SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

The informal cousin of Virtual Book Club.

We're going to have the occasional voice chat over on the groups official discord server about whatever we've been reading individually or in a Buddy Read. We can also discuss themes, ideas, and tropes that appear in multiple books that will hopefully add a few more inches to your TBR mountain.

There's no set schedule, whenever a few of us decide we want to talk about anything mentioned above then we can scramble something together.

Join the groups discord via this link.
https://discord.gg/jAskcge42Q

Or go directly to the Discord voice chat channel with this link
https://discord.gg/MmjVMvpZ

If you find yourself in the power of someone who will use the word “commence” in cold blood, go somewhere else very quickly. - Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

All kidding aside, I'd love to join but 16 GMT is a tad too late for me. I could join if it was an hour or two earlier.

It was a little arbitrary that we settled on 16:00. I can also do 2pm or 3pm. I will keep an eye on this thread if we (by that I mean, Ryan) decide to move it an hour earlier.

And since we haven’t changed from Daylight Savings Time yet, it’s still 5 hours back to Eastern on Saturday. Best to look at or ask your favorite computer AI for the time.

I should be free from 1430 GMT, but it all depends on Bonnie as her wanting to tell me why she's wrong was the catalyst to this all. :)

Ooh! Just saw this, I was on for 4.
I am available if I get ready!

OK I am ready
Where To!

Oh wait I forgot that is Britain 😅

I just realized that I have a thing at 3:15 GMT. I could probably hang out for 20 minutes or so with you. See you then!

Does this work?

https://us04web.zoom.us/j/77429395578...

It does!

Mistake was mine, Bonnie! I forgot we're actually gmt+1 at the moment.

Ryan wrote: "Does this work?

https://us04web.zoom.us/j/77429395578..."

not for me

I closed it :7

Ryan DaCosta-McKenzie (He/Him/They) is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: General book chat
Time: Oct 30, 2021 02:30 PM London

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us04web.zoom.us/j/76870514052...

Meeting ID: 768 7051 4052
Passcode: hrW9Tp

Just going to make myself a banana and blueberry smoothie. I'll join shortly

I can’t get the link to work. Is there a number to call in?

Try this.

https://us04web.zoom.us/j/76870514052...

I'm just starting my day, are you still online?

Yes.

Le fin.

Thanks everybody!

I hope to sort my technical issues out by the time we have Melanie's fire side Fantasy chat.

It was nice to chat with you all - sorry I missed you, Kaa!

I'm thinking we might be able to lure Anna, Allison, and Melanie out if we go for a Fantasy and Amatka chat next.

Should probably say something in the buddy read thread about possibly having a zoom chat to supplement/enhance/ruin the group read experience.

(I've kind of not joined VBC lately because my reading slump is so bad that I throw a party when I finish AND enjoy a book. With that in mind, I don't think I want to spread this shitty mood to others, so I'll stay out of any fun group activities for now.)

((Working on it.))

(((Reeeeeeally hard.)))

But you've read and loved Amatka...

Yeah but it doesn't stop me from being cranky! Anyway, my point was that don't make plans around me, because if I show up I'll probably kick the walls and swear a lot.

(I just realized that I have Extreme PIE! As in Post Isolation Exhaustion. My social spoons are so tapped out that I don't even know how to make it to the cutlery store. And I don't make any sense. Anyway, moody and cranky, count me out for now!)

I'm so glad this went well! today didn't quite work for me but I'm the future I'm in!

I managed to attend for the last part and would show up again, was fun to chat about books.

I would be glad if we didn’t schedule a specific book to discuss. I am not spoiler averse, so I don’t mind chat about books I haven’t read (yet) but I feel the pressure now to read Amatka before next weekend and I know I won’t manage, even if I fully intend to read it sooner rather than later. Just my 2 cents.

Would it be fair to say, for Virtual Book Lounge, that we can put specific books on the agenda, but they are not "scheduled" as in "This will be a discussion about Book X" ??
Mission statement = Talking about books. Especially SFF books.

I made a little list for yesterday, a personal mini-agenda as a reminder / in case conversation stalled; it looked like this:

The Quantum books, recap Magician

She Who Became The Sun >
C.S. Pacat
Dawn moving

Freshwater / The Drowning Girl

Fiction/Nonfiction

some Notes from October 30 lounge lizard discussion

Book Recommendations:
She Who Became the Sun - Shelley Parker Chan
Glasshouse - Charles Stross
The Postman - David Brin
Planetfall/Atlas series - Emma Newman
Quantum Evolution series - Derek Kunsken
Steerswoman series - Rosemary Kirstein (the only fictional world where Ryan would be willing to stay and live)

Edit.^^ for those series, subsequent books are better than book #1, so keep reading.
_____________________

Mexican Gothic vs. Gods of Jade and Shadow ; Silvia Moreno-Garcia's books vary widely in style and genre.

