Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Be a mirror”: Twisty political intrigue, spectacular world building, and cultural assimilation

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

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From the prologue, this book absolutely blew me away. It’s a twisty political intrigue, with an Aztec-influenced empire. It’s also a meditation on the meaning of empire from a person who is trying to keep her home from being swallowed by it while at the same time being entranced with its literature and language. It’s about how that language controls how we tell stories about ourselves and the world around us. “You’ve said something meaningless.” <Yes,> Yskandr agreed. <When I was ambassador it was my habit […]

What do Australian spec fic writers do during a pandemic? Make an anthology, of course!

Crossed Spaces by Lynne Stringer, R.A. Stephens

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I’m always up for an anthology, especially a science fiction one. This is a collection of sixteen short stories by Australian authors. While there were some I didn’t care for, on the whole this was a very enjoyable collection with a few stand-out favorites. Just a note that the only place you seem to be able to buy this is from the publisher’s website. “Traitor” – Geraldine Borella – ★★★. An exploratory mission to determine the habitability of a planet leads one scientist to contemplate […]

quiet duty, questionable faith, and children taking on the burdens of their parents

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

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I’d remembered of course that I should be grateful as always, but hadn’t been able to keep the disappointment from my mind. Kazuo Ishiguro, the master of suffering with dignity, is back with another literary gut-punch. There is no one else who handles quietly doomed duty quite like him. Klara is alive, but not entirely. She is an AF: a robotic companion for disconnected children. She lives in a shop window where she strives to please the Manager. She hopes to bask in the nourishing […]

Half Read but Still Reviewable

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

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Just for clarity and full disclosure, I only managed to get through about the first 100 pages of what is 563 page novel before I got distracted and then had to return it to the library. But I still got enough to form some impressions, even if I’m honest, I may not have truly been able to really read the whole thing even if there hadn’t been another hold on the book and I’d have kept it a while longer. The Ministry for the Future […]

Time travel, Silicon Valley tech bro style

The Future is Yours by Dan Frey

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“So an antisocial introvert doing everything in his power to avoid the world … may have created a technology that will end up destroying it?” Ben and Adhi were college roommates who bonded over shared trauma – the death of a parent – as otherwise they couldn’t be more different from each other. Ben’s charismatic and driven, someone who sees himself as a Steve Jobs visionary type. Adhi, on the other hand, is an introverted engineering genius. Dissatisfied with their lives after college, Adhi uses knowledge from […]

So are people just getting you down? What if they just. . . weren’t there?

Dissipatio H.G. : The Vanishing by Guido Morselli

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A very odd little book.  Written in 1997, the Italian author committed suicide not long after the book was published, in part because none of his books had sold very well.  Hmmmm. The unnamed protagonist had been contemplating suicide, and found himself in a cavern in, possibly, the Swiss Alps.  He was ready to fling himself into a bottomless lake, but, eventually, reconsidered.  However, as he left the cavern, he slowly realized that Everything. Had. Changed. Since he had been living pretty much as a […]



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