Rest in peace CUSFS, long live Jomsborg
Feb. 19th, 2007 01:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackEdit2: An emergency committee was formed, and five years later CUSFS has an exceptionally active community composed mainly of undergraduates, so I apologise for my pessimism. See a more detailed description in a reply to Jessica below.
Edit: This was based on my impressions from the conversation afterwards, and is inaccurate in a couple of important respects. It may do as jack-chatting-to-friends, but CUSFS will send an email describing the decisions accurately, to which you should turn.
Last night I went to the CU Science Fiction Society AGM. For a while it has been being sustained by an older crowd of Chiarky people and more recently a less old crowd of Simeony people, but has not really been acquiring *new* people.
Some of the events, such as games evenings, and traditional large CUSFS/Jomsborg socials like the wake have been busy. I haven't attended many of the regular Sunday discussions, but AFAIK they have not been very well attended. The desire has been to attract new freshers to join, and then run the society for their benefit, but if this isn't happening, there's no point carrying on with what we've been doing.
They decided to disband at least for the moment.
There is still a committee for this year, and there are many people steeped in experience and the traditions who will be pleased to help anyone who does resurrect it. And Jomsborg (originally the fantasy split group, now the social half of the society) is certainly sustaining, not actually doing anything scifi/fantasy-y, but as an alumni organisation with rich traditions still hosts the traditional social events (afmaelisdagr and veizla) attended by lots of people of many eras, and steadily if slowly sucking in new people from here and there.
If anyone laments the lack of a real science fiction society in Cambridge, feel free to ask to co-opt the large amount of existing infrastructure in CUSFS and organise it as you want.
Edit: This was based on my impressions from the conversation afterwards, and is inaccurate in a couple of important respects. It may do as jack-chatting-to-friends, but CUSFS will send an email describing the decisions accurately, to which you should turn.
Last night I went to the CU Science Fiction Society AGM. For a while it has been being sustained by an older crowd of Chiarky people and more recently a less old crowd of Simeony people, but has not really been acquiring *new* people.
Some of the events, such as games evenings, and traditional large CUSFS/Jomsborg socials like the wake have been busy. I haven't attended many of the regular Sunday discussions, but AFAIK they have not been very well attended. The desire has been to attract new freshers to join, and then run the society for their benefit, but if this isn't happening, there's no point carrying on with what we've been doing.
They decided to disband at least for the moment.
There is still a committee for this year, and there are many people steeped in experience and the traditions who will be pleased to help anyone who does resurrect it. And Jomsborg (originally the fantasy split group, now the social half of the society) is certainly sustaining, not actually doing anything scifi/fantasy-y, but as an alumni organisation with rich traditions still hosts the traditional social events (afmaelisdagr and veizla) attended by lots of people of many eras, and steadily if slowly sucking in new people from here and there.
If anyone laments the lack of a real science fiction society in Cambridge, feel free to ask to co-opt the large amount of existing infrastructure in CUSFS and organise it as you want.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-19 03:14 pm (UTC)And anyway, it wouldn't really help. The AGM made the point that another year of pushing it along wouldn't really help, but would just be for tradition's sake, as if it were going to take off again, it probably would have done by now. What it needs if anything is someone can put it first and do things a bit differently and find what is really exciting to a new crowd of first-years, of whom they're hopefully one...
If you have any protégés, upcoming reincarnations of Naath, you could encourage *them* to do it :) Simeon said he had some friends who might possibly be like to do something, and I can think of some people who might... :)