[bksvol-discuss] Next Meeting of the Science Fiction Club, Thursday, January 9, 2014
- From: "Evan Reese" <mentat1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Bob Acosta" <boacosta@xxxxxxxxxxx>, <bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "SF list" <scifi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 14 Dec 2013 16:38:15 -0500
Hello Folks,
We had a good showing at our most recent meeting, where we all liked our book,
Ship of Fools by Richard Paul Russo. For our next book, we're on another ship,
this time journeying to the edge of the galaxy and perhaps beyond, in
Transcendental by James Gunn.
The next meeting of the Science Fiction club will be on Thursday, January 9,
2014
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 02:00 UTC.
Our book, Transcendental by James Gunn, is available as a digital download from
BARD at:
https://nlsbard.loc.gov/download/detail/prefix/DB/bookmag/77425
Here is the NLS annotation:
Riley joins a group of pilgrims traveling to the outer edges of space
seeking transcendence. His secret assignment is to uncover the identity of the
prophet
leading the group, but as he learns his fellow passengers' stories--and develops
a relationship with mysterious Asha--his mission grows more complicated.
And here's an editorial review from Booklist taken from Amazon's page for this
book:
*Starred Review* Gunn, whose science fiction novels include the classics Star
Bridge
(1955) and The Immortals (1962), hasn't published a new title in about eight
years,
which is too long for a voice as strong as his to remain silent. Considering how
good this novel is, readers will probably forgive him his lengthy absence. The
story
involves a human ex-soldier, Riley, who's coerced into joining an interstellar,
multirace
pilgrimage in the hopes of identifying the Prophet, the man or, perhaps, the
alien
being who promises transcendence to another spiritual plane at the end of the
long
journey. Identify the Prophet, and then kill him-that's the plan. But as Riley
begins
to learn more about his fellow passengers aboard the dilapidated spaceship
Geoffrey,
he begins to question his mission and his own feelings about transcendence. Very
loosely structured like a far-future Canterbury Tales (the ship is named after
Chaucer,
and individual chapters recount the stories of some of the key characters), with
literary allusions to works as varied as T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Robert
Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, the novel offers a thoughtful and
thought-provoking
examination of the delicate nature of personal faith and the power of human (and
nonhuman) relationships. An ambitious and resoundingly successful novel from the
resurgent Gunn.
Let's start off the new year with another good crowd, (including some new
voices), to talk about what sounds like a very thought provoking offering from
one of the greats of Science Fiction.
Evan
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