The September meeting took place yesterday at The Sleepless Goat, and it was possibly the longest and most lively meeting in the young history of our group. Four were present: M, S, Penny, and myself. (No new faces, despite our fancy colour flyers. But we are not giving up!)

After some initial chatter about summer and future travel plans we started to actually talk about books.

I had a pile of books from the library. Last year we read Keeping it Real by Justina Robson, and now we talked a little about the sequel Selling Out. M has already read it, and I’m looking forward to.

S is reading (***forgotten, will fill in the title and author when I’ve found out). Penny is reading (***same here… crappy notes!)

What was the best book you read over summer? This turned out to be a more difficult question that it sounds like, because we had to try to remember what we have read. M could not remember at all, except that it was many. I mentioned how I have been writing down every book I finish for ten years. Of course I didn’t have my list with me, so it didn’t help much.

Together we started filling out a questionnaire for SF/F book groups. The most interesting question was perhaps the one about what makes a book (or story) discussionable. We agreed that it has to bee exceptional in some way — very good or very bad, or somewhat controversial so that you want to argue with (or about) it.

To illustrate discussability I mentioned two stories from a collection of seminal science fiction stories (in Swedish translation) I’m reading now.

“A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury had a explanation of the butterfly effect (perhaps originally named after this story) that I found stupid (although the effect itself was well described and the story was good). This made us talk about chaos, alternate histories and the importance of individuals. I mentioned The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson as an example of an interesting and well executed alternate history. (I could also mention his short story collection Vinland the Dream, where he among other things explores the questions about the sensitivity of history on particular events.)

The other story was “No Woman Born” by C.L.Moore, led to a discussion about human nature, and about self-knowledge. S made a comment about the connection to literacy, therefore the discussion took a turn to be about education, education politics and policies and funding — and led to an increasingly heated (but good-natured) political discussion.

After this we needed to talk about something else. Penny had a great idea about having a meeting where we read a book and watch a movie adaptation. We decided to have a special meeting. We are going to read War of the Worlds and watch at least one of the movies — perhaps two. We’ll have a potluck dinner and make a full movie night, and M offered to host it. The regular October meeting will still take place, of course.

The subject of movie adaptations of books made us express some opinions on the Lord of the Rings movies, and talk a bit about Batman (and other comics). S mentioned inofficial lobby groups putting pressure on publishers and television producers to control the content of what they produce. We were close to a political discussion again, but I turned it to books by recommending Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (about control of information, note that the whole book is available on the author website — follow the link!) and the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (money and large companies controling the world). In this short report I have mentioned Stan Robinson three times. Have I ever told you that he is my favourite author?

Another point on the questionnaire was if our group has any contact with fandom. What is fandom? The short answer is that it’s the informal network of people that has existed around the science fiction (and fantasy) genre since the 1920’s. A slightly longer answer can be found here: a not so new but still good web resource about fandom, with a Canadian angle.

Next regular meeting: Tuesday October 14, 7PM at The Sleepless Goat!