Literaire Studentenvereniging Flanor

Today I’m getting the chance to tell you all a bit about my favourite sci-fi reading group: 🌩🐑Electric Sheep🐑🌩!

Let’s start with some history: I started this reading group about 5 years ago because there wasn’t a science fiction reading group yet, and because I thought it would be nice to learn a little bit more about the genre. The first book we read (if I recall correctly) was Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, which is appropriate since it was (depending on how you ask the question) the first science fiction book. The group’s name is a reference to Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which we also read.

Typically we choose 3 new books to read after each reprieve, meaning 6 books a year. These are planned ahead so you will have ample time to prepare for that book discussion you really don’t want to miss. Currently our meetings are every last tuesday of the month, but this is negotiable. What’s that you say? How can you have meetings every month if you only read 6 books per year? Easy, the other 6 meetings or for short stories, movies and other sci-fi themed things. This way there are plenty of literary sci-fi events that you can join without having to read anything beforehand.

We read anything that most people in the group are excited about reading, and it's certainly fine to propose books that are maybe on the edge of sci-fi and another genre, but generally we try to read diverse kinds of science fiction. For the current half year we have planned:

-March 29th: Reading short stories from The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu

-April 26th: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

-May 31st: A movie night, movie(s) t.b.d.

-June 27th: A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

-July 26th: Axiom's End by famous Youtuber Lindsey Ellis

-August 30th: The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

July 26th was supposed to be a no-prep general meeting but there was a tie in the poll and lots of enthusiasm, so an extra book discussion was added.

At the last meeting we read some excellent short stories by Ken Liu who will be visiting Flanor in may. If you’d like a taste of his writing as preparation, here is a link to a very short short story we read that we all thought was really nice.

Would you like to join the reading group? Feel free to pop into our Whatsapp group. You can find a link here! 

Happy reading and hope to see you around!

Bauke