December Meeting

And so we came to the final meeting of 2011, and the theme of "The Unmissables."

With this, we came to the end of the themes picked out during the old regime. Next month, we move to the topics picked out after the changeover of leadership earlier this year a changeover that did not come without surrounding unfortunate circumstances.

"The Unmissables." During November, I defined the term somewhat more firmly by putting it in the context of the popular BBC radio show "Desert Island Discs," and its premise that if you got marooned on a desert island with (IIRC) one book and eight pieces of music on disc, what book - and what music - would you pick? Which unmissable book would you take with you if you had to go through a literal Hell?

I'd made my pick a long time before the meeting itself, since of all the books in my collection I can only think of one that has never strayed far from my side, and never bored me even though I'd read it a thousand times before.

And to some, I seem to have made some sort of wrong choice (?) - but I'll expand on that in a separate post, or quite possibly on my blog The Serpent's Tongue.

And so we came to the choices.



John Rennie chose First Lensman, in this case representing an entire series, the Lensman Series as written by E E "Doc" Smith. In his own words, "... if you like hard scifi/space opera you must read the Lensman series by E E Doc Smith as that's where it all started." In this case, John chose First Lensman as an example of a foundational series; along with Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy (and only the trilogy, no disrespect intended), the Lensman series form the base of any well-informed science fiction fan's reading experiences.

The works of Isaac Asimov would crop up again, later in the meeting.



Fiona chose a similar foundational book - The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner. This book, along with others penned by Garner, encapsulates mythologies both local, Celtic and Norse, bringing them into a seamless whole and setting it amid the real world geographical landscape of Alderley Edge, not more than a dozen miles from his home there - for the most part.

That apparently seamless blending of the real and the unreal, the mundane and the mythical, and that sense of pilgrimage when a Garner fan visits the Edge, marks Weirdstone as unmissable.



An alternative book, 2001: A Space Odyssey, had personal significance for Fiona, as well; her personal experience made this book unmissable (though I could personally add Rendezvous with Rama, Profiles of The Future (non-fiction), Childhood's End and The Fountains of Paradise to this list of unmissable Arthur C Clarke books for various reasons).



Tibor Fischer's The Collector Collector, Geoff's choice, concerns the events surrounding a unique artifact, described by the book's publisher as "unquestionably the finest novel ever narrated by a bowl."

Geoff's alternates included Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451, and a story called "Pit Stop" about a group of people stuck in a remote diner waiting for a certain visitor ...



Penny had a hard time choosing her favourite - with such a range of choices available, who could blame her? - before settling for (author of Game of Thrones) George R R Martin's Fevre Dream, his vampire novel set on the Antebellum Mississippi. Alternative choices included Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy series, PKD's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Clifford D Simak's City.



For John Oakes, between the choices of I, Robot by Isaac Asimov, On A Pale Horse by Piers Anthony, and the non-fiction The Science of Science Fiction and Carl Sagan's seminal Cosmos, eventually chose I, Robot - with some lively debate as to whether the Will Smith movie counted as a decent portrayal of the book (with an overwhelming, near-unanimous verdict of "NO!")

Asimov's books would appear again, later in the meeting.



Rodney chose the whimsical, yet compelling Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde, laying out the bizarre world of Eddie Russett. The link above connects directly to Jasper FForde's website, written in "vintage HTML" rather than letting "professionals" handle the coding, thereby losing something in translation and letting a certain "corporate distancing" creep into his hand-crafted web pages.

Completely understandable, and I can see Rodney's passion for the author and his works.



Next came Nick's choice of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, the collection of three books Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone (why did I almost type in "Forever Alone" there instead?)

If you would consider Alan Garner's fantasies as the foundation of any well-informed fantasy reader's library, perhaps reinforced by Ursula K LeGuin's Earthsea books, then Gormenghast builds upon that foundation to provide a solid base for any beginning fantasy reader. However hard it might seem to get through, every reader must have at least one challenging book to get through - whether the Illuminatus! Trilogy of Robert Anton Wilson, Heinlein's Time Enough for Love or, indeed, Nick's choice of Mervyn Peake's masterwork.



