Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Trouble in FantasyLand

Get in Trouble: Stories by Kelly Link

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The lovely faintingviolet turned me onto Kelly Link, and I’m here to report that her latest book of short fiction, Get In Trouble, is a delight and there was not a story in this collection that didn’t simultaneously charm and terrify me. As a whole, Link’s greatest achievement is her ability to build entire universes in 40 pages or less. It’s an incredible feat that includes massive speculative worlds and full character development, while still using beautiful prose packed with metaphor and description. Here’s the breakdown: “The […]

It’s Worse Than That; He’s Dead, Jim.

Redshirts by John Scalzi

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 This book was the perfect little bit of escapism to get me through a long, challenging weekend recently. It’s a really funny little book that goes a lot deeper than you think it would on the surface. Andrew Dahl has been posted in the Intrepid, the flagship of the UU fleet. It seems like a real career boost and he’s looking forward to it. Until he gets to the Xenobiology lab. Why does everyone hide when the senior officers arrive? Why is it everyone is […]

Decent, but a little dry

Downbelow Station (The Company Wars #1) by C.J. Cherryh

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Apparently a Hugo award winner, Downbelow Station was part of the huge pile of Christmas book swag that I’ll likely be working my way through for the rest of the year. Not something I’d normally buy for myself, I found it to be an ambitious and pretty impressive piece of sci-fi world-building, but ever so slightly dry in its execution, so I didn’t quite get as into this as I would have liked. In our far distant future, the denizens of Earth have spread outwards […]

Too Much to Say About the Cat

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

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To Say Nothing of the Dog is not for those with short-attention spans. Though it eventually finds its way and becomes an absorbing, rollicking time travel story, the road there is bumpy and, even worse, frustratingly slow and irritating. For about 150 pages, almost a third of the book, Willis putters around with her narrative, allowing characters to waste time on sitcom-level miscommunications and incompetent decision-making. The book makes an impressive recovery, which explains and also justifies the high esteem it is held in among […]

A Brief Word from Your Friendly Sentient Killing Machine

All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries) by Martha Beck

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Though I adore me some sci-fi, I’ve muddled through so many mediocre novels that I tend to wait for awards season to come around. Last year this aerodynamic novella won everything (Hugo, Nebula, Alex, Locus) so here we are. Since the title contains the whole premise, it’s no spoiler to say that Murderbot—a hacked security construct—is our narrator. It is self-aware, competent, and thoroughly bored guarding a scientific expedition on a remote planet. (Luckily, it has hacked its systems so that it can watch future […]

Planet hopping and robots and sex, oh my!

Barbarella by Jean-Claude Forest

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Barbarella was one of the first digital comics I bought back in 2014, when I got my first tablet and realized that Google Play also sells books and often has better prices than Amazon available in my region. The only thing I knew about it was that it had inspired a movie starring Jane Fonda that I have never seen. So why did I buy it? Well, I have a bit of an Everest problem when it comes to books AND it was available in […]



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