SF Book Discussion

Our Science Fiction Book Discussion group met this Thursday for our first meeting of the year. Our new schedule is a monthly book discussion on the first Thursday evening of every month at 7pm. Meetings are held in the Conference Room #2 upstairs at the library.

This month we discussed J.R.R. Tolkien's classic, The Hobbit. The bulk of the discussion revolved (not surprisingly, I suppose) around the book's recent translation to film. We spent a good deal of the discussion talking about the relative merit that should be given to some of the criticism of Tolkien's most famous "children's book".

Next month (March 7th) we will discuss Joe Haldeman's war novel, The Forever War. Written by a well-known and celebrated science fiction author as well as Vietnam veteran, the book is probably his best known. It is an interstellar war story in the vein of Heinlein's "Starship Troopers", but there the similarities end. I am looking forward to reading this book.

On April 4th we will discuss Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination. Written several years after Bester's Hugo Award-winning The Demolished Man, it is a sort of proto cyber punk novel mashed up with a tale of a man who is shipwrecked and abandoned.