The Sydney Futurians are an impressively old body, at least by the standards of science fiction. They were started by a group of fans in the 1930s, but folded early in the second world war. As one original put it, "science fiction was effectively illegal" (due to restrictions on sending foreign currency to the United States and/or wasting paper) "and we were all being drafted one after another". Some day I hope to get more of these recollections down, but since I believe one of our members published a book on the subject it may be fraught with legal difficulty.
Existence since has been on and off. The most recent iteration is more than a few years old and appears healthy as of 1999. I've been coming on and off since 1995 or 1996.
The Sydney Futurians meet at about 7 P.M. on the third Friday of every month. The venue is room 1615 of the Broadway Tower, which is the main building of the University of Technology, Sydney. It's eminently walkable from Central railway station.
The first part of the meeting is concerned with news. We go round the table, and everyone tells us interesting stuff that's hopefully somehow related to science fiction or at least science fact. We sometimes have to chivvy this along a little, since it's easy never to get to the topic.
In the second part of the meeting we discuss the topic of the meeting. In practice this tends to mean people calling out the names of stories that concerned the subject. Most of them simply go through with nods and no comment, some generate requests for clarification ("I never heard of it"), literary criticism ("of course, it's all ripped off from Todd Thrumberry") or polite disagreement ("a cephalopod is not the same thing as a bug, so you're off topic, what's more you smell bad").
And then we amble home.
It's actually a lot more fun than I've made it sound. Perhaps it's just as well I never went into marketing.