Colonisation - the November '11 Theme

Okay, so we have "Colonisation" as next month's theme. That can cover all different kinds of stories - the establishment of a colony and survival against a planet's hostile environment; the exploration of a planet to locate a suitable spot for a colony; or things taking place within an established colony, usually political, where the remote colony itself serves as a "bottle" to isolate the protagonists and antagonists from any possible external aid.

Even a failed colony can have story potential - can a doomed colony's remnant population survive with all external support cut off?

The theme seems so broad in scope that, in truth, we need a shortlist of titles for the meeting, which exemplify the themes we wish to explore.

The process of working out a suitable shortlist will take a week, maybe two, in order to give everyone a chance to pick their title, chase it down and read it - if they haven't got it already.

Upgrade To The Facebook Group

Facebook have scheduled the Chester Sci-Fi and Fantasy Readers Group for archiving, and allowed the option of an upgrade to the new Groups format.

Effective from today, I have made this upgrade. The new URL:- New Chester Sci-Fi and Fantasy Readers Group on Facebook.

Those 2012 Dates and Topics

After the meeting on Saturday, the following dates and topics were provisionally written down:-

January 28	The Life and Works of Olaf Stapledon
February 25	Romance and Relationships
March 24	The Red Planet - Mars
April 21	Comedy in Science Fiction
May 19	Marvellous Technologies v 2.0
June 16	Virtual Realities
July 14	Giants and Dwarves
August 11	Magic and Sorcery
September 08	Evolution in Action
October 06	Near-Future
November 03	Artificial Intelligences
December 01	The End of The World

I'll get ironclad confirmations of the dates, and I aim to finalise the order of the topics before September in order to present Chester Library with the 2012 poster.

Watch this space.