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November 2020
Stefen’s Bookclub – November
This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone We have done a lot of Hugo Award winning books in the bookclub, and rightly so. This month, it’s a Hugo Award and Nebula Award-winning novella in the form of This is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar. It’s an epistolary time travel romance, and quite complex despite its short length. It is full of references and uses the time…
Find out more »December 2020
Stefen’s Bookclub – December
We by Evgeny Zamyatin This is a 1926 dystopian novel that serves as the inspiration for both 1984 and Brave New World. George Orwell and Aldous Huxley both frequently name checking Zamyatin as a major influence on their work. It’s a short piece about a scientifically perfect (supposedly) future Russian society and one individual within it who is given reasons to question everything he believes he knows about the world and about the nature of his society. It’s quite intense,…
Find out more »January 2021
Book Launch – The Elephant Girl
The Elephant Girl by Chitta Ranjan I’ve been wanting to do some events with local small press and self-published writers for a while now, and the original plan was for that to begin in earnest in 2020. Fate had other ideas however. Still, better late than never. So, on Thursday 14th of January we’ll be hosting a launch event and having a chat with Chitta Ranjan about his book The Elephant Girl. Set among the social and political turmoil of…
Find out more »February 2021
Stefen’s Bookclub – February
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine For our first meet of 2021 I thought we'd carry on the tradition of reading Hugo Award winners by setting the 2020 best novel winner A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. It's a space opera with a touch of thriller, but there are some ideas with regard to technology and cultural attitudes that I think will be fun to talk about. There's also an interesting juxtaposition in the two societies we encounter…
Find out more »May 2021
Stefen’s Bookclub – May
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine Since our first attempt at this one was somewhat stymied by the February lockdown, I thought we’d have another go. Here’s the stuff from February if you missed it: For our first meet of 2021 I thought we'd carry on the tradition of reading Hugo Award winners by setting the 2020 best novel winner A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. It's a space opera with a touch of thriller, but there are…
Find out more »June 2021
Stefen’s Bookclub – June
The Last Human by Zack Jordan I picked up this one to read months ago, more because it looked like a rollicking space opera than anything else, but pretty soon I realised that underneath that there is a fascinating subtext. The way this universe is put together, its rules, structure, society, economy and the way that the various alien races interact I think will make for a fascinating discussion. This is going to be a very different sort of read…
Find out more »July 2021
Stefen’s Bookclub – July
The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez This 2020 science-fiction book has a lot of interesting elements to unpack, starting with economic implications of relativistic travel told from the perspective of producers and the transport crews. It’s also about found family and belonging and the things that bind people to places and one another. A mix of charming and dark elements and with themes about relationships, economic colonialism, and politics there are a lot of threads to pull on here. I’m…
Find out more »Book Launch – Juliet Marillier
A Song of Flight by Juliet Marillier It seems like such a long time since we’ve been able to do a store event so I’m thrilled that on the 31st of July we’ll be hosting a launch event with WA author Juliet Mariller for her new book A Song of Flight. It’s the third in the Warrior Bards series and returns readers to the Gaelic kingdom of Dalriada and an ancient time of magic. We’ll be doing the event in…
Find out more »August 2021
Stefen’s Bookclub – August
Replay by Ken Grimwood This was actually suggested as a possible bookclub book a couple of years ago, but at the time editions were not particularly easy to get. However, Gollancz recently did a reprint so I thought now would be a good time to incorporate it into our reading list. It’s a fairly familiar premise, particularly for modern readers. Someone relives the same life time again and again. In defence of Ken Grimwood, this version came out in 1986,…
Find out more »September 2021
Stefen’s Bookclub – September
The Player of Games by Ian M Banks Despite the fact that Ian Banks is one of my favourite science fiction writers, I have never suggested a Banks book for bookclub. I’m not sure why this is – maybe the moment wasn’t right. Anyway, for our next bookclub we will be reading The Player of Games. It’s not the first of his Culture novels, but as they don’t run in sequence it doesn’t really matter. It is one of the…
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