Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


It walks, talks, learns, and wants to take over the world

How to Train Your Evil Robot, by Joy McCullough and Eduardo Medeiros

by Leave a Comment

I would have liked a smidgen more technical information in the book, How to Train Your Evil Robot, but overall this is a fun read about AI or of course, artificial intelligence, but the way it is presented mostly allows for the amount we are given to lead to an understanding of what AI is and what it can do. I read via an online reader copy, therefore I could see the graphic novel format, but am also assuming it might be a bit of […]

A Theory of Dinniman Sucess

Operation: Bounce House by Matt Dinniman

by Leave a Comment

I have read 7 of the 8 currently available Dungeon Crawl Carl books so far, but it took me until Operation: Bounce House to figure out how to describe what I’ve read of Matt Dinniman in terms of genre. Operation Bounce House is not part of the Carl series; it’s a stand-alone, with different cast and different universe, but also some distinct similarities including genre and general tone. The premise is still conventional sci-fi: human colonists of New Sonora are mostly farmers who, with the […]

A Pokemon-Magic-Yugi-Oh Mishmash

The Eye of the Bedlam Bride by Matt Dinniman

by Leave a Comment

The Eye of the Bedlam Bride one the one hand takes on the geek card game as its general dungeon challenge (it’s a cross between Magic the Gathering and Yugi-Oh, with a hint of morbid Pokemon, kinda), and on the other it’s set on sort of a ghost Earth, making it a chance for some significant backstory as well as possible foreshadowing. If it wasn’t clear already, the game-master AI is also becoming more of an element of the story, which could both be the […]

“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 […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo