Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Redshirts by John Scalzi is silly, fun, and full of adventure.

Redshirts by John Scalzi

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The short version of the plot is that a group of junior officers on a spaceship realize that members of their rank tend to die when on away missions with senior officers. Anyone familiar with the original flavor of Star Trek will recognize the setup.  The book starts with ensigns Andrew Dahl and Jimmy Hanson meeting other newly assigned ensigns Maia Duvall, Jasper Hester, and Finn as they wait for the shuttle to take them to their newly-assigned ship. The five lucky ensigns have been […]

“‘Fourteen million and fifteen percent of the gross?’”

Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi

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This is a kind of good, kind of bad, and very ridiculous take on first encounters with an alien species. It’s also very clearly a younger John Scalzi getting ahead of himself in terms of talent, and trying something that can only really work as a farce, and offers some deeply disturbing questions that aren’t really answered in the book and a lot of casual misogyny that I bet he felt perfectly fine with at the time. Anyway, our narrator is a 30ish agent for […]

Politics, Capitalism and Impending Doom

The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi

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This is the first full length Scalzi novel I’ve read, and I quite enjoyed it.  The prologue begins with a mutiny on board a space ship, though the mutiny is slightly disrupted when the space ship drops out of the Flow, one of the trails used for faster than light space travel between systems. After this, the novel leaves behind the crew who were only used to introduce the fact that the Flow might be unstable now.  The novel follows a few different characters and […]

CBR11Bingo: Award Winner (and 2 others)

Vox by Christina Dalcher

Dry by Neal Shusterman, Jarrod Shusterman

The Dispatcher by John Scalzi, Zachary Quinto (Narrator)

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I’ve grouped 3 reviews here — all are “in the not so distant future, the world will be even shittier than it is now” stories. John Scalzi’s The Dispatcher won an Audie for Zachary Quinto’s narration, so that’s my “Award Winner!” Square. Vox by Christina Dalcher I don’t normally read books that have a less than 3.8 rating on Goodreads. That seems to be about my threshold for enjoying something. Vox has about a 3.6, but it was highly recommended on THIS site so I […]

Rich people are still the worst

The Dispatcher by John Scalzi

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CBR11 Bingo Square- Science! The Dispatcher by John Scalzi was created as an audio book narrated by Zachary Quinto, and was a free monthly download for subscribers. I’ve only read one other Scalzi (I really should fix that) but this main character, Tony Valdez, is a similar type of main character, working in a morally gray area and not feeling that bad about it. In his world, most people cannot be murdered, they wake up in their beds, naked and with the clock starting again. […]

Uh, weren’t we having a mutiny? (redux)

The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi

The Consuming Fire by John Scalzi

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The Collapsing Empire (4 stars) CBR11 Bingo: And so it begins. I read (and reviewed) this back in 2017, but had forgotten it when I tried reading its follow-up back at the end of last year. So, I put off reading book 2 until I could go back and re-read this. And here we are. These books take place far in humanity’s future. We’ve left earth and colonized parts of the galaxy using something called “the flow”, which is a system of highways or rivers […]



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