The Sunless Countries
Book Four of Virga
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Narrated by:
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Joyce Irvine
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David Thorn
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By:
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Karl Schroeder
About this listen
The Sunless Countries is the fourth novel in the Virga series of hard science fiction space opera adventures
In an ocean of weightless air where sunlight has never been seen, only the running lights of the city of Pacquaea glitter in the dark. One woman, Leal Hieronyma Maspeth, lives and dreams of love among the gaslit streets and cafés. And somewhere in the abyss of wind and twisted cloud through which Pacquaea eternally falls, a great voice has begun speaking.
As its cold words reach from space to the city walls—and as outlying towns and travelers' ships start to mysteriously disappear—only Leal has the courage to try to understand the message thundering from the distance. Even the city's most famous and exotic visitor, the sun lighter and hero named Hayden Griffin, refuses to turn aside from his commission to build a new sun for a foreign nation. He will not become the hero that Leal knows the city needs; so it is up to her to listen, and ultimately reply, to the voice of the worldwasp—because an astonishing disaster threatens Virga.
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Critic reviews
“Inventive and solidly enjoyable… Schroeder paints his unique world with deft touches while keeping the story moving briskly.” —Publishers Weekly, on The Sunless Countries
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Maddy should have died in a plane crash. Liam should have died at sea when the Titanic sank. Sal should have died in a tragic fire. But a mysterious man whisked them away to safety. Maddy, Liam, and Sal quickly learn that time travel is no longer just a hope for the future; it is a dangerous reality. And they weren't just rescued from their terrible fates…they were recruited for the agency of TimeRiders created to protect the world from those seeking to alter the course of history for personal gain.
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Rather mundane story, not very scifi
- By DoctorMu on 01-24-16
By: Alex Scarrow
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Stations of the Tide
- By: Michael Swanwick
- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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The Jubilee Tides will drown the continents of the planet Miranda beneath the weight of her own oceans. But as the once-in-two-centuries cataclysm approaches, an even greater catastrophe threatens this dark and dangerous planet of tale-spinners, conjurers, and shapechangers. From author Michael Swanwick—one of the most brilliantly assured and darkly inventive writers of contemporary fiction—comes a masterwork of radically altered realities and world-shattering seductions.
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Hard to categorize, hard to put down
- By Robert L. on 03-25-12
By: Michael Swanwick
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2113
- Stories Inspired by the Music of Rush
- By: John McFetridge - editor, Kevin J. Anderson - editor
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 13 hrs
- Unabridged
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The music of Rush, one of the most successful bands in music history, is filled with fantastic stories, evocative images, thought-provoking futures and pasts. In this anthology, notable, best-selling, and award-winning writers each chose a Rush song as the spark for a new story, drawing inspiration from the visionary trio Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart.
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I'm a RUSH fan, but ...no..not this book
- By NBP on 07-15-17
By: John McFetridge - editor, and others
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Kingdom Keepers: The Return Book One Disney Lands
- Kingdom Keepers: The Return, Book 1
- By: Ridley Pearson
- Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 6 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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With the defeat of the Overtakers behind them, the five teenagers known as the Kingdom Keepers should be celebrating. By all accounts they saved Disneyland from certain destruction. Why then did their mentor leave one last puzzle for them to decipher? The Keepers must solve a puzzle of the past, or be crushed under an evil that makes the Overtakers seem like gentle souls.
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Why do I keep buying these?
- By Rebecca on 04-04-16
By: Ridley Pearson
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The Kingdom Keepers
- Disney after Dark
- By: Ridley Pearson
- Narrated by: Gary Littman
- Length: 6 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Using a cutting-edge technology called DHI - which stands for both Disney Host Interactive and Daylight Hologram Imaging - Finn Whitman, an Orlando teen, and four other kids are transformed into hologram projections that guide guests through the park. The new technology turns out, however, to have unexpected effects that are both thrilling and scary. Soon Finn finds himself transported in his DHI form into the Magic Kingdom at night. Is it real? Is he dreaming? Finn’s confusion only increases when he encounters Wayne, an elderly Imagineer who tells him that the park is in grave danger.
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Awful narration
- By Kelsey on 06-14-17
By: Ridley Pearson
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The Final Empire
- Mistborn Book 1
- By: Brandon Sanderson
- Narrated by: Michael Kramer
- Length: 24 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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For a thousand years the ash fell and no flowers bloomed. For a thousand years the Skaa slaved in misery and lived in fear. For a thousand years the Lord Ruler, the "Sliver of Infinity," reigned with absolute power and ultimate terror, divinely invincible. Then, when hope was so long lost that not even its memory remained, a terribly scarred, heart-broken half-Skaa rediscovered it in the depths of the Lord Ruler's most hellish prison.
