Location: The Cellar Bar, The Argyle Public House, 1 Greville Street (off Leather Lane), London EC1N 8PQ

On Wednesday 22nd May 2013, Janet Edwards (author of the Earth Girl trilogy) will be interviewed by Ian Drury.

ALL WELCOME – FREE ENTRY (Non-members welcome)

The interview will start at 7 pm. We have the room from 6 pm (and if early, fans are in the ground floor bar from 5ish).

There will be a raffle (£1 for five tickets), with a selection of sf novels as prizes.

Map is here. Nearest Tube: Chancery Lane (Central Line).

FUTURE EVENTS:
26th June 2013**– James Smythe, interviewed by TBC
24th July 2013*  – Cory Doctorow, interviewed by Tom Hunter

28th August 2013- Ian Stewart, interviewed by Stephen Baxter

* Note that this is a month with five Wednesdays. The meeting will be on the fourth, not the last, Wednesday of the month.

** Due to personal reasons, Catheyrnne Valente is no longer able to attend.

Photo (c) 2012 Future Publishing (www.sfx.co.uk)

Location: The Cellar Bar, The Argyle Public House, 1 Greville Street (off Leather Lane), London EC1N 8PQ

On Wednesday 24th April 2013, Lavie Tidhar (author of the BSFA Award shortlisted Osama, and The Bookman Chronicles, and editor-in-chief of the BSFA Award-winning World SF Blog) will be interviewed by Edward James (Chair of the Science Fiction Foundation).

ALL WELCOME – FREE ENTRY (Non-members welcome)

The interview will start at 7 pm. We have the room from 6 pm (and if early, fans are in the ground floor bar from 5ish).

There will be a raffle (£1 for five tickets), with a selection of sf novels as prizes.

Map is here. Nearest Tube: Chancery Lane (Central Line).

FUTURE EVENTS:
22nd May 2013* – Janet Edwards;** interviewer TBC
26th June 2013 – Catherynne M. Valente, interviewed by Farah Mendlesohn
24th July 2013*  - Cory Doctorow, interviewed by Tom Hunter

* Note that this is a month with five Wednesdays. The meeting will be on the fourth, not the last, Wednesday of the month.

** Due to personal reasons, Aliette de Bodard is no longer able to attend.  We hope to invite her at a future date.

On Wednesday 20^th March 2013,* join Donna Scott, BSFA Awards Administrator, for a lively chat all about this year’s BSFA Awards Shortlist. Joining Donna will be:

Duncan Lawie -  an SF critic and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He will also be a BSFA representative on the Arthur C Clarke Award judging panel for 2013. Speaking of the event, Duncan says, “I think there are two obvious picks for this year’s BSFA award novel – but I wonder if anyone else will agree which two.”

Anne C. Perry – Assistant Editor at Hodder & Stoughton, commissioning genre titles, co-editor of Pornokitsch and co-founder of The Kitschies Awards.

Jared Shurin, also co-editor of Pornokitsch and co-founder of The Kitschies Awards.

…and Kim Curran – author of thrilling new YA adventure Shift (Strange Chemistry).

ALL WELCOME – FREE ENTRY (Non-members welcome)

The interview will start at 7 pm. We have the room from 6 pm (and if early, fans are in the ground floor bar from 5ish).

There will be a raffle (£1 for five tickets), with a selection of sf novels as prizes.

Map is here. Nearest Tube: Chancery Lane (Central Line).

FUTURE EVENTS:
24th April 2013 – Lavie Tidhar; interviewer TBC

22nd May 2013** – Aliette de Bodard; interviewed by Duncan Lawie

27th June 2013 – Catherynne M. Valente; interviewer TBC 

* Note that due to the proximity of Easter to the fourth Wednesday of the month, this meeting will be held on the third Wednesday.

** Note that this is a month with five Wednesdays. The meeting will be on the fourth, not the last, Wednesday of the month.

(Pictures c/o, SFX, Duncan Lawie (Scott Polar Research Institute), Pornokitsch, Kim Curran)

There’s no contest this year, but guessing which six books from that long list will make the short list is still an interesting proposition, and SFX is requesting them.

The winning book will be announced on May 1st at the Royal Society, hopefully after a day’s Clarke Award symposium, “Write the Future”, for which there’s currently a Kickstarter going for fundraising. The fundraiser is already 3/4 of the way to its goal, with 25 days remaining, so there’s a very good chance indeed of this “new micro-conference on science, technology, communication and fiction” happening, also at the Royal Society.

Dr Louise Livesey is Tutor in Sociology and Women’s Studies at Ruskin College Oxford.  She is an activist as well as an academic and works hard to bring the two activities together as much as possible.  Mostly recently she has been working on activist/academic engagement with Oxford Brookes University’s Tale of Two Cultures conferences and speaking at events as diverse as Slutwalk Oxford, Oxford Reclaim the Night  and One Billion Rising Oxford.  She is also a playwright, performer and former blogger at The F Word.

The BSFA Lecture is intended as a companion to the George Hay Lecture, which is presented at the Eastercon by the Science Fiction Foundation. Where the Hay Lecture invites scientists, the BSFA Lecture invites academics from the arts and humanities, because we recognise that science fiction fans aren’t only interested in science.  The lecturers are given a remit to speak “on a subject that is likely to be of interest to science fiction fans” – i.e. on whatever they want!  This is the fifth BSFA Lecture.

While Twitter lit up with Superman references, Stephen Baxter, obviously best known for being president of the British Science Fiction Association, was interviewed by the New York Times: “A Flash in Russian Skies, as Inspiration for Fantasy”. Meanwhile, the BBC World Service got in touch, and our Donna Scott, our Awards Admin, provided them with a just-in-time bibliography on the subject.

