Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Please, Re-read the Previous Book First

Queen Demon by Martha Wells

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So, I did mention I had more than one Martha Wells book to attend to today, and this is the tricker one to write about. I read Witch King  earlier this year, and while I very much liked it, there were, I thought, some notable flaws. Witch King had a dual narrative, with each of the two branches separated by over fifty years. And within these fifty years, there have been some significant political changes that are sometimes a little hard to grasp because of […]

A Fragment of Murderbot

Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy by Martha Wells

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OK, I’m going for a Martha Wells two-fer today. And I’m going to start of with the shorter story. I have to give mu thanks to  faintingviolet here because if I hadn’t read their review, I would not have known this had been released.  And I thought I kept up pretty well with most things related to Murderbot But even though this short story is, well, short, (a fragment of a story even)  it made me very happy because it focuses of Peri/ART. Told from […]

A tale of two parallel expeditions

Queen Demon by Martha Wells

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Bingo Square: Culture (it’s a fictional culture but so much of what drives and explains Kai is his cultural background and his status as one of the last remainders of his culture after they were victims of genocide/mass murder – he is the one who remembers the traditions and beliefs that have been lost) – also, 2nd Bingo (5th column). I absolutely adored Witch King when I read it two years ago and was excited to read this sequel. While I remembered the broad strokes […]

I struggled, but it’s still a Martha Wells book

Queen Demon by Martha Wells

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When I read and reviewed Witch King in 2023, I was hoping there would be more books in Kaiisteron’s story. I got my wish, but I flailed around for a while before I was able to sink into it. First, I realized that I needed to reread Witch King. Next, I needed to recalibrate. In a lot of fantasy series, there’s a person or entity that is the ultimate antagonist. In The Rising World series, I think the antagonist is a kind of power. I […]

Scuttlebut

Network Effect (Murderbot #5) by Martha Wells

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Murderbot is at it again. Once more, he is keeping his favourite humans (or at the very least, humans that it doesn’t hate) safe as they do exploration work. On the return, though, their ship is hijacked and dragged into a wormhole by none other than ART (short for Asshole Research Transport), Murderbot’s erstwhile friend and companion. ART is a research transport with massive computational capabilities, able to outsmart virtually everyone – so why has it been hijacked by a strange lifeform? Once again, Murderbot’s […]

Murderbot takes on a murder mystery

Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells

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CBR 17 BINGO: Black (see cover) I’d taken a short hiatus from reading Murderbot, but watching the Apple series put me in the mood again. Apparently it did the same for many fans, and probably generated a bunch of new ones, because when I went to my local library almost every Martha Wells novel had been checked out. Fortunately, I had plenty of other BINGO books to read while I waited for my turn to borrow Fugitive Telemetry. This time around, SecUnit is brought in […]



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