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Prepare for sleepless nights
- By tercia on 10-21-18
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Frozen Earth
- Rogue Star, Book 1
- By: Jasper T. Scott
- Narrated by: Flynn Earl Jones
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Logan Willis’s life is falling apart: he lost his job and found out that his wife is cheating on him all in the same day. Thinking that his world has ended, Logan checks into a hotel and turns on the TV to see that he's not far wrong - radio telescopes have detected mysterious signals coming from inside our solar system, and the source is moving toward us at over 500 miles per second. The media concludes that these signals must be of an alien origin. Still reeling from the news, Logan gets a phone call from his brother-in-law.
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Not that good
- By Roni on 12-27-18
By: Jasper T. Scott
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The Pearl Wars: Skyship Academy, Book 1
- By: Nick James
- Narrated by: Jeffrey Kafer
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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A devastated Earth's last hope is found in Pearls: small, mysterious orbs that fall from space and are capable of supplying enough energy to power entire cities. Battling to control the Pearls are the Skyship dwellers -political dissidents who live in massive ships in the Earth's stratosphere - and the corrupt Surface government.
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Starts slow but picks up in the quarter...
- By Karissa Eckert on 12-11-16
By: Nick James
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The Book of M
- A Novel
- By: Peng Shepherd
- Narrated by: James Fouhey, Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 17 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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One afternoon at an outdoor market in India, a man’s shadow disappears - an occurrence science cannot explain. He is only the first. The phenomenon spreads like a plague, and while those afflicted gain a strange new power, it comes at a horrible price: the loss of all their memories. Ory and his wife, Max, have escaped the Forgetting so far by hiding in an abandoned hotel deep in the woods. Their new life feels almost normal, until one day, Max’s shadow disappears, too.
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It was ok
- By Fatima on 12-04-19
By: Peng Shepherd
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The Abyss Beyond Dreams
- Chronicle of the Fallers, Book 1
- By: Peter F. Hamilton
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 22 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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The year is 3326. Nigel Sheldon, one of the founders of the Commonwealth, receives a visit from the Raiel - self-appointed guardians of the Void, the enigmatic construct at the core of the galaxy that threatens the existence of all that lives. The Raiel convince Nigel to participate in a desperate scheme to infiltrate the Void. Once inside, Nigel discovers that humans are not the only life-forms to have been sucked into the Void. The humans trapped there are afflicted by an alien species of biological mimics.
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Intersection of the Void and Commonwealth - Super
- By C. Hartmann on 10-30-14
What listeners say about The Sunless Countries
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Stef
- 05-05-16
Schroeder, Irvine & Thorn deliver, with 1 glitch
Schroeder is a hard science fiction writer who builts fascinating worlds AND populates them with interesting characters. Joyce Irvine, who also narrates the other books in this series, has a unique voice that I absolutely love. David Thorn is also a very competent narrator.
I did find it annoying that Irvine and Thorn often switch off narration in the middle of a scene. Whenever they switched at a point that wasn't a chapter break, it distracted me for a couple of minutes.
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- Just a guy that answers questions
- 04-01-17
Great Series Edge if Seat Stories
loved this series it make you want more. also read Ventus by the same author for more artificial nature and it's downfalls
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- MikeFarr
- 11-17-15
Ideas you may never have run into
Possibly the best of the series And some ideas about The evolution of intelligence that you may never have heard of before. Legitimately new ideas, in addition to fine operatic story, this is truly a joy.
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- Julie W. Capell
- 09-17-23
More cerebral than other books in the series
I first read (correction: listened to) Karl Schroeder's Virga series as it was being released. Somehow, I missed this fourth book in the series, and so am returning after more than a decade. I liked how this book focused on a different set of characters and a part of the world that was barely touched on in previous books in the series. Here, the main action is set in a town named Sere that is located far from the large artificial sun that lights most of Virga. The people of Seer have adapted to the perpetual twilight and some of my favorite passages in the book describe what their lives are like. AND . . . tiny spoiler alert . . . there are some really great passages depicting how the protagonist, Leal, reacts when she sees sunlight for the first time.
A good part of the plot is driven by the politics of the city of Seer, which have become dominated by a group of refuseniks who deny that there is a greater universe outside of Virga. History teachers must only teach the curricula that is approved by the government, and books that do not conform are burned. This book came out in 2009 and while Schroeder is in fact a professional futurist, I'm sure he was just following in the venerable footsteps of Orwell and Bradbury, rather than actually foretelling the ascension of similar science denial we see now in 2023. Still, the echoes in current affairs were chilling for this reader, and it's thought experiments like this that keep me reading scifi.
In sum, I liked this book more than the third one, because this one focused on more cerebral questions and less on action sequences.
[I listened to this with narrators Joyce Irvine and David Thorn, both excellent. They co-narrated the previous audio book in this series, and there it made sense to have two narrators, as the action was moving between two different characters, one female and one male. That wasn't the case with this story, and I struggled to understand why the narrators were switching back and forth. It wasn't terrible, but it was a bit distracting.]
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