Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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World War Z, but with Robots

Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson

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Hey, did you like Max Brooks’ novel World War Z ? Did you love the structure, the multitude of accounts woven together to form a much larger story of survival? Well, Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson is a fun read but a weak substitute. In brief: sometime in the near future, a sentient AI has taken control of the worlds’ robots and has mostly wiped out humanity. This novel is a concentration of accounts that detail how humans fought back.  It’s only possible to avoid […]

The only thing worse than Them, is us

The Last Woman in the World by Inga Simpson

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I am no stranger to apocalypse fiction, but despite hailing from The Land Downunder I haven’t consumed much Aussie apocalypse fiction (beyond ‘On the beach‘ in 2020). And if ‘The Last Woman in the World’ is anything to go by, then I have truly been depriving myself. The story commences as the world is already falling apart, as various references are made throughout to the pandemics, the downfall of the USA,  and communities decimated by climate change. As we slowly learn, in the midst of […]

Sheep go “KERBOOOOOM!”

Before & After by Matthew Thomas

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Bingo 16: Fauna So for me, this book is basically what Good Omens would have been had it been set in 1999 (ie end of the world/millennium references abound) and written by Terry Pratchett exclusively. I have nothing against Neil Gaiman, but he definitely has the darker tone and less openly funny humor (ie no humorous footnotes). Before & After is essentially Good Omens, except it stars an approximately 500-year old history professor who may have used to the name Nostradamus in his earlier years, […]

Kind of a letdown to a strong start

Dust by Hugh Howey

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[Read as an ebook from the public library] NANOBOTS. I’m going to be honest – I skipped a bunch of pages in this one. My affection for Wool had started wearing off by this time and not even Juliette’s return could pull me back into the narrative enough to get me fully invested. I still like the overall world here, but there’s just so many holes after Shift. A lot of the menace of the outside world is gone, the rituals of IT are no […]

A middling middle

Shift by Hugh Howey

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[Read as an ebook from the public library] Note: This edition is the collection of three novellas. This is essentially the prequel to Wool, and serves to explain how and why the silos were built and what has happened to the outside world by the time of Wool. It takes place in two different timelines — one follows Donald Keene, a young Georgia congressman in 2049, tapped to help construct a new nuclear waste storage facility in the area outside Atlanta. The other follows Troy, a silo […]

A kind of hopeful dystopia

Wool by Hugh Howey

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[Read as an ebook from the public library.] Note: This is the omnibus version, which collects the original five novellas into one edition. I didn’t expect this book to hit me in quite the ways it did. This has clearly been the year of sci-fi for me and I’ve run the gamut from Becky Chambers loveliness to the quirkiness of Murderbot to this, the comparative grimdark of the Silo. I usually don’t go in for post-apocalyptic literature, because I don’t need to be more depressed, […]



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