Most of our meetings are on Sundays at 8pm in St. Anne's College, Seminar Room 11. Follow the map to get to the building. We'll be meeting outside the library entrance at 8pm. If you're late, please message on Discord to be let into the building. There is an elevator for accessibility, though it is very slow – apologies for that!
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.
| 11 Oct | Sunday | 1st Week | St Anne's | Discussion | Desert Planet Books – What are the ten SF and Fantasy books most worth reading and why? In OUSFG'S 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. Audience contributions are encouraged, but no worries if you are new to SFF or just feeling a bit shy! This is an excellent place to find out about books that you may not have yet come across, and hopefully introduce the society to hidden gems that we have not heard of. |
| 18 Oct | Sunday | 2nd Week | St Anne's | Video | For this term's movie night we'll be watching Arrival, the adaptation of Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life. If you're just here for the aliens: there are aliens, they're mad freaky. There will also be at least one chinook helicopter. Good stuff! For the rest of you, this film explores language, time, free will and determinism, and most interesting the intersection of all these things. |
| 25 Oct | Sunday | 3rd Week | St Anne's | Discussion | Tentacular Vikings. 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. |
| 1 Nov | Sunday | 4th Week | St Anne's | Discussion | Language in Speculative Fiction. For our first discussion event of the term, we'll be talking about language is used, abused and explored through SFF, from a worldbuilding tool in sprawling fantasy worlds to alien "languages" that stretch the definition of what a language actually is. We'll see how authors have used language to challenge our assumptions about identity and society, and how words can shape the realities we live in. |
| 8 Nov | Sunday 16:00 | 5th Week | Balliol | Speaker | Award-winning author C. L. Clark is coming to speak about her work and inspirations! |
| 13 Nov | Friday | 5th Week | St Edmund Hall | Quiz | Oxford Geek Quiz run by Whosoc. Come along to reclaim the honour of OUSFG as the Geekiest society. If you haven't been to a geek quiz yet, in this event geeky societies compete each other in rounds such as "guess a world based on its map", "guess what fictional food is described", "guess on whom the guy from quantum leap was photoshopped". If you would like to enter all you need is to provide a round of questions. If you have an idea for a round (two people from OUSFG still can make a round!), pick a theme and make some (usually 10) questions worth 10 points. The contents of the rounds should be reasonably diverse — try to include as many media and fandoms as you can to make the round somewhat accessible to everyone (think: the goal is for everyone to have fun, not just to flex your niche trivia knowledge...)! If you're making a round, email it to Ash and she'll forward it to the organizers! |
| 15 Nov | Sunday | 6th Week | St Anne's | Discussion | What is Speculative Fiction? |
| 22 Nov | Sunday | 7th Week | St Anne's | Discussion | TBA |
| 29 Nov | Sunday | 8th Week | Library | Party | Christmas party in the Library (of ~1000 books!) featuring the game of Werewolf |
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ousfg/misc/termcard-26mt1.html last modified 14th October 2026 by
