Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Poetry-writing AIs and Misfit Humans

The Salvage Crew by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

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I have a thing for snarky AIs, and once I saw this was narrated by Nathan Fillion, of course I requested this audiobook. “I’m surrounded by idiots.” Amber Rose – called OC by his crew – is a snarky AI who used to be human. He’s a Buddhist who writes poems in his spare time (absolutely awful poems, by the way) and he’s slowly working his way up the rank of AIs. His latest mission is to oversee the salvage of a UN colony ship […]

What intelligence means to a human, spider and octopus

Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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In this sequel, we jump back and forth across time and watch the beginnings of new sentience both planned and unplanned by humans and its inevitable fallout discovered aeons later by the first book’s descendents. And true to how things always go awry, nothing is ever what humans (or any sentient species) plan to begin with and that’s what saves us in the end. Tchaikovsky will ultimately assure us this inability to be totally in charge of our destiny is a good thing, though no […]

We’re the aliens, man

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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I was raised on the optimistic technology sci fi of Arthur C. Clarke who believed our future was in the stars and that technology was our only way there. But he often threaded his optimism with warning of our hubris and innate inability to understand a mind truly alien to ours. I’ve waited to read a successor that expanded on these twin stars of hope and wariness. Children of Time succeeds and then carries it into realms I couldn’t conceive, ones I can’t even fully understand […]

A Love Story Even a Non-Romance Person Can Fall For

Winter's Orbit by Everina Maxwell

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Romance is really not my genre; for one thing I’m very much ace and spent most of my growing up time wondering what was wrong with all the story people who apparently have no self-control with the lust and related emotional stuff. However, sometimes, there comes along a romance that has enough other elements, like actually interesting characters, plot, and/or setting, that I can appreciate the whole thing, romance focus or not. Winter’s Orbit is one of these kinds of stories. In some ways this […]

The Empathy and Kindness of Becky Chambers

The Galaxy and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers

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In her final installment of her Wayfarer’s series, The Galaxy, and the Ground Within , Becky Chambers continues to explore themes of friendship, diversity, cross cultural and cross species understanding. It is a beautiful book. Beautifully written and beautiful in that the heart of the author shines in her love of her characters and a deep respect she conveys for each being’s right to exist. Many have characterised Chamber’s writing as uplifting and comforting and that is no small thing in a genre rife with […]

“The whole place had the look of a picked-at-body. But damn! What a beautiful corpse.”

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

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This book has received so much hype and lived up to every bit of praise it has received!  Thank you, Cannonballers for putting this on my radar and keeping it there.  I’m almost at a loss to review Gideon the Ninth since so many of y’all have done so already.  Here is a list of things that I enjoyed immensely, in no particular order: 1 – Muir’s word choices.  It’s delightful to be confronted with an unfamiliar word and Muir did it more in this […]



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