Kyle, too, had a hard time choosing a truly unmissable book. After Consider Phlebas by Ian Banks, Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon and George R R Martin's Game of Thrones he settled on Joe Abercrombie's The Blade Itself (above); by its description, a trilogy which outshines George R R Martin's above work, posing a possible challenge to readers to pick up the works of both authors for careful perusal and comparison ... perhaps a topic for some future meeting of the club, or even TEBS.



Marco, a newcomer to the club, unfortunately did not have as much time to prepare as the others, though he chose I, Robot as his book in the end, describing it as a book about relationships between man and machine, and a first departure from the then-traditional "robot goes berserk" stories making their rounds in SF at that time.

Which left only one other speaker; only one other choice.

And for that choice ... I'll leave mine for the next blog.

October Meeting - The Works of John Wyndham

So, wasting no further time, let's begin with a series of posts on the works of the author John Wyndham.

So let's begin with this page:-

Fantastic Fiction - John Wyndham

John Wyndham
(John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris)
UK (1903 - 1969)
aka
John Beynon, John Beynon Harris, Johnson Harris,
Lucas Parkes, Wyndham Parkes

And the Wikipedia entry:-

Wikipedia - John Wyndham

Next: Bibliography of John Wyndham's works.

Post-Meeting Debriefing

The meeting took place at the usual time in the meeting room, on the first floor of Chester Library. Only five people, including myself, turned up. The rest of the regulars had made their apologies earlier, and some of them at the last minute.

Seeing as the races were on, I would not have blamed them for desiring to stay away from the town centre. Traffic is usually murder in Chester on Race Days, vehicular and pedestrian alike. Still, the traffic was not that bad today.

I have said plenty on the subject of dystopias, but perhaps the idea is not to everybody's tastes. Nineteen Eighty Four and Animal Farm can seem somewhat stale to modern readers, seeing as they are allegories of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union of the time; and Brave New World and The Handmaid's Tale got a mention, each covering their respective authors' take on procreation and society's expectations of the procreators.

V For Vendetta was described in detail, along with Battle Royale, both characterised by the fact that each had a movie adaptation and a graphic novel - though BR had a full novel.

At the end, I found myself wondering the same questions I'd asked in my previous posts. What makes a society dystopian? Why write about such nightmares? Why write about utopias if they are so boring? (I noted that William Gibson had written about one such Utopia, in his short story "The Gernsback Continuum," and it turned out to be a nightmare!)

And again, I returned to the conclusions I'd drawn previously.

Dystopias are Utopias ... but not for everybody. A Utopia is a place where those who belong need want for nothing. As they need want for nothing, the Brechtian maxim "Grub first - ethics later" allows those who prosper from this Utopia to claim that they can be noble towards those without privilege.

They can pretend, so to speak, that "Noblesse oblige" - Nobility obliges. As long as the system works in their favour, they can always appear magnanimous and generous towards the hoi polloi, while at the same time reaping the benefits of a system of control that puts them at the focus of the blind devotion of all the little people at the bottom.

A society is Dystopian if those for whom it is a Utopia are in the minority; for the majority, they have to struggle as best they can with everyday life, while accepting that some sort of horror exists beside that everyday life, parallel to it, permeating their collective psyche. The threat of Room 101 and the Two Minutes' Hate in Nineteen Eighty Four. Landru's Red Hour in the Star Trek episode "The Return of The Archons." The Nightwatch in Babylon 5. The Judges in Judge Dredd. The Finger in V For Vendetta. The monsters in the World of Darkness roleplaying game. The "Final Solutionists" in R Talsorian's Cybergeneration - the protagonists' own family, selling them out to the government.

And that horror is integral to keeping the public cowed, controlled and slaving to support the privileges of the few up at the top, with enforcement provided by the usual phalanges of anonymous riot gear-clad troops with water cannon, tear gas and riot shields.

