If I was just rating the story of this book (and this series), I would probably give it all five stars. But holy crap, Pierce Brown’s writing style is so melodramatic and self-serious sometimes, his prose so purple, I think it must be suffocating from a lack of oxygen. When he forgets to try to be Important and A Good Writer and just writes, his story shines. Oh, and Sevro is amazing. So this is the last book in the Red Rising trilogy (but not […]
AI with Feelings
4.5 stars My goal this Cannonball is to read a bunch of sci-fi fantasy and books in general not written by white dudes. I saw that Ancillary Justice had won many awards including the Hugo and Nebula awards. It was also highly recommended by NPR Books. It tells the story of Breq, formerly the Justice of Torren, a ship that is part of the Radch Empire. The ship is controlled by a sentient AI with physical bodies called ancillaries. The story alternates between the present […]
Highly Entertaining Space Opera
I was not expecting to like Leviathan Wakes as much as I did. I picked it up because I liked The Expanse on Scy-Fy and needed to know what happened next, but I picked it up thinking it’d be a slog through overly detailed hard sci-fi and I wasn’t really looking forward to the slog. But it is an extremely enjoyable read and I found myself fully immersed and engaged in the world that James S.A. Corey has created. If you watched The Expanse, then […]
A disappointing novelization.
I waited for this book on hold at my library for two and half months. It wasn’t worth it. At the same time, I’m glad I didn’t give in to my initial impulse to buy it. That would have been a huge waste of $20. Unfortunately, Alan Dean Foster manages to take a great story and make it more pondering, less exciting, and inserts a level of cheese into the dialogue with his added and extended scenes (and even in some cases, changed lines) that […]


