Most of our meetings are on Sundays at 8pm in Trinity College. We will meet in front of Trinity College (entrance at Broad Street) just before 8pm and move inside together at 8:05pm, to the meeting room (usually the Teaching Room 5).
See below for details, sign up for the ousfg-announce mailing list to receive a reminder and details for each meeting, or check on Discord for smaller updates.
Please remember that Sunday is the first day of the Oxford Week, so do check the dates below if you are unsure.
| 12 Oct | Sunday | 1st Week | Trinity | Discussion | Desert Planet Books – In our traditional first event of the year, we each recommend the speculative fiction books we would most like to be stranded on a desert planet with in the event of a spaceship crash, and then vote on the winners. In recent years we have explored Desert Planet Movies and TV Shows, but unfortunately the spaceship crash destroyed all our viewing, and only the books remain. |
| 19 Oct | Sunday | 2nd Week | Trinity | Discussion | Evil (in SFF) – In our first discussion meeting of the year, we will discuss the common ways fantasy and sci-fi represent evil, from the frequent evocations of Nazism to cyberpunk corporate overlords to echoes of traditional Christian models of demonic ‘pure evil’. We’ll discuss the light this sheds on broader (and often competing) cultural definitions of morality, and questions around whether sympathetic villains who sincerely believe in their ideals are actually more psychologically ‘realistic’. The prequel to ‘Good (in SFF)’, probably coming next term… Run by Luke, our secretary. |
| 25 Oct | Saturday | 2nd Week | bookshops | crawl | Bookshop crawl – Our president, Paulina, leads us on a tour of the SFF sections of Oxford’s bookshops. Will our society library (hosted in Paulina’s accommodation) swell to ever more Borgesian proportions, beyond the confines of Euclidian space? |
| 26 Oct | Sunday | 3rd Week | Trinity | Discussion | Tentacular Vikings (Collaborative Storytelling) – Named for a long-forgotten legend, Tentacular Vikings is our termly collaborative story-planning event. Like tentacles grafted onto a viking, we add to an initial prompt until it becomes an outline of a setting, characters and plot. Somebody then proposes actually writing it as a story, and invariably never does; until you arrive, and break the cycle… Previous examples include the environmentalist space-western Tentacular Yaks, the apocalypse of Milton Keynes, and the celebrated time-travelling saga Boom Sticks. A prompt will be provided before or at the event; anyone is free to come up with one. |
| 2 Nov | Sunday | 4th Week | Trinity | Discussion | SF and Predictions – This week Tim, our Ghost in the Machine (IT officer), will lead a discussion on the predictive power of SFF, especially sci-fi. To set the scene, we will discuss how SF Grand Master, Robert Heinlein, did with his 19 "predictions" from 1952. Can we do any better for the next 75 years, and how good a guide is SF? The genre often claims a power to predict future developments, socially and technologically. How much is the genre’s creative power tied to its predictive accuracy? How much is prediction a self-fulfilling prophecy, as sci-fi influences cultural developments, as in the Torment Nexus meme? Is the interest in building a plausible vision of the future what links hard sci-fi, dystopia, utopia, post-apocalypse? How much is the prediction of possible social futures inherent to the ‘speculative’ of speculative fiction more broadly, even if its more fantastic varieties do not depict plausible technological possibilities? |
| 9 Nov | Sunday | 5th Week | Trinity | Discussion | Unique Stories – This week, Paulina will lead a discussion on the relationship between SFF and uniqueness. This is a set of genres simultaneously often defined by imagination and tradition, often written between the poles of adhering to certain genre conventions and expectations and inventing entirely new kinds of settings, stories and images. Uniqueness often has a shelf life: radically new concepts often become subgenres with set patterns and expectations, even if novelty often remains central to those expectations (as with ‘the Weird’). We’ll weigh the value of creative use or subversion of expectation against radical conceptual novelty. |
| 16 Nov | Sunday | 6th Week | Jesus | Discussion | Speculative Fiction and Roleplaying Games – This week, noted RPG enthusiast Luke will run a crossover event between the two halves of his soul: OUSFG and the Oxford Roleplaying Games Society. We’ll discuss the tightly interlinked histories of sci-fi, fantasy and speculative fiction and the evolution of the roleplaying game genre, an unusually close marriage between a particular fictional genre and an entire storytelling medium. Examples of this relationship include 70s D&D’s role in systematising high fantasy tropes, to the importance of 90s World of Darkness for both urban fantasy and the development of parlour LARP, and the crucial impact of tabletop RPGs on non-linear video game storytelling. In particular, discussion will likely focus on the distinctive ways RPG sourcebooks foreground setting and world-building as distinct from plot. This event will be held at Jesus College rather than Trinity. |
| 23 Nov | Sunday | 7th Week | Trinity | Speaker | Fantasy Author, and former OUSFG member, Juliet McKenna will be speaking to us. |
| 30 Nov | Sunday | 8th Week | Library | Party | Party in the Library (feat. Werewolf) – You may have contributed to the swelling of the Library. Now, join us for an end of term party in Paulina’s room, alias, the Library itself. Feel free to browse and borrow any of the hundreds of SFF books available. And, as the night draws on, you may begin to hear the howling of wolves. For it is winter, when the nights grow longer, and the moon reclaims its crown. Before the reign of Among Us and its culture-blighting memes, there was the OUSFG’s Werewolf, honed to perfection through decades of oral tradition, and the unsung hero of its transition into the digital age, Tim’s Werewolf app. The ultimate social deduction experience awaits you. Survival itself is at stake. |
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ousfg/misc/termcard-25mt1.html last modified 13th October 2025 by
