Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Life, uhh, finds a way. – The Divine Jeff

Green City Wars by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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I requested Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Green City Wars because I was intrigued by the premise – Philip Marlow meets Redwall with a raccoon private investigator. This is not an inaccurate description. BUT! It’s Phillip Marlow meets Redwall written by Adrian Tchaikovsky. When I understood the premise of the world in Green City Wars, I had to lie down for a bit. It is so deeply dystopian. The humans have created what may be a utopia for themselves, and to achieve it, they’ve bio-engineered small animals, amphibians, […]

a metaphor for the defeat of the terrible tech/political men but make it scifi with spiders

Children of Strife by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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Already we are very behind, but this time it is became I am back in the clutches of AO3, the Heated Rivalry edition, and there are many thousands of words I have eaten in that vein. But here has muscled in a book that absolutely grabbed my attention and clung tight, much like the squelching, squirming, scavenging Life of the Hartland. To get it out of the way: is this five star book in that it is a perfect book? No, but you should know […]

Three sci-fi books making me think about robots and AI

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

Rose/House by Arkady Martine

Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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The end of January to the very beginning of March has had the good fortune to have three excellent books looking at robots, AI, sentience, autonomy, finding meaning, and limitations on the flawed way humanity has programmed robots/AI.  While setting up this post, I just realized all the author’s first name start with A.  Huh, kind of interesting. First up was a novella by Annalee Newitz, Automatic Noodle.  This is the most fun and lighthearted of the bunch.  It is the year 2064, a few years […]

“there’s a limit to how much sentiment a large therapod can really hang on to.”

One Day All This Will Be Yours by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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Tchaikovsky is, at this point, one of my favourite authors. His writing is so sharp, witty, philosophical, and pessimistically hopeful for the future, and this novella is no exception. Although it is, I think, perhaps a bit more pessimistic than hopeful. Plot: Our hero is a veteran and only survivor of the Causality War. The last war to end all wars (for real this time). And he has one job, to stop humanity from ruining everything that ever was, again. The only way to do […]

Cute and timey-wimey

One Day All This Will Be Yours by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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This story is about is a time war gone wrong, and a hero (?) taking it upon himself to make sure no one ever discovers time travel again (or past?  or…since? or whatever.)    Our protagonist lives an idyllic life at the end of time. He is the last surviving warrior from the Causality War. He has engineered time such that he is just there, at the end, waiting for other time travelers to show up (and they always do) so he can eliminate them […]

Birds of a feather

Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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CBR Bingo: Culture (this book features first contact between different cultures, and touches on the thematic philosophical question of if destroying a culture is worth it if it means saving the people of that culture). This is the third book in the Children of Time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and I have just flown through them all in the past few days. I loved the first two books in the series, so I wanted to start this one almost immediately after finishing Children of Ruin. Much like […]



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