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 […]

When I tell you, when I tell you, when I tell you. 

Guardian by Sara Fields

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Y’all… This warranted an immediate phone call to my former review writing partner, Pattykins. Do you remember several years ago when Patty and I read When Life Happened by Jewel E. Ann and it had such a shocking twist that I set up a separate Facebook group so that we could talk about the twist after you all read it? Guardian by Sara Fields came real close to that level of what the fuck just happened, which I would not have expected at all from […]

What it Means to be My Favourite Alien

Translation State by Ann Leckie

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Have you ever experienced so much anticipation for a book that it you nearly squealed in glee? This is me with Ann Leckie’s Translation State. If Translation State had just been a sequel to her Imperial Radch Trilogy, it would still have been intriguing enough to check out. But Translation State is not just a follow-up to the Radch books—it’s a book that heavily features the Presgr Translators! To keep things vague for anyone who hasn’t yet read the Radch books (and you should), the […]

The greatest Alien movie never made.

Alien 3: The Unproduced Screenplay by William Gibson by Pat Cadigan

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Alien3 had a long, strange trip before it made it to screens in 1992, fully six years after the critical and box office smash Aliens made writer/director James Cameron a household name. During that time more than twenty scripts were considered at one time or another for the follow up. Before work began the only consideration was that series heroine Ellen Ripley, played perfectly by Sigourney Weaver, would be sitting this one out. Weaver had expressed fatigue with the series and did not think there […]

Octavia Butler – Adulthood Rites, well this was disappointing

Adulthood Rites by Octavia Butler

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I hate writing negative reviews, especially for authors I love, but this book did not do it for me. Middle parts of a trilogy are difficult, I understand that, but this book just felt repetitive and barely moved the narrative forward. This novel focuses on the first male child born of a human (with genetic input from the Oankali) on earth since humanity was saved from extinction. Lilith, the main character from the first book is the mother but she barely appears as Akin, her […]

Dawn – An intriguing take on human-alien interactions

Dawn by Octavia Butler

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I first read the Xenogenesis saga of Octavia Butler when I was a teenager and it arrived with a ton of other books I ordered from some science fiction book club (I had just gotten a job and was a dumb kid, don’t judge). What I remembered most from the initial read was the use of cancer cells by the alien race, the Oankali, to reshape their own bodies which I thought was a brilliant concept (actually still think it is brilliant). Maybe I did […]



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