#cusfs

Wandering nightgaunts, post-apocalyptic lesbians, and non-binary cosmic horrors, we are DELIGHTED to announce our first speaker event of the term with William A. Wellman of Hello From the Hallowoods!

Who are you people?

We're the official student SFF society at the University of Cambridge, CUSFS (pronounced cuss-fuss)! We've been around since 1963 in one form or another. We're students, we run film nights and cool events, we shout about shows we like, we've got one of the largest sci-fi-specific libraries in the UK, we do mead ceremonies, we have a secret evil shadow society (don't worry about it)...

...Evil shadow society?

Don't worry about it.

Cool events?

Yeah! We've got a proud history of collaborating with up-and-coming genre fiction writers. Back in the 1980s, we hosted Terry Pratchett before Sourcery had even come out, and we've had talks from greats like Tanith Lee and Douglas Adams. Aside from our everyday events, you'll mostly see us posting here about lectures, book events and Q&As with our favourite SFF academics & creatives. In 2024-2025 we were lucky enough to be joined by the amazing @jonnywaistcoat and @thesiltverses, and keep your eyes peeled for our 2026 guests...

Where actually are you?

We're based in Cambridge, UK. All our events are in person, and unfortunately we don't currently have the wherewithal to record and share them.

Can I find you anywhere else?

Sure thing! Our official website is here. We also have an Instagram, which we update sliiiiiightly more regularly and is the best place to go for details of our more small-scale events.

Someone mentioned a zine?

The spring edition of TTBA Zine, TRANSCENDENCE THROUGH BIONICS AND ARCANE, is officially out, with many thanks to all our wonderful contributors!!

So English has this word reeve (which most prominently survives in sheriff “shire-reeve”) which comes from Old English ġerēfa, apparently cognate with Middle Low German grēve (which survives in the Scandinavian languages as greve “earl” but unconnected with German Graf “earl” which is from Greek γραφεύς “scribe”) but that’s where things get murkier.

The first part of ġerēfa is clear. Ġ̇e- is a common prefix in Old English cognate with latin co- and it appears in lots of words marking completeness, togetherness, processes, results, or similarity. Rēfa though is less clear. Wiktionary claims it’s *rōf “an array, number, host”, a word attested only in compounds (e.g. seċġrōf “host of men”, and stæfrōf “alphabet”) which apparently means. This seems kinda problematic. The vowel’s wrong (why is it an ō not an ē?) and the other forms are strong nouns but ġerēfa is weak.

Chasing *rōf we find that there is an attested OE word rōf, but it means “strong” or “noble” (which seem semantically similar to reeve), but wiktionary gives its etymology in proto-germanic *rōfō/rōbō “number/calculation” maybe related to *rōbaz “strong” and linking it to Old High German ruoba “number/multitude”. This is an utter mess. There are clearly two different threads going on here but wiktionary would have us believe they’re swapping meanings every so often rather than just remaining (mostly) parallel.

So I have no idea what the PGm form is other than that it begins with an r, has a long vowel (either ō or ē) and followed by a labial (either b or f, this is common in words not attested in High German or East Germanic).

Anyway, doing some more searching I’ve found out that German ge- (cognate with OE ġe-, shocking I know) i-umlauts the following vowel in some cases so I guess that’d fix that problem with the supposed etymology of reeve if it also held in OE, but it still wouldn’t explain the change in declension.

My uni's Science Fiction Society played a chainwriting game last year, where we would each write 250 words of a story and then pass it on to the next person to continue. (We also had some variants like backwards chains and a still in-progress choose-your-own-adventure).

This morning I got the possibly-silly idea that it would be fun to do the same thing with Tumblr. I'll use the same starting point that I used in one of ours, out of curiosity to see how far they diverge (also because lazy).

If you want to see where CUSFS took it, go here; we'll use the same starting point as The City Stops. However, please be warned one of the other chainwriting stories in this issue of TTBA (Really Wrong starting on page 16) could be really triggery for abuse, and I also wouldn't bother with Wildfire which is just kind of a mess.

CUSFS!

  This week we're going to talk about the role of female and minority authors in science fiction! Since this isn't my area of expertise in the slightest I'll get right to it - we're meeting in Hamilton 703 on Wednesday at 8 PM.

  The second publisher that actually accepts your manuscript,