Category Archives: Meeting Notes
Science fiction, why not?
With our hundreds of years (combined!) of reading science fiction, it is hard to believe that much could have escaped the collective intelligence of the Beamers. Until we came face to face with the history of female authors who labored long and were, in many cases, complete surprises to us. Editor Lisa Yaszek complied 25 …
To everything, turn, turn, turn
In the immediate present, the Beamers tackled the far, far future, looking at the end of human time and the extinction of our Sun. With a particular if peculiar hope. In the dark of winter, what could brighten our days? This time, it was the 2006 Hugo winner, Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson, a novel …
Misfiring Chekhov’s phaser
Bringing the Beamers up to speed on some contemporary fiction, we tackled a newer work by an author not known for her science fiction, Louise Erdrich, who posits that evolution could reverse its course and suddenly leave Earth as a vacant lot waiting to become the Future Home of the Living God. Full of saints …
In space, everyone can hear you laugh
For the opening book of 2024, the Beamers opened an oldie but a goodie, The Witches of Karres by James H. Schmitz. For most of us, it was a re-opening of a book that we encountered among our first sf books, one denoted as a classic of the genre. And one still being reprinted 70 …
Once, twice, three times a witch
With the solstice approaching, the Beamers tackled a book about the rediscovery of witchery that built its calendar around the Sun’s quarterly positions. The Once and Future Witches (echoing the Beamers’ own “Once and Future Books” web page) by Alix Harrow is an historical fantasy that introduces several issues of female empowerment via the idea …
Getting bogged down in Area X
Never afraid to tackle a tough book or topic, the Beamers launched off into the weird wilderness of Area X, the setting for Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, which starts with the novel, Annihilation. Loosely adapted into a movie, Annihilation has won a Nebula Award for science fiction and a Shirley Jackson Award (2014) for …
Something Great Pumpkin this way comes
Due to a confluence of personal and professional obligations, I was unable to attend the October Beamer gathering, a discussion of Ray Bradbury’s important early collection, The October Country (I mean, how could we NOT pick that one?). But not to totally miss the party, I did write down my thoughts and sent them to …
A picture worth a 1,000 (or more) words
Retiring to our (on-line) club like good gentlefolk, the Beamers gathered out of the heat of the day to swoon on our divans over a piece of literature that shocked, shocked!, our Victorian predecessors, The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde. This short novel, a moral fairy tale of corruption and downfall, led to …
Through the wall with the red-headed league
The Beamers, having a fondness for classic science fiction, are not always as familiar with the Big Three (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein) as we might wish to be. So, to rectify another missing piece of our reading history, we went after a late novel in the career of the “Dean” of science fiction, Robert Heinlein, looking …
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