Join Our Book Club

For my considerable sins I have this year found myself serving on the programme team of Octocon, the Irish science fiction and fantasy convention. This will be Octocon's 30th year and, because of the unpleasantness, its first as an online rather than in-person event. There will be the usual panel discussions, author readings, and fan chats, all accessible from the comfort of your own home. And this year Octocon is free to virtually attend. Octocon always runs a book club, but this year we are going mad and running two. The first book is the Hugo-award nominated novella To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers. Taking its title from the opening speech by the UN Secretary General on the Voyager probe's golden record, the novel deals with space exploration by a team of astronauts searching for new planets for humanity to live on. I have not read anything by Chambers myself but I understand her to be good on human relationships and a writer who generally presents an optimistic vision of the future and our place in it, which could be something of a tonic in these troubled times of ours.

The other book is the anthology In A Glass Darkly by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (with the suggestion that if people are are stuck for time they just read "Carmilla"). In A Glass Darkly was first published in 1872 and presents a series of macabre stories loosely linked together as coming from the papers of one Dr. Hesselius. Octocon is running a number of Gothic-themed panels this year and having a bookclub for In A Glass Darkly allows us to look back at a classic foundational text of the genre. I have read these before and aside from "Carmilla" (a key influence on Bram Stoker's Dracula) I also recommend "Green Tea" (a warning against over-consumption of that stimulating beverage) and "The Familiar" (evocative of Le Fanu's native Dublin in the late 18th century), but all of them are good.

Both of these books are readily available in bookshops. In A Glass Darkly can also be found on Project Gutenberg.

For more on the Octocon bookclub, click here.

images

To Be Taught, If Fortunate cover (Goodreads)

David Henry Friston "Carmilla" illustration (1872) (Wikipedia)