Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“The stories in this anthology trust their worlds and characters completely, and because we can sense the author’s confidence, we are willing to trust them in return.”

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 by Edited by R.F. Kuang

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This is always one of the highlights of my reading year; I do love a SF/F collection and the contemporary field really clicks with me (more than those 1960s/1970s collections I keep subjecting myself to). John Joseph Adams does a great job setting this up, reviewing all the stories of the year (a gargantuan task), and providing the series editor with 80 stories to choose from. I like seeing what the year’s editor has to say and what picks they make. Having a different editor […]

“The making of this book was thus a process of discovery; as I think the reading of it will be.”

Interfaces by Edited by Ursula K. LeGuin and Virgina Kidd

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I was hoping that Ursula K. LeGuin being one of the anthology editors would counterbalance the fact that this anthology came on the tail end of the 1970s (published in 1980), but I still felt like the overall quality was iffy and reflective of all my prior stated issues with this era of SF/F. LeGuin and Kidd’s taste did lead to more stories that I enjoyed, but I still skimmed in sections and this wasn’t a keeper for me. Interfaces is a themeless anthology, and […]

It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don’t

Exhalation by Ted Chiang

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Even if you haven’t ready any of Ted Chiang’s stories, you may already be familiar with his Nebula and Hugo Award-winning work “Story of Your Life,” which was adapted into the Academy Award-nominated film Arrival. I haven’t read that story (yet), but the concepts in the film intrigued me enough that when I heard about this new collection, I was eager to read it. If you have seen Arrival, you won’t be surprised that Chiang’s writing continues to explore ideas about time, free will, responsibility, and […]



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