In attendance were
The topic for the evening was "Memory Erasure and Alteration in Science Fiction". More on that later.
The big news was that Peter Eisler and Emma (surname?) are getting hitched. Peter remarked that Emma was named for Mrs. Peel of the Avengers, who was in turn named for being appealing.
The Ig Nobel prizes have been awarded. Discoveries honoured included:
Omni has gone the way of all flesh.
There's a new movie based on a Phillip K. Dick story: "John P. Crowe".
There was some discussion of Jack Parsons. Jack was a rocket scientist, devil worshipper, lunar crater namesake and was unjustly accused of something.
Clams on Heat: Clam farmers like all their clams to spawn simultaneously for obvious reasons. Usually they use serotonin to get them excited, but they have discovered that prozac (in larger doses) works just as well and is cheaper. The conclusion that clams don't make love well because they are depressed is almost (but not quite) irresistible.
An Australian science fiction series called "Something is Out There". It appears to be a rip-off of "The Hidden".
A couple of interesting movies had been on SBS. These included a Kazakhstani ripoff of Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai; and a Thai ripoff of John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos, reviewed for the Futurians by David Bofinger.
Titan has water vapour (determined by the infrared space observatory). The observatory is running out of helium to cool its detector, but not as fast as had been expected. Titan seems to include ice, water vapour, stones and tarry stuff. Not bad if you're looking for life.
David Bofinger has made an effort to find out the name of the book about Platinum wires and brain whisking, and has failed. (He's also, subsequently, put up a web page asking for information.) No luck so far.
A useful word for the week: endobuccoglossia somehow pertains to having one's tongue in one's cheek.
Reference was made to a psychology program on the ABC's Open Learning program concerning false memory implantation; the Better Than Life game, Holly's request to Lister that he erase all memories of Agatha Christie, and post-hibersleep amnesia of Red Dwarf; Piers Anthony's Steppe, where the game players plot on deceiving the game referees, having forgotten that the game referees monitor everything; a Frederic Brown story in which the major characters believe they murdered someone; Robert Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle; Roger Zelazny's Today We Choose Faces and his Amber series; Phillip Jose Farmer's World of Tiers; Joe Haldeman's Forever War, where soldiers are given memories of enemy atrocities that they understand are false on an intellectual level but not emotionally, and Tools of the Trade; Larry Niven's A World Out of Time, World of Ptavvs, The Fourth Profession and the Rich Mann story with anti-puppeteer piracy; Phillip K. Dick's Time Out of Joint and We Can Remember it for You Wholesale aka Total Recall; someone's I Hope I Arrive Soon; Fred Pohl's Tunnel Under the World; Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (where Rat and Mole forget something, apparently); many traditional stories about gods and the faery; Lloyd Biggle's All the Colours of Darkness; something by Lawrence Watt-Evans; Pat Cadigan's Fools; William Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic; George Orwell's 1984 (doublethink); Hoyle's Fifth Planet; Stanislaw Lem's The Futurological Convention; Terry Pratchett's Strata (if the fossil record can be considered part of the corporate memory); Bob Shaw's Who Goes Here?, Orbitsville and Night Walk; Somebody who could also be Bob Shaw's book with the prison planet whose capital was Tetrarch and where new arrivals were "peons"; a story with a pen, which had the property that whatever you wrote you forgot; the Gray Men in Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat; Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia; somebody's And the Poor Get Children; Stanton F. Coblenz's juvenile Stranger From the Depths; Michael Crichton's Sphere; James Gunn's Crisis; Gene Wolfe's Soldier of the Mists series; Heinlein's Time Enough For Love; Greg Egan's Transition Dreams; Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep (Pham Nuwen); and Baxter's The Secret Life of Plants, where plants can sense the death of yoghurt.
Question inspired by above: What would happen if you put a skrode under a pot plant?
John Varley's The Phantom of Kansas was ruled not to qualify, but his The Disaster Express does.
A special mention: Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's The Moat Round Murcheson's Eye aka The Gripping Hand. It doesn't have memory erasure in it, but we'd sure like to erase our memories of it.