Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Aliens being aliens

Watch Your Orbit by Etta Pierce

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Watch Your Orbit fulfills the “rec’d” square on CBR17 Bingo My good friend Seher is someone whose recommendations I always trust, but I’m not always very quick to pick up the books. Such is the case with Etta Pierce’s Intersolar Union universe, which Seher has been shouting about for over a year, and I finally picked up Watch Your Orbit, which is the first book in the Over the Moon spin-off tie-in where the humans that have been rescued are building a home and community […]

Dystopia Now

Radicalized by Cory Doctorow

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CBR Bingo: White I picked up Radicalized a short time after it was published in 2019, fully intending to read it, but for various reasons never got around to it. I’ve read some of Cory Doctorow’s work before, both full length novels and shorter essays. I think he usually has really good ideas, but these don’t always translate well into stories, where his characters often feel like they are lecturing the reader. Radicalized isn’t a novel, but a collection of four short stories (I think? I’m […]

“Its so easy, isn’t it, to decide the people you’re fighting aren’t really human.”

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

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I am counting this book for the Citizen category in the CBR17 Bingo Reading Challenge. The central antagonist of this novel is an empire known as the Radch. The inhabitants of the Radch are known as Radchaii, which translates to either “civilized” or “citizen.” The Radch is benevolent and giving to its citizens, but brutal and violent to outsiders. One of the central themes of the books centers on how people justify atrocities by dehumanizing those they hurt, and how the concept of “citizens” or “civilized […]

Let’s Not Ship Toxic Men

Heavenly Tyrant by Xiran Jay Zhao

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Heavenly Tyrant, the sequel to Iron Widow, picks up immediately after the first book finishes, and the long ago Emperor Qin Zheng is awake now and won’t be dying of the plague he was certainly dying from. He is immediately accepted as the ruler of Huaxia, and has absolute power. Zetian marries him, and they implement what seems to have parallels to the rise of Communist China and Mao Zedong. He strips wealthy folks of their lands to redistribute and he imprisons and executes many […]

“He was, after all, still a trainee, even if he was simultaneously head of HR.”

Human Resources by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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In this short story, Tchaikovsky explores the somehow already well trodden field of AI, and specifically the ways in which technology replacing people might create (or exacerbate) a crisis of meaning and community. Tim was hired on as an intern at Holring and Baselard’s HR department, and within the year found himself the last remaining member of it. Everyone else have been made redundant by various AI modules. Everyone Tim interacts with, in fact, is an artificial intelligence of some kind, that have all been […]

“I hate caring about stuff. But apparently once you start, you can’t just stop.”

Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells

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The third installment of The Murderbot Diaries season follows our favorite misanthropic cyborg as it gets pulled into another human conflict and wrestles with the annoying implications of having feelings and a moral compass. Murderbot has hitched a ride to the planet Milu in order to investigate an abandoned terraforming project run by GrayCris, the shady corporation that tried to kill Murderbots clients in the first book. Murderbot hopes to collect evidence of wrongdoing by GrayCris, both to help its friends back on Preservation Alliance, and […]



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