwise difficult to live with. There’s an entire field called “biothaumaturgy”, where like, humans and animals and pieces of industrial equipment are spliced together and the whole thing still functions as a living organism, even if now you consume gasoline and excrete out of a exhaust pipe. They’re called Remade, but the ones who have escaped from society are called FReemade.
IIRC, the second book had a race of mosquito people, the male ones were perfectly reasonable, nice people who ate flowers, the female ones were ravenous monsters that drained all the blood from anyone who set foot on their island. They are not allowed to leave their island, for everyone’s safety
I wish there was more stuff like this in other fantasy.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
I've been saving reading the Bas-Lag trilogy because I've loved almost every book by the author, and this seemed to be the big one. But my online english library access would be ending soon, so I decided to give it a try.
Also decided to liveblog my thoughts from page 278 onwards.
p278 : The situation is so fucked that I'm afraid to turn the page. God, protagonist you idiot, why did you start raising this caterpillar that you didn't even know what was! To say nothing of the guy who stole the thing... No, in the first place, why send something so important and dangerous through mail? Deliver it yourself! God they are so screwed.... The book is only 38% done and it's a trilogy... For all I know the whole city might be taken down, I've read Embassytown, I won't put it past him to do something of that magnitude... ㅠㅠ what are they going to do... Five mind-controlling insects... they are so screwed... the government doesn't even know there's five of these things...
p280 : Excuse me? The devil? Wow this book is really going places (positive) Wait what? Even the demons are afraid? God Isaac you crazy idiot ㅠㅠ no it was whoever mailed it via normal mail that was the crazy one... ㅠㅠ Good thing I didn't look at any spoilers because I would never have guessed the story would go into this direction.... Moreover, that 'Torque' thing that was mentioned would surely come into play later... I'm scared...
Oh a protest.... oh police brutality... I feel like this author always tends to portray this side of city life and I really appreciate it... Oh, the paper publisher was taken ㅠㅠ....
Fuck I just noticed the book's fucking cover has a moth! I hate it! Don't do this to me!
The interludes with the winged species guy's city life, is this the same guy that the protagonist is helping out?
p313 : Ha Isaac you're really screwed... what are you going to do... Having the protag's group realize that this goes up to the government right after showing us how the government treats dissidents really drives home how screwed they are. If the friend was dead, at least they could give up...
By the way did that tiny Wyrman survive not because they were small but because their intelligence wasn't as highly developed as a human's? Then couldn't they gather a team with these guys? Or aren't there people who could move without visual information? God this is such a terrible situation... To think even the demons cut their losses and gave up ㅠㅠ...
333p Oh thank god they figured out it's five moths
337p Oh no even the wyrmen are being eaten ㅠㅠ
348p Okay so they don't just eat dreams, they also spread nightmares. Okay sure fine (god...)
I like the informant section... Makes sense that he'd report on this and betray his freinds since the situation has gotten so out of control and terrifying... Also liked their leftest movement taking great care to keep their secrecy yet just telling things to friends of friends because they trust people. It's so real orz
The thing I'm most afraid of right now is the moths breeding. There's five of them! Insects breed very quickly after reaching maturity! If those thing breed they are really done for
358 Finally a name. Slake-moths.
361 I think one reason I love this author is because they see the beauty in the unexpected. (this from the description of the seductive wings as irregular, shifting randomly and inconstantly.)
Also love that the moths are trying to find the minds they knew as caterpillars, to feed on them. It's like the opposite of what happens in happier fantasy stories where you pick up a dangerous creature in its infancy & it attaches itself to you and favors you and helps you out.
363 Oh god the scientist begging at them to shoot her... Do victims not simply become brain-dead? Is there a worse fate awaiting them?
368 LIN NO
I thought Lin was a co-protagonist, but is Isaac the sole protag... I suppose this could be said to be an ensemble cast
374 I see I see "the subconscious their nectar"... they really do feed on dreams
Omg the nightmares are supposed to enrich our subconscious so that they'd be more nutritious for the moths... 😭
376 Dreamshit is their baby food... god
"Hermaphrodites" this is the worst case scenario, they are so screwed
Omg I forgot about the construct and the virus
397 Ears. Why ears? I'd understand if it was eyes, but ears?
Lin can't be dead. I refused to believe it. She was the second POV character & got so much background development, she couldn't have been killed off screen
441 I really like this parasitic species. Love that there's a dog.
451 the half empty skull of the construct council 😭 God I love how this author keeps throwing new concept every chapter
475 OMG they got one! Construct minds do not dream... a genuinely alien intelligence...
tbh I have trouble imagining an intelligent, concious mind that can communicate with humans that doesn't have subconcious... I can only imagine what appears to be intelligent but isn't, like generative AIs...
