Hello Folks, The next meeting of the Science Fiction club will be on Thursday, December 10, 2009. Place: Book Nook at http://conference321.com/masteradmin/room.asp?id=rs7867a2369e0e Time: 9 PM Eastern, 8 PM Central, 7 PM Mountain, 6 PM Pacific, and 0100 UTC. This month, we're reading: Fleet of Worlds by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner. This is a prequel to Niven's classic Hugo-award-winning Ringworld involving those cowardly, but oh-so-clever Pierson's Puppeteers. You can get it from the NLS for download at: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.nls/db.66712 or on tape with number RC 66712. Here is the NLS synopsis: Two hundred years before Ringworld's discovery, the alien Citizens flee a supernovae chain reaction in their Fleet of Worlds. Spaceship navigator and colonist Kirsten Quinn-Kovacs, a descendent of humans rescued as embryos from an abandoned starship, scouts ahead for danger and uncovers disturbing, long-hidden truths about her ancestors' origins. Here is a more detailed summary from Publishers Weekly taken from Amazon: Niven, winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula awards, and Lerner (Probe) offer a lively prequel to Niven's 1970 classic, Ringworld. It's 2650, some 500 years after the human colony ship Long Pass was captured by Citizens, those paranoid, two-headed beings better known as Puppeteers from the Fleet of Worlds. The Citizens of the Concordance have bred and nurtured successive generations of human Colonists from the Long Pass's crew and embryo banks, while lying about their origins, telling stories about an abandoned colony ship adrift in space. When a team of Colonist explorers led by Citizen Nessus to study intelligent life on an ice-covered world also uncovers evidence that the Concordance has lied about the past, they're determined to find the truth. Meanwhile, Concordance Citizens learn that the ruling Conservative policymakers have mishandled secret contacts with Earth and endangered the Fleet. Fans of hard SF will be well rewarded. Sounds like an exciting read, so I hope lots of you can make it for this one. Evan