Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Man, Magic, and the Machine

The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday by Saad Hossain

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This is a delightful novella.  It’s fresh and weird and engaging, a sci-fi-fantasy set in near-future Kathmandu.  An interesting mix of traditional magic elements (djinn!  I love djinn.) with traditional sci-fi elements (vaguely creepy AI!), and pretty bonkers…but weirdly lovable?…characters.  The themes and the narrative are brutal, whimsical, funny, and sobering, sometimes all at once.  This was riiiiight up my alley, and I recommend it to anyone looking to mix it up a little. Melek Ahmar, the Lord of Mars, the Red King, the Lord […]

First Impressions About Half Right This Time

Network Effect by Martha Wells

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I don’t often pre-order, but the Murderbot series is one of the few that I will do that for.  I am however realizing that this often means I have to wait a few days after the release to actually get the book; this was true even before pandemic close/slow-downs. This meant that I was getting a little impatient for Network Effect to show up. When the novel showed up, I got into it right away, and I think this might have been a bit of […]

Is love really the answer in the end?

Dimension W, vol. 16 by Yuji Iwahara

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I did a quick check and I’m a little surprised that I haven’t reviewed a volume of this series before now; I’ve certainly read them all but somehow not reviewed one until the final 16th volume. Dimension W is a manga series, and there was also an anime that covered basically the first two story arcs. The gist is that in the future, the world now relies on energy drawn from Dimension W although what the dimension is and how it works is not well […]

A new kind of bot in the Murderbot world

Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells

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So far we’ve seen Murderbot and humans, Murderbot and other sort of sentient machines, and now it’s time to start putting those things together. Rogue Protocol picks up where book two left off as Murderbot is trying to get away from the areas where it’s dangerous to be potentially identified, and in so doing, Murderbot falls into another adventure when the transport its on turns out to have two human passengers on their way to some kind of security detail job which involves guarding some […]

Relay-Reading Murderbot

Artificial Condition by Martha Wells

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As far as I know, my dad doesn’t read a lot of fiction; the one exception to this is science fiction, at least of the what you might now call classic or vintage variety, as in William Gibson and Isaac Asimov. I was home visiting recently and Dad made a comment about not being sure what to read next after he finished whatever he currently had in his hands; I had Artificial Condition (Murderbot Diaries 2) in mine, so I let him have a look […]

Great introduction to author Brandon Sanderson

Skyward by Brandon Sanderson

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Two years ago when I set out to attempt my first full cannonball, I asked friends and family on Facebook what their book suggestions were, Skyward was one of them.  Later someone recommended it to me as a good introduction to author Brandon Sanderson, as I hadn’t read anything by him.  Despite fantasy being my jam, he’s written so much of it that previously I’ve been flummoxed as to where to start.  Ironically, I’m not starting with one of his fantasy novels.  Skyward is science fiction, […]



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