OUSFG Trinity Termcard 2021

Sunday speaker, discussion, and games meetings are held at 8pm on Zoom. Sign up for the ousfg-announce mailing list to receive a reminder and details for each meeting, including the Zoom connection details.

**Termcard**
25 Apr	Sunday	1st Week	Zoom	Discussion	We'll be planning this term's events.
2 May	Sunday	2nd Week	Zoom	Game	This Sunday we're starting the term with our carefully-honed, world-beating edition of Werewolf, a hidden role game similar to Mafia.
9 May	Sunday	3rd Week	Zoom	Discussion	Luke is running our collaborative story planning event, Tentacular Vikings, for the second time this year. The starting concept this time is: It is the year 2045. Scientists have been able to prove that the prophecies surrounding 2012 had in a sense been correct; in that year, we passed into a different universe, without noticing it as the time. We can then explore the consequences of this, such as the impact this would have on our sense of reality, on understandings of history and cause and effect, and the science of the multiverse and how travel could theoretically have taken place and be discovered. Some of these themes may prepare us for Kiran's coming discussion on philosophy and SF, and the question of how we would know if we were living in a computer simulation.
16 May	Sunday	4th Week	Zoom	Discussion	William will be leading a meeting discussing webcomics. Here's his description: Webcomics – the free-est medium! You get free entertainment, the author gets freedom of artistic expression, and the whole thing is free from quality control. We'll be sharing the gems amongst the sea of content. Come along to share your under-appreciated favourites and get some new recommendations!
23 May	Sunday	5th Week	Zoom	Discussion	Sonia will be running a discussion of Micromegas, an early science fiction story by the influential 18th century philosopher Voltaire, in which aliens come to earth and question humanity's ways of doing things. The book's accessible free here.
27 May	Thursday	5th Week	Zoom	Quiz	On Thursday at 8pm, OUSFG will be taking part in the Geek Quiz, details of which can be found here. The sign-up deadline is on 26 May. Please join us as we compete for the crown of 'the one wot won that year'!
30 May	Sunday	6th Week	Zoom	Discussion	Kiran will be continuing the fascinating discussion on Philosophy and SF he led last term, with the focus now on the question of how we'd know if we were living in a computer simulation.
13 Jun	Sunday	8th Week	Zoom	Discussion	Bethany will be running a meeting on Medicine and SF. Here's her description of the meeting: We'll start with a very short introduction to relevant principles in medical ethics, and then jump into the following discussion prompts. The ethics of cloning. We will discuss the varying ways that speculative fiction treats cloning, and consider how modern medical ethics would manage these dilemmas. Bad pharma and altered states. We will consider how speculative fiction engages with the topic of medications and their effects on an individual and population level, and with the intersection between corporate and medical worlds. Suggested reading list: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre. Other works on medicine and sci fi: Autonomous by Annalee Newitz, The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist, The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton, Excession by Iain M Banks (The Culture universe).
20 Jun	Sunday	9th Week	Zoom	Discussion	Jonathan and Sonia will be running a discussion on the portrayal of race, gender and sexuality in the Hunger Games series.

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ousfg/misc/termcard-21tt1.html last modified 18th June 2021 by

Tim Adye, <T.J.Adye@rl.ac.uk>