Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Strong Writing and an Interesting World Meet the Bad Gender Politics of 60s/70s SF/F Yet Again

Nightwings by Robert Silverberg

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I read this as part of my planned effort over the next year to thin out my library by reading some of the books I’ve been schlepping from apartment to apartment with the idea that I’ll read them someday. Someday is now! This plan worked here because this book is going straight in the recycling after this review, freeing up shelf space to buy more books. Nightwings is a combination of three novellas, one of which won the Hugo in 1969. I didn’t notice that […]

“The rocket made climates, and summer lay for a brief moment upon the land…”

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

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CBR14Bingo: Hot This is a book I kept out of the library so long as a kid that I accrued a $75 fine (do I currently have two books out of the library that are also so overdue they’re going to charge me for them if I don’t return them — yes, I haven’t learned my lesson). I can’t even imagine how many times I’ve read it and I’m happy to say it holds up yet again. It has been a few years since I’d […]

“If you don’t like the facts, you ignore them, and if you need facts, dream up some you do like.”

Little Fuzzy (Fuzzy Sapiens, #1) by H. Beam Piper

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Reading this back to back with Scalzi’s reinterpretation was an interesting experience, not least because the differences were really clear, but what was different was somehow surprising. I’ve read several classic sf books this year, and though they have shared varying tones and subject matters, they share a certain cultural sensibility. This is a very humanist little book, conscious of questions of personhood and exploitation, but it’s also a bit paternalistic. The basic plot here, shared by Fuzzy Nation, is that Jack Holloway is a […]

When “You don’t like where you’ve been, the place where you are is grim, and the only place you see yourself going is not an improvement on what’s gone before,” you’re a malcontent

Out of the Dead City by Samuel R. Delaney

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This book did a great job with the world-building, but not such a great job with the plot-building. I’m not sure this review can describe what it was about, because I’m not entirely sure I understand what happened. But it sounded very pretty while whatever it was was happening! Far away in a beryl sky, three suns rushed madly about one another and gave a little heat to this farthest of their six planets.” We start the book with Jon Toshar, who has just escaped […]

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 […]

“You should have fallen in love with a happy man, if you wanted happiness. But no, you had to fall for the breathtaking beauty of pain.”

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The Vorkosigan Saga is one of those classic SF series that has been a little intimidating to me because there are so many books in the series, and the suggested reading order of the series is not the publication order, so it doesn’t naturally lend itself toward easily identifying the “next” book in the series. Cordelia’s Honor is actually an omnibus edition comprised of Shards of Honor (Vorkosigan #1) and Barrayar (Vorkosigan #7)(???) Here’s a short plot description from Goodreads for both of those: Shards […]



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