Press Release

A massive Comic-Con-like fan event for London at last?

-- NineWorlds GeekFest raises 232% of its target fundraising on KickStarter and announces first guests, including genre author and super-geek, Stephen Hunt.

LONDON/NEW YORK- For years, British fans have been flying to huge US cons like Dragon*Con , Comic-con and GenCon, and wondering why nothing like them exists in the UK. San Diego Comic-Con gets 130,000 fans. France can drum up over 20,000 fans for Utopiales, even Finland can find 15,000 fans for FinnCon. But when it comes to large fan-driven residential multi-genre cons in the UK, pickings were pretty slim.

But now a bunch of fans have got together to assemble an event that aims to out-geek all the large US and European events, GeekFest - running 9-11th August 2013 in London. NineWorlds was one of the first outfits to use KickStarter once the online fund-raising portal opened its doors to UK-based projects… the results are now in, and GeekFest was quickly successfully oversubscribed by 232% of its target amount.

NineWorlds organiser Erich Schultz said, 'The Nine Worlds team is overwhelmed by the level of support from the geek community for Geekfest, with our crowd-funding efforts pulling in 232% of our target. We're now redoubling our efforts to delivery an out-of-this-world event in August.'

GeekFest has announced some of its early guests of honour for the event, and these include British Über-geek and genre author, Stephen Hunt.

Stephen Hunt noted, 'I'm delighted to be a guest of honour at the inaugural GeekFest. Over the last few years geek culture has been sweeping across the UK, with Doctor Who consistently producing the highest viewing figures on TV, and books in the Twilight, Hunger Games, Game of Thrones and Harry Potter series accounting for up to 70% of total fiction sales in some months. Whether it's Batman on the big screen or Halo on the gaming screen, all your base are belong to us. It's well about time we threw an event to rival the shindigs put on by our friends in the States.'

Other early guests announced include leading writers such as Cory Doctorow and Charlie Stross, and a host of names from the world of comics, games, books and broadcast media will be announced in the months before the event.

ABOUT NINEWORLDS GEEKFEST

Nine Worlds is a residential con celebrating all aspects of geek culture: gaming; film; cosplay; anime; literature; and partying. It's rented two big conference hotels in London, and recruited some of the UK's top fans and fandom organisations. With their help, NineWorlds is creating talks, games, discussions, workshops and parties spanning a swathe of geek obsessions. Whether you're into board gaming, film and film-making, Doctor Who / Torchwood, science, feminism, Tolkien, SF&F academia, video games, partying like a dance floor demon, role play gaming, Discworld, My Little Pony, social gaming, SF&F literature, knitting, Harry Potter, creative writing, Star Wars, queer fandom, buying cool stuff, steampunk, the occult, open culture, Star Trek, Whedon, scepticism, costuming, comics, anime and J-culture, or fanfic, chances are you'll find something that rocks your world.

At Nine Worlds you'll be able to wander from session to session, make new friends and discover new worlds. Rock out on Rock Band, see a film, play a hotel-wide game of Assassins. Ask a famous author that question about fighting 21 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck again. Or just buy a drink at the bar and catch up on knitting while watching the costume parade, before hitting the dance floor and rounding the night off in the gaming rooms.

To get tickets for the event and discover more, visit the GeekFest at www.nineworlds.co.uk

ABOUT STEPHEN HUNT

Stephen Hunt is a best-selling writer of adventure, thriller, science fiction and fantasy novels. His 'Jackelian' series of fantasy novels are published by HarperCollins in the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, and by Macmillan Tor in the USA. They have appeared in translation in China, Japan, Portugal, Spain, France, Germany and Russia.

The first novel in his six-book 'Jackelian' series was 'The Court of the Air', a fantasy novel set in a Victorian-level far-future where steam power, rather than oil, drives the economy of a resource-starved Earth riven by ice ages and natural disasters. It is a world where humans, various evolved sub-species of mankind, sentient robots, aliens and genetically engineered creatures mix among the ruined glories of past, collapsed civilisations. It was voted best novel to be made into a film at the Berlinale (the world's largest film festival) by the event's organisers and producers… who pitched it as "Bladerunner meets Charles Dickens."

The subject of an auction and bidding war among the major British publishing houses, The Court of the Air's subsequent mass-market sales helped jump-start the steampunk genre, turning the field from a sleepy backwater in 2007 into a thriving global literary and social scene today. Subsequent novels set in the same world include 'The Kingdom Beyond the Waves', 'Rise of the Iron Moon', 'Secrets of the Fire Sea', 'Jack Cloudie', and 'From the Deep of the Dark'.

An online trailblazer before becoming an author, Hunt was a digital publisher and editor for the Financial Times and launched some of the world's first online magazines such as Nature.com. His own web site can be found at www.StephenHunt.net

CONTACTS

Erich Schultz
NineWorlds Geekfest
erich@nineworlds.co.uk

Stephen Hunt
shunt@sfcrowsnest.org