Location:

On Wednesday 27th February 2013, Elizabeth Hand (author of, among others, Waking the Moon, Black Light, Mortal Love, and Radiant Days) will be interviewed by Farah Mendlesohn (Professor of Literary History at Anglia Ruskin University).

ALL WELCOME – FREE ENTRY (Non-members welcome)

The interview will start at 7 pm. We have the room from 6 pm (and if early, fans are in the ground floor bar from 5ish).

There will be a raffle (£1 for five tickets), with a selection of sf novels as prizes.

Map is here. Nearest Tube: Chancery Lane (Central Line).

FUTURE EVENTS:
20th March 2013* – BSFA Awards discussion
24th April 2013 – Lavie Tidhar; interviewer TBC
22nd May 2013** – Aliette de Bodard; interviewer TBC

* Note that due to the proximity of Easter to the fourth Wednesday of the month, this meeting will be held on the third Wednesday.

** Note that this is a month with five Wednesdays. The meeting will be on the fourth, not the last, Wednesday of the month.

Paul Cornell, from November 2012: http://thedoctorwhopodcast.com/upload/CornellBSFA.mp3

Dave Hutchinson from January 2013: https://www.dropbox.com/s/529fegd6kx5p5u5/BSFA%20Meeting%2030.1.13.m4a

Thanks to Paul Cornell, Tony Whitmore and the Doctor Who Podcast for the first, and to Dave Hutchinson for the second.

The lineup of tutors for the Masterclass is different every year: this is your only chance to spend three immersive days studying sf criticism with Nick Lowe, Graham Sleight, and Cat Valente! I encourage all of you to seriously consider applying for this year’s class.

Seventh SF Criticism Masterclass 2013

Class leaders:
Nick Lowe (author of the long running, Mutant Popcorn)
Graham Sleight (Editor of Foundation, and managing editor for the Hugo Award Winning Encyclopedia of Science Fiction)
Catherynne M. Valente, author of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, and participant in the Hugo Award winning Squeecast.

To be held 2nd thru 4th July 2013 at The University of Liverpool.

Cost: £200.
Accommodation: this is not provided but Andy Sawyer (A.P.Sawyer@liverpool.ac.uk) is able to assist, and if you have attended the
concurrent conference you may wish to stay on.

To apply, please send: a piece of critical writing (between one and five thousand words), and a short cv and bio to farah.sf@gmail.com

The deadline to apply is February 28th.

The robots in Canadian author Madeline Ashby’s novel are self-replicating artificial humanoids designed by a “global mega-church” as post-Rapture “helpmeets” for those humans left behind after the ascension of the just. Why, it’s not clear – though given what we learn about how these robots are conditioned to engage with humanity, something beautifully ironic and poignant could have emerged. That is not what we get but vN is an interesting though flawed work.

Amy is one such construction, the daughter of robot Charlotte and flesh-human Jack. vN robots like Amy and her mother eat special robo-food and are fitted with a “failsafe” – a kind of First Law which not only prevents them from harming humans but actually causes them to shut down if violence is observed. On Amy’s graduation from kindergarten, her grandmother Portia turns up and attacks Charlotte. Amy eats her in her furious attempt to defend her mother but Portia somehow survives as a consciousness linked to Amy’s. Fleeing, Amy encounters Javier, a “serial iterator” who has given birth (vN reproduction is not gendered and vNs exist in networks of identical clades) to a dozen unauthorised copies of himself and becomes involved in a rather hazy political plot. The revelation that in her the failsafe has broken down is key: each side, human and vN, sees her as a potential weapon to be used or destroyed.

The novel only takes us so far and like many sf futures, vN suffers from something of a lack of focus. The robot-world is well evoked, with vN vagrants living off junk and tensions between vNs and humans. There has been a violent quake on the USA’s West Coast and, somewhere, a (semi?)-autonomous city-state of Mecha exists as a possible sanctuary. But is this culture all world-wide? Does every country in the world “have” vN humanoids? All this may be explored in subsequent volumes but some generic flattening undermines the interesting things Ashby is doing with the “robot” icon.

Still, there are fascinating things here in what is implied about families here – notably the relationship between Amy and her artificial-humanoid mother and human father and between her and Portia, the predatory grandmother. There’s also a skilful creepiness. It’s clear that these robots are – as ‘real’ robots may well be – used as sex toys. The term helpmeet does not necessarily have (in its original Biblical context) a sexual implication but it certainly derives this as a term for marriage partners and equally certainly New Eden Ministries, Inc. means this. The ungrown “child” vNs are of course tempting for those whose interests lie that way. The development of the ability in Amy’s clade to overcome their failsafes is ingeniously linked to her family history and the darker side of desire for robot sextoys that will do whatever you want.

There is, though, a lot about the nature of love (not all sexual) in the novel: obsessive love, the kind of love that may be simply exploitative. And here the most interesting figure may be Jack, Amy’s father: “Charlotte didn’t do drama… now he suspected he’d find human women too warm, too loud, too mobile.” Or, on the same page, “at one point [Amy] and Charlotte would be indistinguishable. Jack worried about that sometimes. What if one day, years from now, he kissed the wrong one as she walked through the door?”

This review originally appeared in Vector #271. vN has been shortlisted for the 2012 Golden Tentacle Award for debut novel that best fits the criteria of progressive, intelligent and entertaining. The winners of this award and the rest of The Kitschies will be announced on Tuesday, 26 February 2013.