I saw this and it looked very cool. If I can make microphones and things work I may try and join you. A. J. ----- Original Message ----- From: EVAN REESE To: bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx ; Scifi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Friday, March 27, 2009 6:15 PM Subject: [bookshare-discuss] Next Meeting of the Science Fiction Club, Thursday, April 16, 2009 The next meeting of the Science Fiction Club will be held on Thursday, April 16, at 9 PM Eastern, 6 PM Pacific in the Friends of Bookshare Community Room at: http://conference321.com/masteradmin/room.asp?id=rs7867a2369e0e We normally have our meetings on the second Thursday of each month, but because of Passover and Good Friday this year, we've moved the meetting a week ahead. This month, we are reading Spin by Robert Charles Wilson, available from Bookshare, Baen Webscriptions and NLS. I borrowed the Publisher's Weekly Editorial Description from Amazon because the Bookshare short synopsis is singularly uninformative, and the long synopsis is nonexistent. This book won a Hugo award for best novel of 2005. The Hugo is given by Science Fiction fans, so a lot of people liked this book very much. This really is a good one, folks. Hope to see a whole bunch of people there. From Publishers Weekly One night the stars go out. From that breathtaking "what if," Wilson (Blind Lake, etc.) builds an astonishingly successful mélange of SF thriller, growing-up saga, tender love story, father-son conflict, ecological parable and apocalyptic fable in prose that sings the music of the spheres. The narrative time oscillates effortlessly between Tyler Dupree's early adolescence and his near-future young manhood haunted by the impending death of the sun and the earth. Tyler's best friends, twins Diane and Jason Lawton, take two divergent paths: Diane into a troubling religious cult of the end, Jason into impassioned scientific research to discover the nature of the galactic Hypotheticals whose "Spin" suddenly sealed Earth in a "cosmic baggie," making one of its days equal to a hundred million years in the universe beyond. As convincing as Wilson's scientific hypothesizing is--biological, astrophysical, medical--he excels even more dramatically with the infinitely intricate, minutely nuanced relationships among Jason, Diane and Tyler, whose older self tries to save them both with medicines from Mars, terraformed through Jason's genius into an incubator for new humanity. This brilliant excursion into the deepest inner and farthest outer spaces offers doorways into new worlds--if only humankind strives and seeks and finds and will not yield compassion for our fellow beings. Evan