Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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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 […]

Please inhale, Ted Chiang

Exhalation by Ted Chiang

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In both Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” and its cinematic adaptation, the 2016 film Arrival, the protagonist’s story appears out of order. You read (or watch) the narrative as though you are seeing someone put together an intricate puzzle, and it’s not until one critical piece of knowledge— the central conceit of the story — slots into place that you can understand the correct order of events, backwards and forwards. Reading “Story of Your Life” on its own, I loved it. So, I sought […]

Talking Donuts Explode

The Gate of the Feral Gods by Matt Dinniman

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Dungeon Crawl Carl is still going pretty strong in book 4. Carl, along with Donut, and a few others are on floor 5, which seemingly requires a bit of teamwork or at least coordination between groups. It really takes a while for the story to get going, maybe a little too much time doing some scene setting that just doesn’t seem that necessary. The probably haunted buried temple thing likewise has some good potential that really doesn’t get developed. The flying gnomes and the camel […]

Down the future rabbit hole

Lost in the Future Vol 1: The Storm by Damian

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Lost in the Future by Damian was beautifully illustrated by Àlex Fuentes. I discovered this at Forbidden Planet during a London trip this year. I unintentionally plan book crawls, sometimes with too ambitious goals, whenever I travel. I had about 5 minutes until they closed to pick something, and this is what I chose. During a field trip, a group of kids wanders off and falls down a hole. It’s giving Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole meets Adventure Time vibes. They discover it’s a portal and […]



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