If the breakaway train and golem-cobbled tech of the Iron Council thrilled you—the way Judah Low’s craft and the rail workers’ ingenuity turn industry into liberation—then you’ll love how Boneshaker throws you into a smog-choked, gear-and-gas nightmare. Airships, clanking engines, and hazardous expeditions echo the hazardous, jury-rigged daring of Cutter and the train crew, trading New Crobuzon’s grime for a besieged frontier city powered by dangerous invention and audacious runs into forbidden zones.

If you were moved by the union uprisings, the Remade’s exploitation, and the Iron Council’s bid to seize dignity from an oppressive city-state, The Gutter Prayer dives into that same furnace. In Guerdon, thieves and outcasts get caught between predatory guilds and city powers, much like Ori’s brush with revolutionaries and the brutal crackdowns back in New Crobuzon. Living gods, alchemical horrors, and a city that eats its poor conjure the same combustible mix of class rage and desperate solidarity that powered the train to freedom.

If the rail expansion into hostile territories, the war with Tesh, and the colonial calculus behind New Crobuzon’s ambitions gripped you, The Traitor Baru Cormorant channels that same tension. Like the Council’s battle against imperial encroachment, Baru infiltrates an empire from within, weaponizing finance and policy the way Judah wields golems—only here the magic is economics and statecraft. The moral compromises recall Cutter’s choices and the train’s stark trade-offs between survival, loyalty, and liberation.

If you were drawn to New Crobuzon’s combustible politics—the dissident cells, surveillance, and the high-stakes scheming around the Iron Council’s fate—A Memory Called Empire delivers that intrigue in spades. Ambassador Mahit navigates a capital where poetry, propaganda, and succession crises cut as sharply as any militia blade, echoing the machinations that hover over Judah, Cutter, and the Council as authorities angle to co-opt or crush them. It’s the same knife-edge of ideals versus power, just traded from rail-lines to imperial salons.

If New Crobuzon’s grotesqueries—the Remade, scarab-headed Khepri, and Judah’s eerie golems—enchanted you as much as the Iron Council’s mythic aura, City of Saints and Madmen plunges into an equally uncanny metropolis. Ambergris seethes with fungal histories, obsessive scholars, and stories that fracture into hallucination, much like the way the train becomes legend and time itself is twisted by Judah’s craft. It’s that same heady blend of urban wonder and unsettling, dreamlike logic.