About us
Larger related items may be on separate pages. Use the index below left
How to contact us
The primary contact is the secretary, who is also webmaster.
Anton Erasmuson
Ph (04) 528 3345
a.erasmuson@clear.net.nz
Where and when we meet...
Where:
Room 7 off the Queen Street car park, Upper Hutt.
Map at right. It is about 600 m from the
station, zigzagging through the centre of town.
If you are driving, use a real map, and find Queen Street or Logan
Street. The Queen St car-park entrance is across from the Warehouse,
with a bright blue "Public Car Park" sign. The Logan St one is opposite
the Cosmopolitan Club. Parking is free of
course - this is Upper Hutt. Once well into the car park with
the
Health Centre a major feature 30 m ahead, Room 7 is just to your left.
There are two entrances to Room 7, one a ramp, the other at the corner
of the house. Click the map for more pictures.
The technologically adept could use the Lat-Long reference of -41.12211, 175.07299. This is just gimcrack gizmo PratNav to me, but I suspect the day will come when I have to use one of the things. Oh for the days when your horse knew the way home.
The rooms are a Council facility for community groups to meet, and are administered by iSite (One the map - the circled i, lower left.) There are no formal membership dues - just contribute a dollar each time to pay for coffee/tea, biscuits, and the small rent the council charges.
When: First Tuesday of the month, Feb to November. This meeting is always on a topic. The speakers are usually one of the members, talking about an area they are interested in. That is 'interested', not expert. Conversation is quite free flowing, and a planned 30 min talk readily takes an hour. Digressions are accepted, but should also be interesting, and soon return to the main topic.
We often meet again on the third Tuesday at a members house to watch a movie.
Meetings run 7:30 to 9:30 pm.
Who we are
The club is a group of about 20 people who meet once or twice a month. The interest is mainly in the various forms of SF literature and media. Science Fiction is a genre - which not only means it is specialised, but also means that it grabs successes from other genre. There are SF Westerns, detective stories, thrillers (pushed over the edge into Space Opera maybe), and so on. It is also very blurred about what SF is. Could you class The Lord of the Rings as SF. I would say no, solely because when it was written, that is not how it would have been viewed. Today, it would happily fit in.
SF is short for Science Fiction and Fantasy. The F is ambiguous. Take the Rift War series for example. There is a trivial bit of science (about some very vaguely described star gate allowing movement between planets), but it is mainly about medieval fighting including wizardry. It is pure fantasy. But it is also a commentary on how societies and people interact, without having to be constrained by history or technology. So maybe it is sociology in disguise, but well packaged otherwise I couldn't be bothered to read it. We talk about what we like, sources (which is as near as we get to sorcery), and sometimes about complete irrelevancies. There is more to life than SF.
History of the Club.
The Upper Hutt Science Fiction and Fantasy Club first met in April, 1980, and has been active ever since. Other clubs may have predated that by a few years, but they have been beamed up or something. (Temporal Predation.) We think we are the oldest surviving club. This site is newish, but eventually we will put up a page on the subject. If we wait long enough, it could have two authors - one to write the fiction and the other fantasy. "In a small satellite town one long day's walk north of the most boring capital ever to disgrace one of the most beautiful harbours in the world, a shadowy group met in a library, somewhat by happenstance, as digital watches had yet to become a pretty neat idea. An unidentified figure grunted in the dark, and the Librarian turned on the fluorescents...."
Where is Upper Hutt?
This
is a picture of the North Island of New Zealand. The view is from over
North Cape looking towards the South Pole.
To distinguish us from Auckland ( a muddy mess mid-right), we are shining a red laser upwards. Passing spaceships will avoid us as a navigation hazard of course, and well, everyone wants to avoid Auckland.
Not much chance of meeting anyone strange then. (Present company excepted.)
Not everyone likes the view-from-a-spaceship approach. For those preferrring the more down to earth viewpoint, try Google Maps. We're in a valley 35 km above Wellington, and most of the surrounding countryside is farmland and various shades of forest. Some of that forest acted as the location for Rivendell in the Lord of the Rings movie. That claim is open to question, as some people are adamant that forests can't act. There is certainly no Oscar for Best Supporting Location. Shame. If you are visiting, nip up to the lovely Kaitoke Regional Park and give the trees a hug.
©2008
Anton Erasmuson.