SF&F Literati Meet Monday, July 28, 2014

Poet Danger
TITLE: Lexicon 
AUTHOR: Max Barry
WHERE:  
Barnes & Noble #2352 at Oak Park Mall
11393 W. 95th St., Overland Park, KS 66214
On 2nd floor by the windows.
WHEN:  
Monday, July 28, 2014, 7:00 p.m.
AVAILABLE FROM: Barnes & Nobles and other fine booksellers.
 

Overview from Barnes & Noble:

At an exclusive school somewhere outside of Arlington, Virginia, students aren’t taught history, geography, or mathematics—they are taught to persuade. Students learn to use language to manipulate minds, wielding words as weapons. The very best graduate as “poets,” and enter a nameless organization of unknown purpose.

Whip-smart runaway Emily Ruff is making a living from three-card Monte on the streets of San Francisco when she attracts the attention of the organization’s recruiters. Drawn in to their strange world, which is populated by people named Brontë and Eliot, she learns their key rule: That every person can be classified by personality type, his mind segmented and ultimately unlocked by the skillful application of words. For this reason, she must never allow another person to truly know her, lest she herself be coerced. Adapting quickly, Emily becomes the school’s most talented prodigy, until she makes a catastrophic mistake: She falls in love.

Meanwhile, a seemingly innocent man named Wil Parke is brutally ambushed by two men in an airport bathroom. They claim he is the key to a secret war he knows nothing about, that he is an “outlier,” immune to segmentation. Attempting to stay one step ahead of the organization and its mind-bending poets, Wil and his captors seek salvation in the toxically decimated town of Broken Hill, Australia, which, if ancient stories are true, sits above an ancient glyph of frightening power.

A brilliant thriller that traverses very modern questions of privacy, identity, and the rising obsession of data-collection, connecting them to centuries-old ideas about the power of language and coercion, Lexicon is Max Barry’s most ambitious and spellbinding novel yet.

Get ready for August!
TITLE: Existence
AUTHOR: David Brin
Monday, August 25, 2014, 7:00 p.m.AVAILABLE FROM: Barnes & Nobles and other fine booksellers. 

Overview from Barnes & Noble:

Bestselling, award-winning futurist David Brin returns to globe-spanning, high concept SF with Existence.

Gerald Livingston is an orbital garbage collector. For a hundred years, people have been abandoning things in space, and someone has to clean it up. But there’ something spinning a little bit higher than he expects, something that isn’t on the decades’ old orbital maps. An hour after he grabs it and brings it in, rumors fill Earth’s infomesh about an “alien artifact.”

Thrown into the maelstrom of worldwide shared experience, the Artifact is a game-changer. A message in a bottle; an alien capsule that wants to communicate. The world reacts as humans always do: with fear and hope and selfishness and love and violence. And insatiable curiosity.

IMAGE CREDITS: The cover image for Lexicon is courtesy of Micro-Sites in the UK. The cover for Existence is from MacMillan, the book's publisher.

Join us for our 43rd Anniversary!

It's KaCSFFS's birthday! 
WHAT: Monthly open Board of Directors and General Membership Meetings
WHERE: The Writers Place, 3607 Pennsylvania Ave., Kansas City, MO 64111
WHEN: This Saturday, July 19, 2014.
BoD: 5:30 p.m., Regular meeting: 7:00 p.m.
Appropriately for an organization that has endured this long, our program is a mixture of past and future!

Let us Eat Cake!
The July meeting is our 43rd anniversary meeting. Thus, the food theme is birthday cake!  Please coordinate on KAXFEN if you're planning to bring a birthday cake for KaCSFFS, smaller cakes, or that other longtime birthday staple, ice cream.  If it's ice cream, might want to pack it in ice and bring it in a cooler, because freezer space in the Writers Place's kitchen is really limited.

The Yahoo-to-Google Migration

We keep promising, and this month it looks as if the move from the KAXFEN list on Yahoo to a dedicated KaCSFFS Google Group is really going to happen! We will take some time before the regular business meeting for an orientation.

