Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

An excellent spec fiction anthology

The Year's Best African Speculative Fiction (2021) by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki

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I absolutely adore speculative fiction anthologies, so when I saw that both C.L. Clark and T.L. Huchu had stories in this one, I had to read it. This is a collection of twenty-nine stories from 2020 told by African or African diaspora writers, a good mix of science fiction, fantasy and horror. There are stories that deal with age-old problems like racism and parenthood and newer ones like climate change and gentrification, from robot revolutions to vengeful djinn. Most of the stories were a solid […]

There was a game he could see and another he couldn’t, and he would play them both.

Sword Stone Table: Old Legends, New Voices by Swapna Krishna and Jenn Northington

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My formative King Arthur works were the 1963 Disney movie The Sword in the Stone, and 1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail. When I discovered Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave, as a preteen, my life as a reader of fantasy and romance was set. I’m a King Arthur enthusiast, but not a purist (except for Antoine Fuqua’s 2004 King Arthur – great cast, beautiful visuals, terrible movie that should never have been marketed as “historically accurate”). Hearing that a work is a retelling of […]

“I’m not distracted. I’m focused on what matters most.”

Love in Color by Bolu Babalola

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I adore fairy tale retellings and I was already familiar with the author from following her on Twitter, so of course I wanted to read this book. Add in the gorgeous cover art and I was completely sold. And this anthology is excellent, full of thoughtfully reimagined tales with strong women and varied settings, and how love unites us all. “So, what was our beginning? When we first met? When we first fell in love? But falling in love is continuous and perpetual, an activity […]

A science fiction anthology about time and the power of hope

I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories by Kim Bo-young

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This book consists of two pairs of stories by a South Korean author known for her speculative fiction. Both deal with a sort of time-is-relative theory, though in very different ways. The first and last stories are from the perspective of an engaged couple. One is traveling back from Alpha Centauri, so rather than wait the few years for her to return, the other decides to board a spaceship that’ll accelerate up to light speed – meaning that it’ll only be a few months for […]

An excellent anthology of disabled authors from a variety of perspectives.

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the 21st Century by ed. Alice Wong

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This was a solid collection of essays from voices rarely heard in publishing, or elsewhere. Ableism is baked into our culture. I read this for Read Harder this year, and this is why I like participating in that challenge every year, because there are always a couple books I probably would never have read otherwise, and this is one of those. Like most essay collections, there are essays that are stronger than others. The standouts for me were the very first essay by Harriet McBryde […]

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 […]



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