Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Angels of Punching You in the Face

Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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Earth’s crust and mantle have been peeled back by the Architects and shaped into a beautiful flower. A beautiful, uninhabitable flower. Maybe this is a reflection of my age, but I kept thinking about how clean spaceships were in science fiction when I started reading. The governments were huge global or galactic entities demonstrating how humans had unified, and often how they had integrated into a system of many alien species. There was an orderliness to science fiction worlds, even if the protagonists were rogues […]

“The Empire, the world. One and the same. And if they were not yet so: make them so, for this is the right and correct will of the stars.”

A Memory Called Empire (Teixcalaan, #1) by Arkady Martine

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**30 Books in 30 Days** Book 12/30 I was so intimidated by this book before I picked it up! There’s a certain attitude that often comes along with intelligent sci-fi with lots of made up names (so many vowels!), and which plays around in the political intrigue sphere. Like, let’s just confuse the shit out of you before we settle into this! Throw everything at the wall and see what sticks! No hand holding! I will show you I’m smart by making everything so hard […]

“This did not mean that laws and rules were not helpful, or that explanations should not be sought, but rather that there should be no fear in changing them as needed, for nothing in the universe held still.”

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (Wayfarers, #4) by Becky Chambers

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I’m sad this series is over, but I’m glad it exists, and this was a really good one to go out on. Like the other books in the series, there isn’t really a plot. The story is very character focused, and acts as a sort of slice-of-life. I say sort of, because the circumstances here are slightly out of the ordinary. The whole book takes place over five or so days on the planet Gora, essentially an interstellar truck stop because it intersects with so […]

An intensely human space story

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

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[Read as an audiobook from the public library] Well, we’re straight out of Murderbot and right into some of the most serious big person pants sci-fi I’ve read since I started reading Leviathan Wakes about a hundred years ago. Bite-sized fun time space western this is not. It was some work, and it took some time, but the rewards are definitely ample. Ancillary Justice is on its face a sprawling space opera spanning a thousand years, with weird names and strange planets and ridiculously nuanced cultural […]

The Five-Hop One-Stop at the End of the Universe

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers

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Well, not exactly the end of the universe, but definitely the Restaurant at the End of the Wayfarers Series! While we’re speaking of restaurants, allow me to share with you one of the best (outside of Redwall, of course) feast descriptions that I have ever come across: “grilled quickbread, a hurriedly made batch of whitefish salad, tiny wraps of grain paper stuffed with nut butter and edible flowers, and the last of his smoked eel and crackers.” So very tempting- and I can barely tolerate […]



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