Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Mrs. Glasse wondered if she were not looking at some sort of chimera.

Mary Toft or The Rabbit Queen by Dexter Palmer

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I can’t sell this book enough, but also if you told me you hated it, I would buy that too. Dexter Palmer is the author of two other novels, both that I really liked. The first novel is a kind of steampunk retelling (though with lots of fantasy elements too) of The Tempest. The next novel is about a computer scientist working on theories about alternative reality and we stumble upon a glitch in the space time continuum wherein a singular and pivotal moment in a […]

Yes, this is only my third book of the year…but in an alternate life it’s my 31st

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ver·sion con·trol noun COMPUTING the task of keeping a software system consisting of many versions and configurations well organized. – google When I’m feeling particularly sorry for myself over something, I like to think that in some other, parallel universe, I was in a similar situation, only things were worse. And now here I am, living in the version of my life that follows the lesser of two evils. How many versions of your life have you imagined? Is there any way to know that […]

Putting the science in science fiction

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Holy mother moly I loved this book. Plot driven? Check. Genre fiction? Check. New worlds? Check (several checks). Dense complexity to the point of ridiculousness? ALL THE CHECKS. Rebecca is doing okay. She has a job and while she’s not crazy about it, hey, it’s a job. She’s (happily?) married though her husband works all hours and is utterly consumed by the “causality violation device” he’s working on – and don’t you dare call it a time machine. Lately, though, there’s something … off. She can’t […]

The Tempest meets Blade Runner and also not.

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This is a novel fundamentally concerned with “total representation.” Representation is such a squelchy topic, especially in literature, because like everything else in art, life, physics, and pretty much everything else, there is a gap between reality and representation of reality. In this novel, which is a kind of futuristic steampunk, a sort of what if a steampunk past made it to the future. Also, it’s sort of like what if there’s a kind of lateral time-line. So think Oryx and Crake, but written by […]



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