Science Fiction Reading Group

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS EVENT WILL BE HELD AT MATHERS, 25 BROUGHTON STREET - JUST A SHORT WALK FROM THE BOOKSHOP!

Now moving towards the end of 2025, we’ll be continuing our Fantasy and Science Fiction reading group, exploring worlds both fantastical and horrific, monstrous and utopian. Whether your interests lie in exploring the ruins of a lost civilization, challenging fiends to save the world from ruin or delicately navigating the politics of a corporate interstellar McEmpire™ (Ask about our franchising options and get a free McNuke™!), I do hope you’ll join us.

For the twelfth reading group of 2025, we'll be heading to a distant world, where concepts of sex, gender and love have evolved in a very different manner.

Genly Ai, a human native of Terra who is sent to the planet of Gethen as an envoy of the Ekumen, a loose confederation of planets. There he finds a people for whom physical sex changes with the seasons, and who are far divorced from his own views on the world.

But even on as world as foreign as this, politics shape society and Genly is soon pulled into a torturous journey across the ice plains that cover most of Gethen's surface.