Mexican food in Mexico vs. Germany; vegan Mexican food.

London has great food and great history, does it also have great culture?

What people found groundbreaking about Ender's Game , even though OSC later did bad things... separating The Work from The Author

Reading books by "Problematic Authors" ?
Your Fave is Problematic:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Pros & Cons of V.E. Schwab's Tolkien Lecture (https://tolkienlecture.org/) speech, "In Search of Doors"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmtqt...

I also brought up a few middle grade SFF reads back from when I was a kid that I adored at the time but have no idea how they'd hold up today by William Sleator, Interstellar Pig and Singularity (which I realize now has a somewhat pandemic isolation type vibe).

Great work, Bonnie!

Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey also got a fair bit of attention.

OMG notes/minutes from every Zoom from now on please! 😄

Reading "Whatever You Love" which seems to be a standard romance book so far.

Phil, I think you meant to post in the What Else Are You Reading thread?

Bonnie wrote: "vegan Mexican food"

I need to know more about this! Did it come up in a book (Mexican Gothic?), or was it just general discussion?

Yeah, I won't have read Amatka before next weekend. But I will certainly want to discuss A Night in the Lonesome October and I Heard You Paint Houses (not SFF) if we are preordering conversations!

Bonnie, you are my hero for posting notes! Since I missed it and I don't know if I'll be able to get to many meetings having the notes helps me feel like I'm still a part of it. Lessens the FOMO a bit.

But I will definitely be keeping an eye on this thread and will jump in when I can.

:)

Are those actual notes from the convo after I had to go or suggestions for future convo topics. I would love to discuss some of that too. Notes are also cool. Lessens the FOMO a bit.

DivaDiane wrote: "Are those actual notes from the convo after I had to go or suggestions for future convo topics. I would love to discuss some of that too."

You were at my wedding Denise

😁

Please don't feel pressured to read any specific book, Diane (and everyone else).

Also, there's no need to wait for me or the mods to get a meeting going. I'm fairly confident that other members will trickle in and out to chat with you. It's all very 'If you build it they will come".

I love the notes! And yes, I love the idea of folks finding people to chat with whenever!

I was wondering...do we think another platform might help this? I'm open to shifting some things on my account to share as it's a pro account, and I was also considering making a group Discord, but I wasn't sure if that would sort of split energies or turn folks off. Idk. Open to ideas!

Do people like Discord? I was 'forced' to install it a couple of years back but it's brought little joy to my life. I even joined a Steerswoman Discord channel and I'm still reluctant to open the app. I've muted everything.

All that to say, I'm fine with the GR forum. Anna has all the links organised wonderfully.

I only have a basic zoom account but somehow managed to host yesterday's hour and a half meeting (or was it two hours?). Might be because we dropped to three participants for 10 minutes.

@Anna, Mexican vegan food came up for both those reasons :)

I think discord also allows for audio rooms which could be an alternative to pro zoom for hosting the lounge.

A sort of split between what the discord and the current goodreads group will be used for could help prevent the split energy problem I think.

I think I have just found a reason to try one more SMG book! If there is no vegan Mexican food I know who to blame 👀

It was me boring everyone with my excitement over vegan food in Mexico City! I’m in vegan heaven over here. 🤤🤤

Nicol, I’m very jealous!!

I use Discord for playing DnD and it works well as an audio gathering place. I know we're not to talk about the other ****&***** SFF group, but they have a Discord and it doesn't seem to pull focus. I would not want to overwhelm our mods though....
I am not passionate about any platform; these are just thoughts.

lol i am aware of "the other group" Rob and I talk! he's who gave me the idea. I'm open! maybe next lounge chat we can try it?

I’ve never used Discord and am not familiar with it.

I'm on Discord and it's good for a couple of things.

- persistent text chat. anybody can drop into a channel at any time and share their thoughts, and others can look at those at their leisure.
- live voice chat. it's more of a casual and/or gaming platform than a business platform, and I've never seen anyone do face cam with it, though it may be possible. voice chat is done through channels that the moderator sets up. it works well if the group is relatively small and the participants are familiar with each others' voices.

It's incredibly easy to do a gaming stream on discord even if you don't have a super duper gaming setup, so if you're at all interested in doing that with friends, it's fun, though free accounts have a terrible frame rate. if *****&***** (I'm not sure why we'd want to redact it, but I'll play along) has a discord, it must work for book groups, but that isn't what it was designed for.