Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable.

Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Real Life by Brandon Taylor

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Doctor Jekyll and My Hyde – 4/5 Stars This is still a wonderful and silly novel. I am thinking of teaching this novel for twelfth graders in a few weeks, but I am realizing from this reread that while the novel is short, there’s some stylistic flourishes that I think are going to stand in the way of enjoyment and analysis. Even the opening few pages, in just describing a weird scene in the street, the opening chapter has to think about the nature of […]

All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now. All the rest was fantasy.

Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks

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This is going to be a tough review to write. First off, I loved it, and I find those reviews difficult. Second, it’s another big Culture novel from Iain M. Banks, and as I found last year with Matter, it’s hard to distill everything into a brief review. I’ll do my best on both counts, but I’ll just start with this: for anyone who loves hard science fiction in general and space opera in particular, the Culture novels are the absolute best I’ve read. Surface […]

Confessions of a recovering literary fiction snob

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I loved reading fantasy and horror and suspense as a kid, and I loved the literary fiction we read in school. As an adult, I started taking myself and my choice of reading materials far too seriously, staying away from anything too genre, making rare exceptions for Atwood’s Madd Addam series or Tolkien. [I know. Insert eye roll <<here>>] And then about six years ago, I read and loved Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory, and I started looking into his other books and found that […]

Culture novels always reminds me of Lois McMaster Bujold, so then I read more of hers too.

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Use of Weapons by Iain M Banks – 4/5 Stars So I have read a few of Iain M Banks’s books in the Culture series, including the weird little novella “The State of the Art” and each time I read one, I think about how much it feels like a blend of Vorkosigan and Hainish novels. It’s not the most literary writing, but I do find it quite literary, and it’s weird, but not crazy, and it’s usually really good at creating worlds and filling […]

On Virtual Perdition, Horrible Bastards, and Millions of Warships

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William Gibson didn’t invent virtual reality, but he was arguably the first to introduce the concept to a mass audience. A generation later, the Wachowskis took the concept to the next level with The Matrix. And now, roughly a generation removed from The Matrix (and if that doesn’t make you feel old, then I’m not sure what will), science fiction has become so suffused with the concept that virtual reality has taken its place alongside rayguns and spaceships and bug-eyes monsters as a venerable trope-verging-on-cliche […]

On Betrayal, Whimsical AIs, and Special Circumstances

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I’ve been reading science fiction since I knew how to read. I’ve immersed myself in utopias, dystopias, parallel universes, and alien mating rituals. I’ve stood on the shores of an inland sea on Mars, plunged into the swirling depths of gas giants, and hacked the operating system of reality. And after thirty years in this genre, I’ve come to one conclusion: I want to live in the Culture. Fuck the Foundation, fuck the Metaverse, fuck Mars, fuck the Federation, and certainly fuck the Sprawl. The […]



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