Germination!

Yea! The San Francisco Science Fiction Book Qlub has germinated!

After 3.5 meet-ups and 4 books, things are getting more established, and it looks like this little seedling is going to make it into the new year!

Born out of conversations amongst friends falling along a spectrum of Sci-Fi fandom, the SFSFBQ started as an exploration of Feminist Sci-Fi, and as an excuse for rabid Science Fiction fans to finally get around to reading classics that fell through the cracks.

Using the Nebula Award winners and nominees as a guide for choices (but not limited to), we've continued to read strong feminist writers as well as classics of the field and promising new writers. So far we've read:

The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five, by Doris Lessing
The Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler
The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi

Next up as the first SFSFBQ book for 2011 is a Sci-Fi staple: The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, by Neal Stephenson. So, grab a copy, get to reading and get ready for a meet-up sometime in February!

-SFSFBQ

ps- the previous posts are mostly for recording our meetups and books, you know, like a log. the format from here on out is to use this to record discussions and minutes of the our awesome Qlub, and for people to post comments to continue our mind-blowing discussions. so, please! comment! post! go for it!

pps- also, anyone in the Qlub can be an administrator, just contact me (mark) and I will knight ye.

Book Qlub 4.5: The Windup Girl

We made it out to Toronado on a rainy sunday, we finally had a quick half-assed discussion of Connie Willis' Doomsday Book, and though it was brief, we had a great discussion of Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl. Once again, it seemed that while everyone had issues with different aspects of the book, over all (and excepting what appears to be a glaring plot hole on Page 201) people really enjoyed the book, and as a debut novel, it was pretty impressive.

I personally recommend people follow up with Bacigalupi by reading his 2004 short story "The People of Sand and Slag."

Also, we decided that our next book would be sci-fi staple The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, by Neal Stephenson, and for a meet up the first Sunday of February, tentatively.

Book Qlub 4: Doomsday Book

Do to us being lame, we didn't actually get this book qlub off the ground. T'was very sad, but all it did was redouble our efforts to commit to book qlub!

Book Qlub 3: Parable of the Sowers

We settled on Parable of the Sowers, by Octavia E. Butler. We finally made it to the Pig and the Whistle, where we encountered many a loud drunk Irishmen. Nice enough, but also loud enough.

We had a very stimulating discussion, and while we had some problems with the book, most agreed it was an interesting story that painted an all too possible dark future.

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Correspondence:

We voted at our last Book Qlub to read, the Nebula Award Nominated, Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler. So, rent your books, read 'em up, and mark your calendars cause Book Klub 3.0 is scheduled for:

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010 at 8:00 PM.

Location: TDB.

Yea!

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Summation:

we had yet another highly successful and highly stimulating book qlub
(3). beers, veggie burgers, fish and chips, social apocalypse,
cannibals, the communes of mendocino, drinking water out of one's
bathtub, hippie-rednecks (or is it hippies-redneck?); just a partial
recap of some of the topics of our highly engrossing discussion.

we've made a decisions for our next book, via ro-sham-bo, and it is
Connie Willis' Doomsday Book, which continues
our theme of exploring female/feminist sci-fi writers and nebula award
winning novels AT THE SAME TIME!!! who knew it could be done?

so!
book: Doomsday Book
when: October 24th, 6 in the p.
where: as yet to be decided. as time gets closer we will find a consensus, but let us keep in mind this time places of lower decibelity (copyleft, 2010) where we can have a good two hour conversation without having to yell over drunkards.

and finally, we need to come prepared this time for book suggestions for Book Qlub 5! our guide has been nebula award winning novels or nominees, as well as feminist/female authors. as there are a +100 books that fit that description, we should have no lack of suggestions. take a look here, and familiarize yourself with some books that you might want to suggest for the group to read and why (note the latest book qlub rule: any member who reads a book on the list of winners or nominees outside of the Science Fiction Book Qlub cannot NOT suggest reading said book, just because they read the book, especially since they heard about the book through the San Francisco Science Fiction Book Qlub; just saying, now it's official, person who shall remain nameless).

so, let's get to reading!

-SFSFBQ

Book Klub 2.0: The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980)

Correspondence from our Second Book Qlub organizing. We eventually settled on Doris Lessing's The Marriages Between Zone Three, Four, and Five, from her Canopus in Argos series.

