Collecting And Reading

Author: Neil Rackham

Book: Elliptical Billiard Balls

Like LinkedIn got possessed by the AI from Dungeon Crawler Carl.

Elliptical Billiard Balls is a funny collection of 11 short science fiction stories.

Usually with a compendium of short stories, you have the weak ones propped up by the few strong ones, that you just have to endure to read the full thing.

Honestly, all of these are strong in their own ways.

There’s stories about aliens, and dog’s sense of smell, there’s religious business consultants, media and AI, CFO = Chief Fashion Officer, and all sorts of other eerily real dystopian takes on the corporate world, technology and the future.

I think what Rackham has done (very well to say this is his first foray into non-fiction writing) here, is blur the lines between absurdity, and reality into what is a Douglas Adams-esque narrative style that really works.

Rackham said that he wrote most of these stories in airports, on the way to or from his travels for work. You can really feel that corporate slavery tugging at the real world with absurdity in the pages.

If you are also a cog in the corporate machine, or just enjoy a light science fiction read with a bit of humour thrown in, I think this would go down well. It’s short, it’s easy, it’s punchy.

4.0/5.0

Disclosure: I was paid to review this book (but these are my legitimately honest thoughts and I would have very nicely offered to pay for the book and not accept a penny instead of pushing an inauthentic opinion).