Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Closing Some Doors, Some Still Open

This Inevitable Ruin by Matt Dinniman

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Capture the flag is now the name of the game in This Inevitable Ruin aka Dungeon Crawl Carl 7, or really more like capture the enemy castles and hold the throne rooms, and probably also kill all members of the enemy group. This is also the Faction Wars part, meaning that some of the other teams actually are from outside the dungeon, and are paying to participate. A lot of the outside groups are now eligible to directly participate, and several do. There’s an interesting […]

A Pokemon-Magic-Yugi-Oh Mishmash

The Eye of the Bedlam Bride by Matt Dinniman

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The Eye of the Bedlam Bride one the one hand takes on the geek card game as its general dungeon challenge (it’s a cross between Magic the Gathering and Yugi-Oh, with a hint of morbid Pokemon, kinda), and on the other it’s set on sort of a ghost Earth, making it a chance for some significant backstory as well as possible foreshadowing. If it wasn’t clear already, the game-master AI is also becoming more of an element of the story, which could both be the […]

I don’t think I’d want to be trapped in a giant empanada

Shrunkation by Janine Amesta

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3.5 stars This was an ARC I received from the author, Janine Amesta. My opinions are my own. Catalina and Trey’s marriage is in trouble. Catalina is exhausted from her demanding work, nearing burnout, and incapable of forgetting some foolish and hurtful things Trey said to her months ago. She’s feeling unappreciated and ignored, not to mention misunderstood. Trey knows that he screwed up, but he thinks all they need is some quality time together. He won a weekend stay at a luxury resort in […]

Three sci-fi books making me think about robots and AI

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

Rose/House by Arkady Martine

Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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The end of January to the very beginning of March has had the good fortune to have three excellent books looking at robots, AI, sentience, autonomy, finding meaning, and limitations on the flawed way humanity has programmed robots/AI.  While setting up this post, I just realized all the author’s first name start with A.  Huh, kind of interesting. First up was a novella by Annalee Newitz, Automatic Noodle.  This is the most fun and lighthearted of the bunch.  It is the year 2064, a few years […]

Read this before the movie comes out – because you’ll want to consume both!

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

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If you liked Andy Weir’s first novel, The Martian, then Project Hail Mary won’t disappoint as another witty, funny, creative sci-fi adventure. Suspend your belief for this one, as moments of sudden clarity, synchronicity, and serendipity abound. But in order to save the world, everything has to fall perfectly into place, and I was here for it! In some ways, Weir’s protagonist, Ryland Grace, is an everyman archetype – an unassuming middle school teacher with no real drama or intrigue in his life. But in […]

In case you were wondering, there aren’t really any werewolves in this book.

The Werewolf Principle by Clifford D. Simak

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Quite an interesting little book. And charming, in the way that a lot of 1960s/70s sci-fi is charming—I love the way that people thought the future might be (in this case, a world government, smart houses that take care of humans and that can fly), and also in this case, Simak’s imagination doesn’t really gel with science as we know it. But if you suspend your disbelief, you get a weird little book about a man found frozen in space who turns out to have […]



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