Welcome to Fandom Café

Read or Die member Rachel Teng writes about Fandom Café, a library and hangout for Manila-based science fiction and fantasy buffs, in today’s Manila Bulletin.

MB did not update their online Youth archive today, so I’ve posted the entire column here.

Fandom Café: For Fans, By Fans
by Rachel Teng

One of the things that Read or Die members have difficulty with is looking for a venue to meet up and talk to each other. The members are scattered through the metro, some even coming in all the way from the provinces just to see everyone else. Apart from that, it’s hard to look for a place where we can just sit and talk all day.

We usually end up in cafés like the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in Gateway or Greenbelt. The atmosphere of their branches are welcoming, and we like their cakes and drinks. Still, we tend to move around after a while, feeling a little embarrassed to sit there in a group for hours at a time.

This is why we were rather ecstatic when we found out about Fandom Café. As the name says, Fandom Café is a place where different fans and fandoms can come together to meet up or get together in a fandom activity. For those who aren’t in the know, fandom is the term used to describe a group of active fans of anything, be in TV series, manga, toys, movies, comics and – you guessed it – books. Finally, a place where we can be bibliophiles without feeling like we’re trolling coffeehouses!

Fandom Café was initially built as the business arm of the New Worlds Alliance in April 2007, by founders Paolo Jalbuena and Jon Sideño. The New Worlds Alliance is the collective term used for many the science fiction/fantasy fandoms found here in the Philippines. The New Worlds Alliance includes groups like Via Astris (The Star Trek Club of the Philippines), The Philippine Tolkien Society, Pinoy Harry Potter, Star Wars Philippines, Pinoy X-Philes, Pinoy Slayers, and The Alliance of Eclectic Gamers and Interactive Storytellers (AEGIS). With all these groups around, there eventually came a need for a venue where the members of these groups could meet and gather. Enter the Fandom Café.

What does the Fandom Café offer to its clients? It’s a good meeting place for small groups of people, with an activity room equipped with a television, gaming consoles and a comfortable couch upstairs, and an Internet hub downstairs. They also have delicious sandwiches and snacks, as well as the best coffee the Read or Die members have tasted in a café yet. (They also offer ice to the residents of the building where FC is located!)

The truly unique feature of Fandom Café is its hominess, the natural way it makes you feel at home as soon as you take a step in the shop. As soon as you come in, the first things that you can see are their posters, collection of toys, and books displayed everywhere. This immediately tells you, “Yes, the people who go here have the same interests as you do!” The members are also very chummy and are open to talking about all kinds of topics, from books to tabletop games, television series to movies and games. Science fiction and fantasy can be very broad, so there’s never any difficulty looking for things to talk about.

Best of all, Fandom Café is home to an extensive library of science fiction and fantasy books, many of them rare and out of print. The books themselves do not belong to the café – instead, the books are donated or lent by the many members of NWA, so that the books can be read other people and also for safekeeping. Truly a café made for fans, by fans!

Their collection is huge: thousands of books covering a wide period of science fiction and fantasy – from The Rebellious Stars (The Stars, Like Dust) / An Earth Gone Mad printed in 1954 to The Lies of Locke Lamore of 2007. They also have books from old, well-known authors like Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury, as well as science fiction and fantasy classics like A Canticle for Leibowitz and Tolkien’s Lost Tales. You might recognize some of their series, like Robotech and Doc Savage, or you might be interested in their rarer books, like A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, printed in 1912.

Fandom Café has opened its library to the public, so if you are interested in speculative fiction works like science fiction, fantasy, or even horror, this is the place to go. For only 500php a year or 1000php for a lifetime membership (students get an additional 50% off on all rates), you can already take home two or four books of your choice home at a time. Check the rest of their books out in their catalogue at http://library.fandomcafe.com/ — it’s not complete yet, and there are some three thousand more books that they need to catalogue, but this does give you a good idea of what you can find in their collection.

As previously mentioned, Fandom Café is also a good place to meet up and have gatherings, especially for small fandom-related events. It’s located near the MRT station in Cubao, and is open from 6AM to midnight. A location map can be found in their main website, http://www.fandomcafe.com/

Fandom Café also occasionally has events of its own that anyone can join. They have livecasts every Sunday night, film viewing once in a while, and its members also attend conventions or hold one of their own. NWA has thrown six conventions already, so you can be sure that membership in the Café will also give you the best news of these events.