Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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a frozen time capsule of a book that clearly has influenced modern day scifi i’ve read

Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke

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A gift, very belatedly read, from the lovely Lauren after she came to visit us in London en route to a meditation retreat, which is a very short way of summarizing one of my very fascinating friends. What a wild book that ended up popping up in conversation with friends much more than I expected! I’ve been in a mood asking people about what they’d do if we were in a Star Trek world where it’s post-scarcity and everyone can do whatever it is they […]

Won’t be reading the sequels, thank you.

Rendezvous with Rama (Rama, #1) by Arthur C. Clarke

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This one didn’t work out for me so much. And it tricked me! I was really into it for like the first twenty pages (hard not to pay attention when a giant asteroid pulverizes Italy), but once the crew of the Endeavor were introduced, this book became pretty dull for me. Rendezvous with Rama, which is a Hugo award winner, was published in 1973. I can see how something like this published fifty years ago would have been a big deal. But there are just so many […]

The drought had now lasted ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended.

2001 by Arthur C Clarke

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The introduction to this novel written by (and in the audiobook, performed by) Arthur C Clarke is probably the best part of the whole thing. In it, Clarke explains the curious decision to write the novel concentrically with the screenplay and how the novel was a choice based on how little explanation (outside of the visual elements) the screenplay would be able to explain. The movie, if you’ve seen it, is an absolute masterpiece in visual (and audio) language telling so much of the story, […]

When in doubt, say nothing and move on.

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C Clarke

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My second Arthur C Clarke novel in a week, and while they are separated by 20 years of publication and are not at all meant to be connected really, and this would be impossible given the events of Childhood’s End, I do think they represent a maturity in either the author’s view on the nature of humanity, the genre of science fiction, or some other changes in the world at large, because they act almost as variations on a theme. What will or would it be […]

Rendezvous with a classic SF novel

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C Clarke

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I haven’t been great about keeping up with reading this year, bouncing between a number of different books and struggling to finish them. So I focused on something small and classic to see if that would give me a reading kick-start. I picked Rendezvous with Rama because I haven’t actually read it before even though I grew up in a household full of classic SF thanks to my parent’s taste in books, and also the stories about the comet Oumuamua were still in my head. […]

Reviewing this makes ME feel like an alien.

Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke

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Without a doubt, I have grown more as a reader since I started doing CBR a few years ago than in my entire 20+ years reading before it. It’s still comforting and thrilling to read books that are exactly the reason I love to read, but going completely outside of my genre is a different kind of experience. Fulfilling. I read Cannonball reviews (along with Pajiba and every other blog or news source I follow) through Feedly, and my only “rules” for myself are that […]



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