The August meeting for the Edinburgh SF Book Group will take place on Tuesday 28th at 6pm in Henderson’s on Hanover Street. The book under discussion this month will be by the late, great Kurt Vonnegut, his 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle, which Graham Greene described as “one of the three best novels of the year by one of the most able living writers”.
This month sees Thomas pulled away from his musical muse to pick a book and he has gone for Blighty’s own Neil Gaiman (our second time with one of Neils works) with Neverwhere, an urban fantasy, a tale of an ordinary man who finds himself in a shadow version of London, a place where Earl’s Court has a real earl holding court as he follows a young woman called Door.
Mike Carey, one of the hardest working writers in comics (and with two very fine supernatural thriller novels under his belt too, and a third on the way) wrote a comics adaptation (with Neil’s blessing) for DC, which has now been collected as a graphic novel. Both prose and graphic novel are vastly superior to the lacklustre BBC TV adaptation. The meeting will be in the usual venue of Henderson’s on Tuesday 31st at 6pm
Author and artist Bryan Talbot, one of the UK’s top comics creators, will be signing his new work Alice in Sunderland on Sunday 3rd of June at the Edinburgh branch of Forbidden Planet International from 5 to 6pm. Several years in the making, the book is a terrific mixed-media graphic novel exploring Lewis Carroll and the Alice in Wonderland books and the influence of the people and history of the area to his writing; you can read a bit more about it in an interview I had with Bryan last year
The next meeting of the Edinburgh SF Book Group will be on Tuesday 26th of June from 6 to 7pm in the usual haunt of Henderson’s bistro on Hanover Street, where the book under discussion will be Russell Hoban’s acclaimed novel Ridley Walker.
The picking of books is a difficult matter,
it isn’t just one of your holiday games…
(apologies to T.S. Elliott for riffing in his poetry)
Thanks to Beth for sending me an updated list of who will be picking a book each month for the next several meetings; if your name is on there this gives you a chance to think what book you want to pick. For anyone interested in joining the group, we take it in turns to select books to discuss, with regulars getting a month each to pick out a book. The criteria is pretty flexible – we take in traditional SF, modern and classic, horror, fantasy, graphic novels and ’slipstream’/speculative fiction works which may not be considered SF&F by many but do contain some SF elements (such as some of Margaret Atwood’s novels, for example). The main aspect really required in a choice is that it contains elements that will generate some discussion.
May – Greg
June – Thomas
July – Jake
August – Suzy
Sept – Chris
Oct – Jer
Nov – Joe
Dec – Beth
The next meeting of the Book Group will take place on Tuesday the 29th of May from 6 to 7 pm in Henderson’s in the New Town’s Hanover Street. Greg (H) has the choice for this month and he has picked out an old classic of SF, “I, Robot” from the prolific pen of Isaac Asimov, the start of a series of works which gave us the famous Three Laws of Robotics (ignore the lacklustre movie version!) which seem to have increasing relevance half a century on as people start to discuss the possibility of artificial intelligence. All are welcome to come along and join in.
Due to schedule conflicts, the April meeting will actually be in May – well, only just by a tiny, teensy bit since it will be Tuesday 1st May. The book for this month will be the jolly crime caper fantasy romp The Lies of Locke Lamora, the debut novel by Scott Lynch (it made me think of a Stainless Steel Rat book mixed with Renaissance Venice). Venue as usual will be Henderson’s bistro on Hanover Street in the New Town, all are welcome.
The March 2007 meeting will take place on Tuesday 27th from 6 to 7pm in the usual venue of Henderson’s on Hanover Street. This month we will be looking at Charles Burns’ acclaimed graphic novel Black Hole, a tale of teenage problems, school and coming-of-age set against a bizarre sexual disease which attacks only teens, creating odd mutations.
The February meeting of the Edinburgh SF Book Group will take place on Tuesday February 27th from 6 to 7pm in Henderson’s on Hanover Street. The book under discussion this month will be the classic Brave New World by Aldous Huxley; all are welcome to come along.
The first meeting of the book group’s graphic novel offshoot, Coffee & Comics, went pretty well and so we’re going ahead with a second meeting on Tuesday 13th of February where we will be discussing the Pulitzer Prize-winning interpretation of the Holocaust by Art Spiegelman, Maus.
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