On Tuesday last week Manchester SciFi Book Club got together at the Madlab to discuss the 1992 Greg Bear novel Anvil of Stars, which was advocated by Mark.
Given that the story is about a group of people setting forth in a futuristic space ship to avenge the destruction of the planet Earth, we thought that, yes, it is SciFi!
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On the 19th July Manchester Science Fiction book club met at Madlab to discuss the Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Our advocate for this superb modern classic scifi book was Simon Carter.
Set in the not-too-distant future, Snow Crash is about a drug that controls the minds of computer programmers in the virtual world of the Metaverse. In the real world, laws have ceased to exist, franchulates are controlled by corporations, the Mafia delivers pizza and people are starting to speak in tongues.
On the 21st June Manchester Science Fiction book club met at Madlab to discuss the The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem. Our advocate for this scifi masterpiece was Naomi Jacobs.
The Cyberiad is a collection of short stories featuring two renowned Constructors, Trurl and Klapaucius, and the machines that they build. “The stories focus on problems of the individual and society, as well as on the vain search for human happiness through technological means.”
On the 19th April Manchester Science Fiction book club met at Madlab to discuss the Nebula Award winning book Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold.
Falling Free is available as a free pdf download, so the discussion kicked off with our thoughts on whether we prefer the traditional paperback or the hi-tech e-book! Some people found the e-book difficult to read since there were formatting errors, e.g. single ‘L’ instead of double ‘L’. Other than it seemed to be down to personal preference. So we quickly moved to the book itself…