In my ideal world there's a separate word for the medieval europe-ish fantasy genre & books like this are what's commonly considred to be 'Fantasy', instead of being called weird-fiction or whatever. Please let me have to learn about a whole entire new world every single time.
481 Love this whole section. The protagonist's personal problem is solved, but they decide to keep pursuing killing all of the moths anyway. All the buildup of the the protag group's anti-government leanings were leading up to this.
498 OH NO THEY'RE BREEDING
522 Yahgarek please don't die...
547 Oh right I forgot this verse has Hell and that they can take souls. So that's why the scientist wanted to be killed rather than eaten by the moth. You need your thoughts intact to get to the afterlife.
God they're in the lair, the moth is laying eggs, by all rights this should be the climax but we're only 75% into the book... It's all going to go wrong
568 Well, it went wrong. But at least they destroyed the eggs.
580 Welp, martial law...
583 Title drop~
588 "This had to be exigency. This could not be a choice." I really hope Derkhan survives...
"But there was no moral accounting that lessened the horror of what she was doing. She could only ignore that anxious discourse." I really appreciate that the author doesn't make things easy for the protag group. Derkhan has to swallow down her disgust at what she is doing & at the same time genuinely try her best to get it done. She refuses to justify it to herself. I like it a lot.
599 omg Derkhan there's a time and place! Don't question the followers of the heretic church why they follow the heretic church when they're only helping you out because the heretic church told them to!
619 "We could take his gag away, (...) and he wouldn't scream... but then he might speak... He left the gag in place." <- man......
620 Oho so they plan to betray the council! I was afraid of it betraying them, but it's the other way!
Only 3 chapters left, we're nearing the end...
630 OMG! The ultimate unconcious mind + the ultimate concious mind! So that's why these concepts were introduced! Omg the poor old man...
640 Who's helping them??
641 What the fuck
647 How do you kill a moth - you kill them with (metaphorical) flame that they're attracted to. Genius.
652 Fuck they were so close fuck fuck
661 Lin! I knew she couldn't be dead!
667 LIN OMG NO........
693 Oh my god
Okay, wow, what is this ending.
I don't know what to make of it.
I do think if I were in Isaac's position I'd do the same.
The thing I'm not sure about is what this book is trying to say with this ending. Maybe it'll become clear when I finish the trilogy...
I instintively feel uncomfortable about the fact that this became a story about rape (against women) in which the men's thoughts are given more narrative weight. At the same time I can't say it's badly or lazily written. But I still feel uncomfortable about it.
It's funny bc I read the depictions of horrible police brutality without an issue, maybe because at the end of the day it was fantasy police brutality. But rape is rape, I guess. That really was like being dumped a bucket of cold water.
I don't think I'll ever reread this book despite loving the majority of it. I just don't want to get into the head of a rapist knowing that they're a rapist.
This feels too much like irl where you can never completely trust an acqaintance, no matter how pleasant your interactions may have been so far.
Does the book want to say something about 'betrayal'...?
Okay this post helped a lot. The theme of community makes sense. I was struck by that scene where Isaac is freed from the threat of the moth he raised but decides he needs to still kill the other moths because he doesn't trust the government to adequately protect their city. And birdboy did say from the start that he was in it only because he wanted to regain his wings. His goal was purely personal from the start, it's just that I got fooled into thinking that him participating in this altruistic mission meant he was a "good person".
Okay having thought about this, I don't like how this book used Lin. Her personal history (her childhood) starts with sexual assault, and at the end of the book, the last we see of her is as "the sexually assaulted girlfriend" whose role in the narrative is to affect the protagonist's thinking. It stings more because in the beginning it really felt like there would be more to the character. I'm fine with her story being a tragedy but I don't like how it feels like she was there at the end just so Isaac could think about the rape thing in relation to her.
Okay, so because I wasn't satisfied with the book's use of Lin - this one gets four stars.
Slake Moth generated by Dall-E mini. This was almost disappointingly easy, but I love the results! Maybe I’ll actually try to paint something like this sometime, but I’ve got no idea where I’d even start.