Ty Gephardt and Kristina Hiner have spearheaded the effort, and will give a how-to-interface presentation on a decision we voted for in May.

43rd Anniversary Retrospective
After the business meeting, Ken Keller also will give a short presentation of some images from 1971, the first year the club was in existence, along with commentary and background.  As one of the Founders and the current President, it would be hard to find a more ideal person to do this.  Many thanks to Terry Matz, who also contributed to this event!

IMAGE CREDITS: Many thanks to the "Females' Corner" website for the birthday candles image, and to the blog "Work it out Bitch" for the ice cream and cake image. The Google Groups logo is from an article on how to create a Google Group from the All India Daily website.

KC Horror Book Club July 2014 Meeting

John Dies at the End: A Novel

By David Wong

Details:
Date and Time: July 12, 2013 (Saturday) from noon to 1:30.
Location: The Green Room Burgers and Beer
Address: 4010 Pennsylvania Avenue, Suite D, Kansas City, MO.
Event Notes: 

Come and discuss John Dies at the End and grab some food too.

"STOP. You should not have touched this flyer with your bare hands. NO, don't put it down. It's too late. They're watching you. My name is David Wong. My best friend is John. Those names are fake. You might want to change yours. You may not want to know about the things you'll read on these pages, about the sauce, about Korrok, about the invasion, and the future. But it's too late. You touched the book. You're in the game. You're under the eye. The only defense is knowledge. You need to read this book, to the end. Even the part with the bratwurst. Why? You just have to trust me.

"The important thing is this: The drug is called Soy Sauce and it gives users a window into another dimension. John and I never had the chance to say no. You still do. I'm sorry to have involved you in this, I really am. But as you read about these terrible events and the very dark epoch the world is about to enter as a result, it is crucial you keep one thing in mind: None of this was my fault."

-Thomas Dunne Books & Earline Beebe

Check the Facebook Event Page for more information.

Please contact Earline Beebe for more information on the Facebook event page.
Image from: SITE. Published by Thomas Dunne Books.

Laser Rangers 2014 July Meeting

Adventures in Solipsism

Date: June 14, 2014
Time: 4:50pm
Location: David Sooby’s home theater with 51-inch Samsung HDTV, a 5.1 Surround Sound Dolby Digital sound system, a full set of audiophile-grade speakers, and upgraded seating for about 15 people without crowding.
Captain Laser: David B.
Food: Ordinary Food, Junk Food
Costume: 50s

To learn more, please visit our Facebook Event Page.

Short features will be shown before each feature. Don't miss them!

Pleasantville

(1998, 124 minuets) Directed by: Gary Ross

Starring: Tobey Maguire, Jeff Daniels, Joan Allen, William H. Macy, Paul Walker, J. T. Walsh, Reese Witherspoon

Two 1990s teenagers find themselves in a 1950s sitcom where their influence begins to profoundly change that complacent world. -IMDB

Watch the trailer here!







~~~~~
After the first feature, please join us for a potluck dinner. Bring something to share. It can follow the theme, or be something you prefer.
~~~~~

Feature Presentation!
Stranger Than Fiction

(2006, 113 minuets) Directed by: Marc Forster

Starring: Will Ferrell, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Queen Latifah, Emma Thompson

An IRS auditor suddenly finds himself the subject of narration only he can hear: narration that begins to affect his entire life, from his work, to his love-interest, to his death. -IMDB

Watch the trailer here!












The home of the Laser Rangers is located about four miles north of the Kansas Speedway, NW of the intersection of I-70 and I-435 on the Kansas side of the Greater Kansas City area.

IMAGE CREDITS: The information for all of these shows come from the invaluable IMDB. The movie posters come from Wikipedia or the movie's respected distributors. 

The movie screen frame image used for the Laser Rangers contact information is courtesy of Psychology Today Online. Many thanks to these websites!