There have been so many post apocalyptic novels out there that I now tend to avoid them. It’s become such an overused trope – right up there with vampires and zombies and…well you get the idea. However this one seemed special so I took a chance. Worth it. The story starts out just before the onset of the apocalypse ( “The Georgia Flu) with the sudden death of an aging Hollywood actor one snowy night while he is playing “King Lear”. An EMT in […]
Search Results for: "Station Eleven"
An archaeologist, an amusement park employee, a talking pig. Everyone is doing their best.
How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
In 2020, when many of us began working from home, I started listening to a podcast series called The Happiness Lab. The creators had produced a string of episodes dedicated to coping with the pandemic, and one episode in particular stuck with me. The theme was that, at some point, we would come out on the other side of our current global challenge, and one way to get through it was to think about what kind of story we want to be able to tell […]
Classic Sci-Fi: Should you read it? Fahrenheit 451
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Classic Sci-Fi: Should You Read It? is a self-imposed project in which I read pre-1990 science fiction novels and categorize them as “classis sci-fi you should read,” “classic sci-fi you should read if you’re all hardcore about it,” or “classic sci-fi you don’t have to read.” For background on my project, please see the introduction to my review of 1984. Fahrenheit 451 is inevitable for my classic sci-fi reading project because it’s on EVERY must-read list, I didn’t read it in high school like everybody […]
“I don’t want to talk about time travel…”
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
“…because if we start talking about it then we’re going to be here all day talking about it, making diagrams with straws.” Thankfully, Emily St. John Mandel also makes the choice to not get bogged down in discussing time travel. Hell, the last Avengers movie probably does more dissection of the implications and intricacies of time travel than Sea of Tranquility, and I mean that as a compliment. I think Sea of Tranquility is a great example of a “soft science fiction” story in the […]
Stats round-up for 2023!
It’s that time of year again! The database is mostly automated at this point, so some of my counts may be a little off. And, as always, the database is incomplete for Cannonball Reads 1 and 2, back before there was a dedicated space for reviews. Some blogs are now offline and aren’t available through Internet Archive or other means. I don’t think I’ll ever recover those reviews. In total, there are 53,038 reviews catalogued in the database of 30,320 individual books reviewed by a […]
Entertained, But Left Wanting
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
I wanted to like this more than I did. And I did enjoy it, but I was expecting more after having read Sea of Tranquility and seeing how much other Cannonballers like this one. Station Eleven alternates settings between when a flu pandemic starts and 20 years later in the post-apocalyptic world. In the future, Kirsten, one of the main characters, is an actor in The Traveling Symphony, a group of actors and musicians who travel from small town to small town to perform for […]
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