Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

full of sound and fury, signifying not quite as much as it could

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

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I’m not going to bury the lede on this one: I wanted to like it a lot more than I did. The nutshell premise is undeniably cool: space fantasy with strong Pacific Rim vibes, in that you have these mecha-type constructs piloted by psychically-linked soldiers who are fighting terrible alien monsters, powering their robots through the power of their chi, but everything inflected strongly through Chinese history and mythology. Except the system is horribly corrupt: girl pilots (we’ll say girls because the protagonist always does, and […]

Anger and Iron: Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

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In the world of this book, humans are in constant battle with alien insect creatures. Mecha robots, piloted by 2-person male-female teams, are critical to the battle efforts. However, the female member of the team is mainly used as kind of battery for the mecha – generally dying during battle as their life force is drained by the mecha. Human society is centered around this war – glorifying battle – and in order to ensure a steady supply of women volunteered for battle, their families […]

Fighting the Spirit Robot Patriarchy

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

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I picked up this novel because I was seeing it mentioned quite a bit on Twitter. And…I loved it. Nice job, queer literature Twitter. In this alternative world China, poor families sell their daughters either as wives or to the military, where they are partnered with the male pilot of a Chrysalis. Essentially a Chrysalis is a giant fighting robot made of spirit metal, which can morph into different forms. It is fueled by the qi of the male pilot and a female companion. Often […]

Two books I Did Not Like

Better Than the Movies by Lynn Painter

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

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Better Than the Movies One star because the main character has a genuinely touching conflict she’s trying to resolve. One star because the main romance is cute if visible from a billion billion miles away. Minus all the other ones for the multiple toxic tropes that we have to wade through which make literally zero sense in the context of the book. Iron Widow UGH felt so bad but this book just didn’t do it for me at all. It started out promising–Zhao’s writing style […]

“If we want something, we have to push back against everything around us and take it by force.”

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

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Look, I am always down for demolishing the patriarchy with mecha. Maybe it’s my fierce dedication to Gundam Wing as a teen, but I have a deep and abiding love for mecha and especially female pilots, so of course I was anticipating this. And it’s exactly what it bills itself as – a fierce and brutal takedown of the patriarchy. In this version of China, the Great Wall protects Huaxia from the Hunduns, strange alien lifeforms that, once killed, can be transformed into Chrysalises, mecha that […]



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