SFSF Social – June Report

The third SFSF Social went off with a bang last night – if you weren’t there, here’s a taster of what you missed (and some advance details of the next Social too).

Back at Eten Cafe, where we had the first Social at the start of the year, authors Jacey Bedford and Paul Kane joined an audience of over 30 (including the chap on the bar, who was working the evening because he’s an SF fan), for readings, questions, and general conversations. There was the small matter of a few books to give away too…

Jacey Bedford

Introduced by Darren Johnson-Smith, who bears a rather striking resemblance to that noted teller of spooky Sheffield tales Mr P Dreadful, Jacey kicked off proceedings with a reading from Empire of Dust, a space opera set roughly five hundred years in the future. In answering the questions that followed, Jacey dealt with the history of the book itself, which was originally intended to stand on its own, and the dangers of accidentally committing trilogy.

We also heard an excerpt from her forthcoming historical fantasy Winterwood, which isn’t due for release until next year. Featuring a privateer heroine and witchcraft in Napoleonic times, it has already gone onto my TBR list…

Paul Kane

Paul Kane gave us an excerpt from his Arrowhead series – a post-apocalyptic Robin Hood story, pitting bows and arrows against Challenger tanks. He told us more about the series, about picking up old characters years later, and his new story collection Monsters. And, speaking of Monsters, Paul also read from one of the stories in that collection, the award-winning A Chaos Demon Is For Life. If you’re going to Edge-Lit on 11th July, you’ll be able to hear more from Monsters at the books official launch event there.

There were books to give away too, including copies of Monsters and The Hooded Man (with thanks to Alchemy Press and Paul himself) and Empire of Dust (and thanks to DAW Books) – and much, much more, as you can see below (more thanks to Richard Webb and Phil Lunt, the drinks are on us)! So many in fact, that we still have some for next time!

One for the covetous bibliophiles!

Speaking of which, SFSF #4 will be taking place during Sheffield’s Off The Shelf Festival in October – specifically, Saturday 17th October, so that it won’t clash with FantasyCon in Nottingham the following weekend. We’ll be putting up the page on Eventbrite shortly, but mark the date in your diary now, and spread the word! If there’s a York Pubmeet in the meantime, we’ll let you know about that too. And going forward, we do intend to carry on into 2016 – if you know of a writer you’d like to see as one of our guests, please do let us know…

So, thank you very much to Jacey and Paul for being our guests, and thank you to everybody who came along and made the afternoon a success; we couldn’t do this without you!

And, by way of thanks to Eten Cafe, if you enjoyed their hospitality, why not vote for them in the 2015 EatSheffield Awards? The link to the voting form is here, and Eten is in the Licensed Cafes & Bars category.