Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Search this Site

Bland Stories, Hack Work, Bad Opinions — 60s Sci-Fi Strikes Again

Shards of Space by Robert Sheckley

by Leave a Comment

I know there is good 60s SF out there, but the good thing about working through my backlog of old SF I’ve been lugging around is the relief that I can throw this out and never read it again. Shards of Space is a short story collection by Robert Sheckley with some bad stories, some hack work, two decent stories, and a bunch of terrible opinions about eugenics and women. I should probably only give it one star, but there are two okay stories in […]

Round up 1

Sword of the Lictor by Gene Wolfe

A Window into Time by Peter F Hamilton

The 10th Victim by Robert Sheckley

The White Cottage Mystery by Margery Allingham

Gwendy's Button Box by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar

Keep Moving by Maggie Smith

My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

The Nonexistent Knight by Italo Calvino

by Leave a Comment

The Sword of the Lictor – 4/5 I might be getting a little series fatigue on these books. It doesn’t help the matter that this is the second time I am reading these books. I am doing that because while I have read them before I am trying reconcile my feelings of them with the rave reviews I read online. The thing I most like about the books is that the world they inhabit feels very strongly like the kind of world I would love […]

The prince is sleeping now.

Letters from Atlantis by Robert Silverberg

Sailing to Byzantium by Robert Silverberg

Nightwings by Robert Silverberg

Christmas Days by Jeanette Winterson

The Little World of Don Camillo by Giovannino Guareschi

Technopoly by Neil Postman

The Disappearance of Childhood by Neil Postman

The Most Beautiful House in the World by Witold Rybczynski

Seize the Day by Saul Bellow

The Game of X by Robert Sheckley

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

White Fang by Jack London

The Man on the Balcony by Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall

by Leave a Comment

Letters from Atlantis – 4/5 Stars In this novella, we meet a time travelling archeologist/anthropologist writing letters to his wife. Seems normal enough (well, minus the time travelling) but what we find out is that this narrator is actually 20,000 years in the past in Atlantis, the mythical or not mythical island country that existed pre-historically, and if the stories that go at least as far back as Plato go, was seemingly advanced. So the time traveler is observing, this society has electricity, as well […]

He must have been a wonderful man.

Journey Beyond Tomorrow by Robert Sheckley

by Leave a Comment

This is a bizarre novel about a past’s future. Namely the novel, which came out in 1963, poses a future in which there’s a large and quite dominant Polynesian/Oceanic culture, and we are getting a kind of oral history of a single member of that part of the world traveling to the United States (or what was the United States) and accidentally setting off an international incident and a war having been mistaken for being a Communist spy. This will happen in the year 2001. […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo