Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Introducing: Miguel O’Hara

Spider-Man 2099, issue #1 by Peter David

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Peter Parker wasn’t my first Spider-Man. He’s one of my favorite characters, don’t get me wrong, but Peter Parker’s origin story was collective knowledge, it wasn’t new. It was picked over turkey with all the baggage of a holiday meal. I knew going in that 2099 would be different, but I didn’t know what that meant at the time. I was twelve, eating lots of Brooklyn pizza, and guzzling Arizona iced tea at a rate surely to put me on the diabetes fast-track (thankfully, it […]

Fauxschizzle vs. 2099: An Introduction

Marvel's 2099 Series by Various

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I was an easy mark. Overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of stories, art, subject matter that filled my local Brooklyn comic store, and limited by a $5-per-week allowance, I had no idea where to enter the world of comic books. Even at a young age I was a story junkie. I loved Spider-Man, Batman, the Silver Surfer, and had a huge crush on Jubilee from the X-Men. I was interested in so many more… Wolverine, Sandman, Martha Washington Goes to War, Tank Girl, Ghost Rider, […]

This book confused my brain in ways it did not intend

Neuromancer by William Gibson

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**Expository wordiness up top. Feel free to skip to the actual book-related stuff if you like. A few things right up top: A few years ago, I flirted with playing a card game called Android: Netrunner. My partner was way more into it than I was, but occasionally I’d build a deck or two and spar with him, just to give him something to play against. I included a link to the Wikipedia article on the game there, because it’s a lot to explain if […]

William Gibson, poet of cacaphony

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I admit that I find Gibson to be rather oblique reading. I first read Neuromancer for CBR IV, and I wasn’t really motivated to read the rest of the Sprawl books for a number of reasons. But I really like the *idea* of cyberpunk, and after watching Netflix’s Altered Carbon I thought I might give some abandoned cyberpunk series another chance, including this one and, yeah, the Takeshi Kovacs books. I don’t remember Neuromancer all too well, but from what I do remember, some of […]

“Get to the next screen”

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  What does society look like if your consciousness can be saved to a device and installed into a new body making death theoretically impossible? While this sounds like the plot of an episode of Black Mirror, it’s actually the main conceit of Altered Carbon, published in 2006 (and adapted into a series on Netflix this year). At birth, every human has a cortical stack implanted at the base of the skull that contains their consciousness. Only the destruction of the stack results in what’s […]

Another Day Older and Deeper in Debt

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This is a noir, cyber-punk, mystery and has a lot of great ideas jammed into it, but I don’t think the execution is quite there. Ashby does play a bit with the noir tropes, reversing roles and changing the tone to be a bit more humorous and I liked that quite a bit, however there’s just so much in the novel that nothing really gets done well. There are a lot of characters, a lot of plot, and a lot of genres all fighting for […]



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