Science Fiction fan club Solaris

Science fiction fan club "Solaris" was born on the 2nd of September 1996. Today it unites about 40 SF fans. We began with a quiet meeting of ten people at one of the city public libraries. Most of those tem people were journalists and their friends. Only three or four of those were real science fiction fans. It became a real SF socializing when on the third meeting new 20 people came in. Now we are one big family. We go out camping to sit by the fire and just to have fun, visit each other`s birthday parities and just have cool time. We read and study the works of different writers and right now we are trying to organize a SF convetion/festival "Fandom-99". Anyone is welcome. Sometimes we watch video and programms on the making of those films together.

Last year we selebrated our first anniversary very noisy. I mean by that we attracted a lot of attention of the press like TV and radio. We turned the small reading hall of the library into a spaceship and went on a voyage around the Galaxy of SF Literature. The members of the club who now were the passangers of the ship had to answer quite hard questions about SF genre, recognize the characters of the books and solve out some problems. Look at the pictures attached. Konstantin Kunshikov poses as the steward of the ship who, at the same, time is a spacepol agent. The fans had to identify a villain out of two pessengers travelling in one stateroom. We invite you to have a try at those questions in out quiz-room) The photo was taken for a local newspaper by Eugeny Zaguliaev. At the end of the show we were listening to the spece waves to hear a few extracts from different novels and guess what novels are quoted. After traditional tea we came back to our Earth, that was the hell of a voyage.

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We celebrated our second anniversary much quieter than last year. This time we focused on tea drinking and sweets eating. Our meeting are still alcohol free as we have several underage kids up here. Our actory managed to do a little show based on Lewis Carroll`s... tea drinking episode... you know-what-book from! That was very funny. Anyway. We had a great time!
We made a few good things last year too. We supported UN action "Clean Up the World" and the Fund "City"`s action "Clean Up the Town". We went out in the streets and cleaned up a part of the city park. Then we made a graffity of our club emblem on a fence that was given to us by the Fund "City" as part of the action "Don`t paint everywhere, paint here!"
The club members took part in a charity concert for disabled children. Although everything we did was only going to the stage and making up a quiz based on kids sf books. We also brought a few books to give away as prizes. After that we took part in Christmas sliding hill opening ceremony with the Fund "City". And the Fund helped us to print out our zine this year!
Right now we involved with some other activities with disabled children and disabled young people. As well as preparing a few programmes for the local Planetarium! One programme was dedicated to SF cinema. The second is in production right now. Some of our poor trees were broken during the year. What a pity! Among the trees that were broken are Jules Verne, Philip Dick, Alexander Beliaev... People are barbarians after all!

We have slowed down our public activities during the last year or two. But still, we have noisily celebrated the 40th anniversary of Yury Gagarin`s space flight. Attracted some TV again.