Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Taking the easy joke here, this book made me want to die inside.

Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg

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I had a hard time deciding between one and two star rating for Dying Inside, as it was well written and the literary voice was engaging. But I found this to be vile. A sexist, racist, masturbatory exploration of a really cool concept. Dude took the laziest option and tried to be profound with it. Ick. Thanks a lot, TBR Jar! Anyway, as you can see, I ended up at 1.5 stars rounded up, because I am willing to extend some leeway for all the positive […]

We stan a vintage janky paperback in this house.

Special Deliverance by Clifford D. Simak

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This wasn’t nearly as good as Way Station, which I read back in 2020 and gave five stars, but I still had a good time with it and will continue my project of collecting all of Simak’s books in their vintage janky paperback editions. Special Deliverance was once of the last books Simak published before his death, and it does bear the hallmarks of a later work in his career, with a revisiting of themes, and a bit of tiredness in sections of the plot (something […]

Couldn’t clear the hurdle of suspending my disbelief on this one.

The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells

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One of the hazards inherent in reading older science fiction (especially sff published before the turn of the century!) is that the science just wasn’t there at the time it was written, and in some unfortunate cases like this one (where we now understand a hell of a lot more about biology and evolution), that makes the book more of a time capsule than a thrilling tale. At least, it did for me. The Island of Doctor Moreau follows Edward Prendick, sole survivor of  of […]

“Peterson remembered with a smile that the US Department of the Interior had made a thorough prediction of trends in 1937, and had missed atomic energy, computers, radar, antibiotics, and World War II. Yet they all kept on, with this simple-minded linear extrapolation that was, despite a bank of computers to refine the numbers, still merely a new way to be stupid in an expensive fashion.”

Timescape by Gregory Benford

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The world is dying and some some scientists make a literal last ditch effort to send a message back in time in an attempt to avert the present day ecological crisis. We follow both the present day scientists in their attempts to save the world, and the scientists in the past as they try to decode the strange interference that seems to be coming from nowhere. I had such good luck reading classic sf in 2020, but in 2021 and now 2022 my choices have […]

Won’t be reading the sequels, thank you.

Rendezvous with Rama (Rama, #1) by Arthur C. Clarke

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This one didn’t work out for me so much. And it tricked me! I was really into it for like the first twenty pages (hard not to pay attention when a giant asteroid pulverizes Italy), but once the crew of the Endeavor were introduced, this book became pretty dull for me. Rendezvous with Rama, which is a Hugo award winner, was published in 1973. I can see how something like this published fifty years ago would have been a big deal. But there are just so many […]

“And yet he had learned to submerge that sense of horror, to disregard the outward appearance of it, to regard all life as brother life, to meet all things as people.”

Way Station by Clifford D. Simak

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I was very surprised at how much I enjoyed this book. “Golden Age Sci-Fi” isn’t always something that personally resonates with me. A lot of it is very dated, or rooted in the time period it was written in, or focuses on ideas and themes that aren’t as interesting to me as more modern sci-fi. But this book feels almost timeless, and though I don’t usually care about the prose of a book as much as I do its ability to make me care for […]



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