Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

It is faith wrapped in the cloak of science. Contact is as vague and obscure as communion with the saints or the coming of the Messiah.

Solaris by Stanisław Lem

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You are doing all you can to stay human in an inhuman situation. Noble it may be, but it isn’t going to get you anywhere. And I’m not so sure about it being noble – not if it’s idiotic at the same time. ― Stanisław Lem, Solaris It’s what we wanted: contact with another civilization. We have it, this contact! Our own monstrous ugliness, our own buffoonery and shame, magnified as if it was under a microscope! ― Stanisław Lem, Solaris Kelvin is finally on […]

Classic Sci-Fi: Should you read it? Starship Troopers and The Forever War

Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

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Classic Sci-Fi: Should You Read It? is a self-imposed project in which I read pre-1990 science fiction novels and categorize them as “classis sci-fi you should read,” “classic sci-fi you should read if you’re all hardcore about it,” or “classic sci-fi you don’t have to read.” For background on my project, please see the introduction to my review of 1984. One appealing thing about sci-fi is that some novels really must be discussed within the context of others. Today (and many other days, I suspect) […]

How blah can you be without hitting boring? Read on to find out.

The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks

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The tournament arc is one of my least favorite tropes in any kind of action driven story, be it fantasy or science fiction, in any medium not limited to but including manga, anime, cartoon, comic book, novel, series or stand alone. It always feels like filler, light on character or plot or much of anything, just a random series of conflicts that build up to the main one in which the world/universe/whatever as we know it is at stake. None of that is quite true […]

Classic Sci-Fi: Should you read it? 1984

1984 by George Orwell

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CSF:SYRI? Background For the past couple years I’ve been working on my own little reading project. I love the sci-fi genre with my entire heart. I also went to a weird religious middle and high school and I missed reading a bunch of classics. A couple years ago I finally read Slaughterhouse 5 and y’all, it is great! What other classic sci-fi have I been missing out on, I wondered, and tried to research the best I could. Of course the internet has all kinds of […]

A Very Solid SF Short Story Collection

The 1976 Annual World's Best SF by Donald A. Wollheim (Editor)

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I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the stories chosen for this collection. As I work through the SFF paperbacks I’ve inherited from my parents, I often end up slogging through some very boring or irritating stories from this era, which was a rough one for the field in my opinion. The New Wave and I do not mix. It could be that by 1976 it was on its way out and that’s why I liked these stories better. You can actually tell what’s […]

Dystopian romance and humanity

Heart Attack by Shawn Kittelsen

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Includes triggers. Not for under aged 14 (and even then, know your reader). I’m rating Heart Attack by Shawn Kittelsen, Eric Zawadzki and Mike Spicer a 4 for several reasons: It is a strong take on what is happening today. It is an interesting story about family (biological and found) and how friendships and love shapes us. It talks about how power and greed corrupts both good and not so good people. And we see how things are not perfect, but humanity does try to […]



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