Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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It’s mid-January, how am I already so far behind?

Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers

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The problem with being able to listen to audiobooks at my new job is that I read many more books and thus am already so far behind in reviews. Reading is so much easier than writing! Anyway, I decided to start my year out with a book I was fairly certain would be great. Spoiler alert: It was super great! Becky Chambers is the best and I will read whatever she writes because I want to live in her world for as long as possible […]

By the Stars We Hope

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Earlier this year narfna posted her review of Record of a Spaceborn Few and in the comments she assured me that even less happens in this third installment of the Wayfarers series. I was delighted. It is generally acknowledged that science fiction takes our current major concerns and conflicts and sets them in the future, usually a more scientifically advanced future. Becky Chambers tweaks that a bit by having her characters preoccupied with the same minutia that preoccupies us all – our relationships, our work, our […]

Science fiction I actually enjoyed!

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#CBR10Bingo: Cannonballer Recommends (this was a CBR Book Exchange gift from Yesknopemaybe (my paperback copy), it has also been favourably reviewed by MathildeHoeg, ingres77, dAvid, badkittyuno, belphebe, emmalita, narfna and faintingviolet, among others) Rosemary Harper is trying to escape her old life and doesn’t want anyone tracking her down. She pays a lot of money to get a new identity and gets a job on a run-down and patched up spaceship, where no one from her old life would ever think to look for her. Aboard […]

“From the stars, came the ground. From the ground, we stood. To the ground, we return.”

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These books are so good. This one was the slowest to get started, but it finished up just as poignant as the other two. For those of you who haven’t read the first two books, first of all you probably should, but know that they aren’t sci-fi adventure books in the classic sense. They are slow burn character studies, for the most part. Interesting things do happen, but unlike a lot of sf, they aren’t driven by their plot. The first book does have the […]

A Spark to Guide You Forward

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I think if there is such a sub-genre as “cozy sci-fi”, Becky Chambers is one of it’s lead writers. A Closed and Common Orbit is the sequel to Becky Chambers debut novel, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. Even more than it’s predecessor, this book is more concerned with the interactions of it’s characters than with action or adventure. At the end of Small Angry Planet, the Wayfarer’s AI, Lovelace, “Lovey,” is damaged in an unprovoked attack. To save Lovey, she is downloaded into a […]

A genetic multiple and an artificial intelligence encased in a manufactured body walk into a bar . . .

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This is yet another review where I’m putting up the white flag. It’s been months since I finished it and for whatever reason I’ve been having a hell of a time trying to figure out what I want to say about it. So I’m just not going to say much at all and this will be more of a mini-review than a real one. I liked this book, but not as much as the first one. It’s really more of a companion novel to A Long Way to A Small […]



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