Those who did not attend missed on the most logical conclusion we could draw at the meeting: that stories are driven by conflict; and where the conflict is all-pervading, the stories are that much more intense than in a Utopia, where perhaps the characters could never be put in sufficient jeopardy for the reader to give a monkey's what happens to him.

You have to make the setting grim, to highlight the sympathetic character. Consider Montag in Fahrenheit 451; he comes to the realisation that what he was doing was monstrous. We get to see the monstrous stuff he does, so that we can sympathise with his volte face.

Consider V, in V For Vendetta. He is a monster; but the Fascist system he is fighting against is worse. And what initially begins, for him, as a systematic eradication of everyone who could ever identify him from his genesis at the Larkhill concentration camp, turns into a crusade to bring down the corrupt regime in the story's second part.

V does some awful things throughout the story: but you cannot help but derive satisfaction at the way he despatches Archbishop Lilliman, a paedophile who'd used his Party connections to secure underage prostitutes for him. When V feeds Lilliman a communion wafer laced with cyanide, Finch, the detective assigned to hunt him down, comments that when the wafer reached Lilliman's stomach "it was still bread," either meaning that Transubstantiation was bunk - or that God Himself had no interest in giving the paedophile communion, so had refused to transubstantiate the wafer.

And the setting for Judge Dredd is grim indeed, so that the characteristic dark humour of the strip can shine through. And, even though it is very hard to sympathise with Dredd himself, what with the body count of two billion and six nuked Mega-Cities on his hands, you find yourself siding with the leather-clad old bastard because the alternative to The Law is as grim as it gets.

So this, then, was the meeting: a meeting whose usual admin bit was mercifully brief, over and done with in less time than it takes for a man to get the snip in 2011 - a quick lie down, a bit of local and a short time later, time for tea and biscuits and back out the door.

I made a note to comment on the forthcoming Ramsey Campbell lecture at the library next month. I'll publish more details on that in a later post. I also have to look up details of a horror event in Runcorn, too. I believe Graham Weaver and The Esoteric Bbiliophile Society have that information - watch this space.

I hope this has been a good event for all who attended. I am sorry that the rest of the regulars could not attend. I wish they had: I could have appreciated insights from Rodney, Bernard, John Oakes and others.

Next month, we will be discussing the works of John Wyndham. Back to school, ladies and gentlemen - when was the last time you read The Midwich Cuckoos?

(Well, two months ago, in my case ...)

September 10 2011 - The Event Page

Here's the link to the event page on Facebook for the September meeting in the library.

The Facebook Events Page

A New Era

Today's meeting began with a surprise. More than one, in truth.

Due to unavoidable personal circumstances, the President of the club, Bernard Smith, had to stand down permanently. His last act was to hand over control of the Chester Library Science Fiction & Fantasy Readers to a new boss.

Me.

Aloha.

I would like to thank Bernard for his tireless efforts to promote and maintain the integrity of this club. On behalf of the entire club, I would also like to extend my deepest condolences to him.

So now, to business. I hope that this new regime will not only see the same people I've come to know and call friend turning up at future meetings as often as possible, but also that we'll be able to draw in new members in the future. I believe we can do this together, both with this club and also with the splinter society being run in parallel with us, run by member Graham Weaver, and meeting in Alexander's Bar in Rufus Court.

Details of that meeting can be found here. Tell Graham the new boss said hello.

The admin portion of the meeting took about fifteen minutes - apologies made on behalf of Penny Davies, Colin Mackay, Rodney Milton and others. I did worry about attendance being down, because of it being a race meeting weekend - and indeed, Kyle Thompson turned up late, understandably with the traffic being murder as it was.

The rest of today's meeting seemed anticlimactic by comparison, but we had a lively discussion on the month's theme - Adaptations.

The meeting broke up at about 15:30, and we made our way to the Coach House to finish off the day's proceedings with a convivial drink.

We missed those who could not turn up this month. I do hope to see you all next month, and hopefully a bit sooner than that in Alexander's Bar.