The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders Charlie Jane Anders is coming to town, we're doing a store event, she has a new science fiction book out and loads of readers are talking about it. So I'm doing the obvious thing and setting it as the book club book. Truth be told, since it's a book that engages with different sorts of societies and identities as well as encounters with the other in the form…

Fools by Pat Cadigan I've always had a soft spot for the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction, and we've read a few of them for the bookclub. Generally when people talk about the genre, names like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and Neal Stephenson are usually mentioned. At the time however, there were quite a few writers exploring future possibilities and contemporary anxieties writ large. One of my favourites is the US author Pat Cadigan who wrote several books that I…

Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut  This is another book that's been on my 'must do this for the book club at some point' list for quite a long time, but I've never gotten around to it. When I noticed that it had just had its fiftieth anniversary, I thought I might as well set it next. It's also a short book, and what with some folks telling me that June was going to be bit busy for them (and me…

Terra Nullius by Claire G Coleman To keep cost down for folks I try to make sure that the book I set for book club each month is in paperback. That means sometimes I have to wait for something to come down in format. I decided a year ago that Terra Nullius was going to be a book club book. The rest has just been waiting for the small format. It’s by Claire Coleman who is originally from WA but…

Light by M John Harrison For the September book club, will be reading M. John Harrison's 2002 book Light. This is big-universe science fiction with all the physics that goes with that. It's also about the now as well, as we move from characters in the 25th century to their ancestors in the 20th as each struggle with very human problems but in different situations. It's not a book with what I'd call sympathetic characters, but they are interesting as…

Native Tongue by Suzette Hayden Elgin I doubt that this will come as a surprise to most of you, in fact I think I probably hinted it in the short piece about the book in the last newsletter. This book has been on my 'want to read for book club' list for years, but getting copies was a problem. With the recent re-issue it went straight to the front of the list. The premise of the book is that a…

The Outside by Ada Hoffman There were some recent changes in distribution with this one that delayed its selection for book club, but that's been sorted and I've got plenty on the way to the store so here we are. I'm always looking for something a bit different to set for discussion, so when I heard that Ada Hoffmann, an autistic author, had written a science fiction novel with an autistic protagonist and antagonist, set in in a universe run…

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler I've been thinking about setting another Octavia Butler book for the book club for a while now, but other than Kindred, so a recent re-issue of the Earthseed novels seemed like the perfect reason to stop procrastinating. Parable of the Sower is set in a future world in the process of economic and social collapse and is told through the eyes of a young woman who begins somewhat protected from these facts, though circumstance and a quirk of her own nature…