Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“It might be that saving the world is idiotically simple. Maybe we just need to connect and care for one another.” #CBRBingo – Shelfie

A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor (The Carls, #2) by Hank Green

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I give this beautiful eyesore of a book five stars. Well, 4.5 rounded up. I kind of don’t know what to say about this book! It was a lot! And, honestly, I liked the first book in this duology (3.5 stars worth), but it didn’t blow my socks off or anything. This one kind of did. I think there was a huge jump in quality here, but also a huge jump in scale. There was a focus on April in the first one that kept […]

Grounded in reality, gripping science fiction: cbr12bingo White Whale

SevenEves by Neal Stephenson

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SevenEves is my “White Whale” for Cannonball bingo 12.  When it came out, my spouse raved about it and in the five years since its release, SevenEves keeps cropping up on “best of lists” and positive Cannonballer reviews.  Despite all the positivity, I was resistant to reading based on size and how that could affect my cannonball.  The White Whale square gave me an excellent reason to move it to the top of the TBR. To some extent, my title says it all.  SevenEves is one […]

If Start Trek Got Blah and Some Part of it Knew That

Red Shirts by John Scalzi

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Bingo Review 17: Red Red Shirts (‘red’ is in the title, and occasionally referenced in-text) is basically Star Trek gone meta, really meta. I would divide the story into two parts: the part where certain members of the crew of the Intrepid start to notice some strange patterns surrounding the away missions: certain crew members always are fine (relatively) while certain others are nearly guaranteed to end up dead. But why is that? Ensign Dahl is the driving force behind trying to solve this strange […]

Books like this are why I love science fiction. #CBRBingo – Fresh Start

Children of Time (Children of Time, #1) by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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Man, this hit me at just the right time, in just the right way. It was the perfect blend of escapism (events take place farrrr away and a verrry long time from now) and dealing with reality (humans gonna human even in the future and light years away). I almost don’t want to tell you anything about this book because if you go in unspoiled you are in for some surprises, but part of why I wanted to pick the book up is that I […]

“If you don’t like the facts, you ignore them, and if you need facts, dream up some you do like.”

Little Fuzzy (Fuzzy Sapiens, #1) by H. Beam Piper

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Reading this back to back with Scalzi’s reinterpretation was an interesting experience, not least because the differences were really clear, but what was different was somehow surprising. I’ve read several classic sf books this year, and though they have shared varying tones and subject matters, they share a certain cultural sensibility. This is a very humanist little book, conscious of questions of personhood and exploitation, but it’s also a bit paternalistic. The basic plot here, shared by Fuzzy Nation, is that Jack Holloway is a […]

Third time through liked this just as much.

Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi

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It was interesting to read this after finally having read Little Fuzzy, the original novel Scalzi reimagined, that forms the basis of the story of this book. They were essentially the same story, but had key differences that made them entirely different reading experiences. Scalzi’s version of the story is much less sweet, for one. It’s much more anti-capitalist, though I wouldn’t quite say anti-colonial, and it’s less about answering the central question of “What is sapience?” and more about how the Fuzzys find a […]



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