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Next on the agenda: what's our next read? We agreed on Doris Lessing, and her Science Fiction opus is called Canopus in Argos and is the following books:

1. Shikasta (1979) – A secret history of Earth from the perspective of the advanced Canopus civilization that is thinking in eons rather than centuries. The history spans from the very beginning of life into our own future. The book ends with a metaphorical telling of the trial of Socrates.
2. The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980) – Depicts the influence of unknown higher powers on interactions between a series of civilizational "zones" of varying degrees of advancement that encircle the planet Earth. One zone is representative of an overtly feminine high civilization initially coupled by royal marriage to a militant and male civilization. The novel culminates with the latter, male, civilization allying with a tribal female realm again due to directives from Canopus.
3. The Sirian Experiments (1980) – Focuses, like Shikasta, on the history of Earth, but from the perspective of visitors from Sirius rather than Canopus. The Sirians are depicted as a highly managed society with fascist overtones, that attempt experiments on lesser civilizations while trying to mitigate the stagnation of their ruling class. The story is told from the perspective of Ambien II, one of a peer group of five who rule Sirius.
4. The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982) – The story of the civilization on a planet that, due to interstellar "re-alignments", is slowly facing extinction, and Canopus's relationship with them. The story is greatly influenced by Robert Falcon Scott's Antarctic expedition, and is Lessing's homage to it.
5. The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983) – A story of Canopean agents on a less advanced planet; explores hazards of rhetoric and mirrors events in revolutionary societies such as Communist Russia.

If we really want to keep on with the gender theme, then I personally Vote for Book Number 2: The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five. Check 'em out.

Okay, so, on the agenda for votes that we should have decided by, let's say this weekend.

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Summation:

Hoorah!

We have officially had our second highly entertaining and delicious
Book Qlub! We ate some awesome Sicilian pizza and had a wonderful
collection of Salads, while drinking some beers, wine, and arguing the
finer points of gender and social development in the science fiction
novel The Mariages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five, by Doris
Lessing.

Next up is Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower! Let's get to reading!

-SFSFBQ

The Gender of Pronouns, an afterward to The Left Hand of Darkness

After our wonderful discussion on gender from our reading of Ursula K. LeGuin's awesome Left Hand of Darkness, I found this copy of the afterward by LeGuin from the 1994 edition of LHoD. Have a read!

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THE GENDER OF PRONOUNS
by Ursula K. LeGuin

What a very dry, dull matter, of no conceivable importance to anyone but grammarians and pedants! How I wish it were so! But The Left Hand of Darkness is haunted and bedeviled by the gender of its pronouns, a wild, fierce, and intractable tribe.

Having invented a race of people who are essentially sexless except for a few days a month, when they become very highly sexed either as male or female, and for the duration of pregnancy and lactation, when of course they remain female having discovered the Gethenians, what was I to call them? In 1967, when I wrote the book, I called them all "he." I believed then that the masculine pronoun in English was genuinely generic, including both male and female referents. This is a pleasant and convenient belief. Unfortunately, the more you look at it, the less credible it becomes. Even more unfortunately, it has been adopted as one of the Thirty Nine Articles of Antifeminism. Some years after the book was published, I lapsed from the faith, and have remained unregenerate ever since. "He" means what it says, no more, no less alas!

What might I have used instead? Obviously the Gethenians' own languages would have nouns and pronouns appropriate to some, their ungendered "normal" state, and gendered nouns and pronouns appropriate to kemmer, their sexual period. Many Terran languages have neuter or bisexual pronouns, somer pronouns; many have gendered pronouns whose gender may or may not be the same as the sex of their referent, if their referent has a sex. The Romance languages are all of this kind.

Book Qlub 1: The Left Hand of Darkness

For posterity: Correspondence from our first Book Qlub 1, where we read Left Hand of Darkness. We didn't actually make it to the Pig and the Whistle; we met up in the middle of the week in front of the Jewish museum. It was nice and sunny out!

We pretty much all agreed it was a great book, and we had a very stimulating conversation on gender and Shifgrethor.

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Hey Folks,

This Sunday, May 16th, we're going to have our first sci-fi book club to discuss "Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula K. LeGuinn. Let's meet at 6:30 the Pig and Whistle on 2801 Geary at Masonic.

Following book club will be an entertaining, fast paced, high competition game of quiz night, also at the Pig and Whistle. So even if you haven't read the book, feel free to join us for some teambuilding...or destroying if you're thinking of the other teams that we will devastate with our trivia knowledge.

Oh yeah, and come with ideas for our next book.

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Summation:

Well, successful book club, gang. It was a bit brief, I felt we could have talked about gender, saving face, foretelling, mysticism, and aliens all day long. My thoughts are that we need more time and some beers/wine/jamesons to really get the conversation going. So, I'm thinking no more lunch time book clubs. As far as bourbon and branch, I really want to check it out, but I've heard that the library area is small and impacted and that we would need a reservation for a table, which I'm not against, but I'm just saying, it might not be as lacks as meeting at an empty bar. Things to keep in mind.