Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Does 2 Out of 3 Count if the Third Book is the Worst?

Wool, Silo Series, Book One by Hugh Howey

Shift, Silo Series, Book Two by Hugh Howey

Dust, Silo Series, Book Three by Hugh Howey

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I picked up the box set of Silo during Amazon’s fantastic book series sale in December. I had watched the first season of the Apple TV+ show and was curious about the books. I had read a review that Hugh Howey had disappointed with the ending, but I was willing to give it a try. BOOK I – WOOL The trilogy begins with a character fans of the show will be familiar with – Sheriff Holston. His wife had volunteered to clean a few years […]

My Kind of Western

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

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This novella has been sitting on my kindle forever and I don’t know why it took me this long to read it but I’m so glad I finally did! I think I’ve talked before about my struggles with short fiction, I always want more. This one wasn’t any different. I don’t know if reading any of Gailey’s other novellas would help clear up some of the background on this story. It’s set in a dystopian America torn apart by war with most people reduced to […]

The 80s were a magical time for dystopian near-future fiction

V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd

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“I’m thinking of taking my family and getting out of this country soon, sometime over the next couple of years. It’s cold and it’s mean-spirited, and I don’t like it here anymore.” Surprisingly, the above quotation does not come from V for Vendetta, but from Alan Moore’s 1988 introduction to the graphic novel for the original DC Comics run. At the time, Margaret Thatcher was entering her third term as Prime Minster of the U.K., and Moore was despairing about, among other things, the treatment of […]

It was the ring of counterfeit Elvis robots that did it for me, honestly.

The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood

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“He can’t shake the feeling that this place is some sort of pyramid scheme, and that those who fail to understand that will be left empty-handed. But there’s no obvious reason for this feeling of his. Maybe he’s ungrateful by nature.” The nation is in economic ruin. Everyone is fighting for whatever scraps are left. Which is why Charmaine is grateful to have a job as a bartender, even if she and her husband Stan are living in their car and moving every few hours […]

A kind of hopeful dystopia

Wool by Hugh Howey

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[Read as an ebook from the public library.] Note: This is the omnibus version, which collects the original five novellas into one edition. I didn’t expect this book to hit me in quite the ways it did. This has clearly been the year of sci-fi for me and I’ve run the gamut from Becky Chambers loveliness to the quirkiness of Murderbot to this, the comparative grimdark of the Silo. I usually don’t go in for post-apocalyptic literature, because I don’t need to be more depressed, […]

cbr12bingo – Green (and another Bingo!)

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

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I wanted so much more from this little dusty sketch of the dystopian west. It had a helluva hook – outlaw lesbians! Gun-slinging sisters-in-resistance! Non-binary action heroes! Unfortunately, it ground to a halt far short of its potential destination. It begins as all westerns do: someone hanging taut at the end of a rope. There are western tropes a-plenty; rough-riding, chaw-spitting, howdy pardnering, thankya kindly ma’ams litter the landscape. This wild west is wild for a different reason, though: we’re in a thinly plotted dystopia. […]



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