Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“I didn’t need any help getting angry, I was great at that on my own.”

Platform Decay by Martha Wells

by 2 Comments

Monthly Keyword 26: Decay Thank you to Tor Books and NetGalley for this ARC. My opinions are my own. This book is out on May 5th, 2026. Murderbot (who has installed a mental health module now, and keeps doing Emotion checks on itself) is on a rescue mission on a large artificial planet controlled mostly by Barish-Estranza. What starts out as needing to find and escort three people from the hostile territory becomes a lot more complicated when Murderbot is forced to agree to locate […]

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

by 1 Comment

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 […]

Something’s Wrong

Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove

by 1 Comment

I’m going to be honest; I picked this one up based on the cover alone.  And like they tell you not to do, I did sort of judge this book by its cover. Well, the cover and the first section of the book. And I thought I’d be dealing with a short set of vignettes about pulp horror monsters in space. Turns out that was a bit of a lowball there—there is actually a story arc that we follow throughout the book.  Poor Dementer, has […]

Houyhnhnms and Dragons

Moonbound by Robin Sloan

by Leave a Comment

I’ve had Moonbound on my TBR shelf physically for a while. It’s also been long enough that I don’t remember hardly anything about Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore (first big hit, by this author). I remember that I really enjoyed both Mr. Penumbra and the follow-up, but not direct sequel, Sourdough. I vaguely remember both of the earlier books as vaguely magical realism, and overall entertaining but Moonbound seems to be something a little different. The power of story and narrative is major theme, and it […]

Fergus to the Rescue (Again)

Driving the Deep by Suzanne Palmer

by Leave a Comment

I enjoyed the sequel to The Finder even more than the first book. Initially, I thought Fergus had another unwilling partner in Zacker, a NY cop who attacks Fergus when he returns to Scotland to make amends for deserting his family as a teenager. In typical Fergus fashion, he’s at the wrong place at the wrong time and is mistaken for a murderous art thief. In The Finder, Fergus took a job on the other side of the galaxy to find and retrieve an almost […]

An Underdeveloped Look a AI-Human Relationships

Pixels of You by Ananth Hirsh, Yuko Ota, and J.R. Doyle

by Leave a Comment

I’ve been following Ananth Hirsh and Yuko Ota’s work for years (I really love their autobio comics), so I preordered this and promptly forgot I did that until it showed up in the mail today. It’s nice to give yourself little presents in the future like that, and preordering really helps the authors. Overall, though, I found this to be a bit of a disappointment when compared to their other work. Fawn and Indira are interns at a photography gallery, and their first meeting is […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo