Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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My general feelings for this book can be summed up as UGHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1) by Kim Stanley Robinson

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I think I am allergic to Kim Stanley Robinson. Loved the idea behind this book, extremely disliked the execution. I tried reading 2312 years back, and similarly, any cool tingly science feelings I got from that book (which if I’m remembering right, starts with a moving, mechanized city on Mercury) was completely murdered by the boring as hell characters and lack of emotional through-line. I just remember the boredom with that one, but here I was not only bored but frustrated and annoyed by KSR’s attempt […]

Mars was empty before we came.

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

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So this is the first novel in a series of three novels and a collection of short stories. The novels get progressively longer and this one already clocks in at 575 pages. So all told the series comprises about 2000 pages. The novel is an expansive granular-level investigation into a Mars colonization project which would start this current decade and one of the central figures of the project is my age — I mean literally — in that he was born in 1982 (I was […]

Felt Like the Sam-Frodo part of The Two Towers But On Mars: Or, It’s a Rock, I Get It, Can We Get to Someone or Something Interesting?

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I have seen this novel recommended at least two separate threads in the greater Pajiba FB ecosystem so I thought I would check it out.  And I am starting to think that maybe I don’t like sci-fi anymore, because it seems like the last few novels I have read that fit firmly in sci-fi weren’t exactly that great for me (unless we count Red Rising as sci-fi? Because I love those books).  The Three Body Problem started out interesting if dark but each novel was […]



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