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We gladly present our fourth guest of honour: Cory Doctorow!

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger — the co-editor of Boing Boing and the author of the bestselling Tor Teen/HarperCollins UK novel Little Brother. His latest young adult novel is Homeland, his latest novel for adults is Rapture of the Nerds.

We are next year’s Swecon!

(Every year, one of the local Swedish sf-conventions is elected Swecon, i.e. Sweden’s ‘most important’ con.)

Summer’s fading into a smooth Swedish autumn, it’s only roughly three months left until Christmas, and we’d like to start the last quarter of the year by presenting you two more guests you will have the chance to meet at the 2014 Steampunk Festival in Gävle: Anders Blixt and Steven Savile. Read more about them here.

Again, we are some days closer to our festival. And again, we have a little surprise for you: From today on it’s possible to buy entrance tickets. The price is now SEK 350,- but it will increase at the end of the year, so getting a ticket during the next months is advantageous for both you and us: For you it’s cheaper, and we get a better grip on how much money we have at our disposal.
You can find the application form here.

365 days, 8760 hours, or one year; whatever expression you prefer, after this amount of time the air around Gävle will be filled with electricity, diesel, and of course steam. Before us organizers lies a period filled with notes, appointments, meetings, emails, and calls; waiting for all of us, there are three great days of gorgeous guests, funny lectures, music, technology, LARP, airship pirates, mad inventors, and ladies with tight corsets and sharp umbrellas, and the unique atmosphere of the Swedish Railway Museum. Does this sound phantastic? Reality will be even better!

We love to welcome you in Gävle June 27th – 29th, 2014.

From now on you can apply for the 2014 Steampunkfestival’s market – we have to get to buy our sweets somewhere, don’t we? Do you make your own confectionary? Do you sell hats and corsetts you’ve sewn yourself? Are you able to juggle, or can you show legerdemain? If so, it’s you we are looking for! Då är det du vi letar efter! More information can be found here.

We would like to remind you that June 6th, 2013 is the final day to hand in your drafts on how to embellish the Swedish Railway Museum’s (and some might even argue world’s) most beautiful locomotive. Let there be no limits to your imagination and creativity! We’re looking forward to it.

Further information can be found at [link].

May 12th, 2013 the Swedish Railroad Museum’s traditional Family Day took place, and of course some of us who organise the 2014 Steampunkfestival were also there. Two brave souls kept watch at the locomotive which we plan to redesign and which we already start regarding as ours – an E2 loco, more precisely number 904.

Many visitors were curious and intrigued, keen to take a closer look at strage hats and remarkable brazen contraptions. Possibly a broadsheet or two found their way to some handbag or other.

The weather was great and by and by, more of us came along, together with the local steampunkers from Gävle and the surrounding area. We even made a tour with our favourite vintage train; hopefully, you will soon be able to read more about this journey here!

August puffed on his cigar as he watched the scenery pass by the cabin window. The weather was sunny, but a strange mist made the sky painfully whitish. He adjusted the flow in his kirlian-monocle, but saw no sign that the ether was hiding anything unhealthy. After his severe illness two years ago, he felt constantly watched – it was as if Death felt cheated and just waited in the wings. He snorted and thought, “And it is entirely the fault of the cow Harriet… who blabbed to the theater people, and, what do you know, the information  had immediately been passed on to the witch Mathers in Paris.”

To impress Miss Bosse, he had bragged about how he, during the inferno years, had found ancient documents that had turned out to be of great interest to people in both the Royal Academy of Sciences and a couple of Free Masons of his acquaintance. Just imagine that he, as any besotted fool, had revealed to her that the documents were actually stolen from Mathers’ Ahathoortempel in Paris. This was an almost catastrophic blunder. He shivered. Golden Dawn and their ideas about freemasonr, ancient Egypt and Atlantis. Or R’lyeh or whatever they were calling it … Surely, he had good reason to feel persecuted, now that Mathers was on his trail.

But soon there would be other things to think of! His poetry and prose harvested the triumphs he was worth and his contribution to Sweden’s greatness – the construction plans for the revolutionary new ether radium boiler which, admittedly, was copied from the documents he had stolen – had not passed by without justified attention. As long as the rumor of the unveiling of the invention did not reach the Golden Dawn, then he should be able to feel safe. By the way, who knows where Mathers in turn had received the papers from?
Now he – visionary and poet fighting the world – was sitting in a train to Gävle to participate in the unveiling of the prototype. To be inaugurated by Prince Wilhelm, the inflated idiot. What could possibly go wrong?