The next meeting will be on Saturday 19th September at 2 p.m. in the Storyhouse meeting room. For details see the Facebook Chester Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Group user group, or comment here to ask for the details if you are not on Facebook.

We will be discussing After the Fall by Edward Ashton. Locus magazine described it as:

funny, thought-provoking, deftly crafted, and possessed of a surprising intimacy

The next meeting will be on Saturday 15th August at 2 p.m. in the Storyhouse meeting room. For details see the Facebook Chester Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Group user group, or comment here to ask for the details if you are not on Facebook.

We will be discussing All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu. Locus magazine said of this:

What finally enables All That We See or Seem to succeed as an intellectual thriller – as well as near-future SF–is that Liu’s own sense of wonder is never far from the surface, and never less than infectious.

and Kirkus described it as:

Equal parts biting social commentary and page-turning thriller, a disturbing glimpse into humankind’s possible future.

The next meeting will be on Saturday 18th July at 2 p.m. in the Storyhouse meeting room. For details see the Facebook Chester Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Group user group, or comment here to ask for the details if you are not on Facebook.

We will be discussing The Society of Unknowable Objects by Gareth Brown. This is a popular book on Goodreads where it has attracted 2,500 reviews (and counting) and made the 2025 best fantasy shortlist, though it seems to have evaded the bigger book review sites. Brown’s first book, The Book of Doors, was described by The Guardian as:

It’s a truly magical book: exciting, intricately plotted and emotionally compelling.

The next meeting will be on Saturday 20th June at 2 p.m. in the Storyhouse meeting room. For details see the Facebook Chester Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Group user group, or comment here to ask for the details if you are not on Facebook.

We will be discussing Feed by M. T. Anderson. Published in 2002, Wired Magazine said of this book:

Twenty years after publication, the YA novel is the century’s most relevant dystopia

The next meeting will be on Saturday 16th May at 2 p.m. in the Storyhouse meeting room. For details see the Facebook Chester Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Group user group, or comment here to ask for the details if you are not on Facebook.

We will be discussing The Object by Joshua T. Calvert. This is a good old first contact hard SF novel. Kirkus described it as:

A brainy and well-told hard-sci fi / first-contact yarn.

There is an interview with Calvert about the novel here.

The next meeting will be on Saturday 18th April at 2 p.m. in the Storyhouse meeting room. For details see the Facebook Chester Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Group user group, or comment here to ask for the details if you are not on Facebook.

We will be discussing The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut. This is one of those classic SF novels that every SF fan should read. It’s typical Vonnegut i.e. it doesn’t make much sense but it’s so enthusiastic and colourful that it’s a great read anyway!

The next meeting will be on Saturday 21st March at 2 p.m. in the Storyhouse meeting room. For details see the Facebook Chester Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Group user group, or comment here to ask for the details if you are not on Facebook.

We will be discussing The Stardust Grail by Yume Kitasei. This is very much an action story, and indeed has been described as Indiana Jones in space. Kirkus said:

Broad in scope, covering everything from the rise and fall of alien civilizations to what it means to be a person, this is a luminous work, vacillating between the highs and lows of human experience and how they might translate across alien worlds. Sympathetic, flawed characters demonstrate how individual actions can reverberate through the past and future.

The next meeting will be on Saturday 21st Feb at 2 p.m. in the Storyhouse meeting room. For details see the Facebook Chester Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Group user group, or comment here to ask for the details if you are not on Facebook.

We will be discussing Harmattan Season by Tochi Onyebuchi.

The book is set in a fictional country based on the North African countries occupied by the French in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. Onyebuchi’s family is from Nigeria not North Africa, but he is known for the Afrofuturist themes in his books and the subject matter clearly appeals to him.

The book can seem a little hard because his characters’ speech is spattered with neologisms from a fictional pidgin, but the meaning is usually fairly obvious and even when it isn’t you can simply ignore them and get on with the story. Onyebuchi manages to construct a fascinating and faintly surreal world where magic and colonial oppression mix to give a colourful and fascinating landscape.

The next meeting will be on Saturday 17th January at 2 p.m. in the Storyhouse meeting room. For details see the Facebook Chester Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Group user group, or comment here to ask for the details if you are not on Facebook.

We will be discussing Slow Gods by Claire North.

Claire North is a pen name used by Catharine Webb for her SF books. Her first book as Claire North was The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August in 2014 and Slow Gods is her thirteenth book. In all her books she manages to come up with all sorts of interesting ideas and her new book looks just as strange and interesting as her first one.

The next meeting will be on Saturday 13th December at 2 p.m. in the Storyhouse meeting room. For details see the Facebook Chester Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Group user group, or comment here to ask for the details if you are not on Facebook.

We will be discussing Monk and Robot by Becky Chambers.

Chambers wrote two novellas – A Psalm for the Wild-Built in 2021 and a sequel A Prayer for the Crown-Shy in 2022. These were subsequently republished as a single novel Monk and Robot in 2025 and it is this single novel that we are discussing. But feel free to read the two novellas separately as the novel is just the two novellas concatenated.

Chambers has created a remarkable character in the eponymous monk Dex. The notion that all problems can be solved with a nice cup of tea is somewhat quintessentially English, though Chambers is actually American.