The programming has been announced for Think Galacticon, which is next weekend (July 8-10, 2011) in Chicago.

My speaking schedule is:

Saturday, 7:45-9:00 PM, Room 238
Choose Your Own Steampunk Adventure: An Interactive novel
Margaret will lead the audience on a live interactive jaunt through his new novel What Lies Beneath the Clock Tower, with a chalkboard to note particular forks and paths.

Sunday, 10:15-11:30 AM, Room 320
Writing for Radicals
Speculative fiction thrives on a dialogue with chewy ideas and can be counter to the suspicion that bringing politics in leads to bad writing. But whether the content is radical politically or the techniques experimental, writing as a radical makes an already difficult task even more challenging. Let’s talk about what radical writing entails and what might help, what works and what doesn’t.

1:15-2:30 PM, Room 320
Anarchism and Fiction
From The Monkey Wrench Gang to For the Win, anarchism is a powerful theme in fiction. This roundtable is a discussion of historical and contemporary anarchist fiction focusing on anarchist representation in fiction and the work of anarchists within the world of fiction-writing.

That something like Think Galacticon exists makes me enormously happy, and I can’t wait to attend.

I’m really excited to attend and speak at Think Galacticon 3 in Chicago, July 8-10th. I’ll be doing a reading from What Lies Beneath The Clock Tower and I’ll be speaking about anarchism and fiction, the subject of my first book, Mythmakers & Lawbreakers. Think Galacticon is a radical science fiction convention. Which is just fucking awesome. I’ll post my schedule properly when I know it. I’m stoked.

Or maybe “stoked’ is a better word to describe how I feel about attending Portland’s steampunk convention, GearCon, July 22-24th. (You know, since “stoked” is sort of a pun about steampunk, cause you stoke a steam engine.) I believe I’ll be doing a reading and generally attempting to worm my way onto panels about steampunk and politics and things like that.

And that same weekend, July 23-24th, is the Portland Anarchist Bookfair, which I hope I’ll have a chance to present Clock Tower at as well, and maybe ramble about some other stuff.

I’m in the United States, unfortunately, and not in Leipzig for Wave Gotik Treffen (the largest gothic festival in the world every year). Two of my co-editors with Graceless are there now, keeping up the radical and DIY spooky culture. My photographs have been included as part of NSK Lipsk which is some crazy wingnut shit related to NSK, a utopian microstate best known through the music of Laibach that mocks authoritarianism.

And I wish I was at Die Blaue Stunde again (sorry, site is in German), a DIY goth party of radical neo-romantics and other strange folks.

I’ll be speaking on a few panels at the Steampunk World’s Fair in Somerset, New Jersey this weekend, so if you’re there, come up and say hello!

On Friday, 5pm, in the Coolige room, I’ll be presenting Steampunk & The Apocalypse with my friends from Combustion Books (and hawking A Steampunk’s Guide To The Apocalypse of course).

Saturday, at noon, in the concierge lounge, I’ll be part of the Steampunk Bible booklaunch, a book I’m quite excited about because I trust the editors of it completely. (I can’t wait to see my copy. One downside to being nomadic is that I only pick up my mail a few times per year.)

Then on Sunday, 10am, Coolige room, I just discovered I’ll be a panelist at the Envisioning a Better Steam Society: Social Issues & Steampunk panel, moderated by Ay-leen the Peacemaker of Beyond Victoriana. From the description:

A discussion panel where panel participants discuss their thoughts about finding aesthetic inspiration in a historical era rife with sexism, racism and classist thinking. Can the steampunk subculture come to terms with its problematic past, or are we just repeating history, except with ray guns? Together with the audience, we hope to engage in an open dialogue about whether steampunk confronts or condones the historical ideas behind its inspiration, how nineteenth century thinking is re-interpreted in the present day, and what makes steampunk actually “punk.”

And starting on Saturday, gods willing, I’ll have copies of What Lies Beneath The Clock Tower.

I haven’t been to a steampunk event in years, and I’m excited as hell. It’s no secret I burned out on steampunk for awhile, growing sick of all the glorification of imperialism and obsession with trying to get on MTV. But it seems like a really good strong crop of people came up through it and are dedicated to utilizing steampunk as a lens with which to critique and understand contemporary society. And let’s face it, not everyone wants to be a punk-punk, so I’m glad that *punk has come around and opened the doors to DIY culture and anti-authoritarianism for more people. It’s not every day that a new subculture crops up that, for example, specifically includes a lot of people in their thirties and older who’ve never been subculturally affiliated. So fuck yeah, I like steampunk.

Now to figure out what the hell to wear.

If you’ve read my blog much you know that I regularly crosspost from From The Greek Streets, an english-language blog about the situation in Greece from a primarily anarchist point of view. That blog is run by the group Occupied London, and they’ve just released a new book, Revolt and Crisis in Greece: Between a Present Yet to Pass and a Future Yet to Come (which I had the joy of helping in a copy-editing capacity). Now, the two editors are on a tour of the US to discuss the themes of the book:

• April 4, 2011 – New York, NY, 6 Charles Pl. Brooklyn
• April 5, 2011 – Baltimore, MD, The 2640 Space
• April 7, 2011 – San Francisco, CA, Station 40
• April 9, 2011 – San Francisco, CA, Bay Area Anarchist bookfair
• April 10, 2011 – Berkeley, CA, BASTARD Conference
• April 12, 2011 – Modesto, CA, Firehouse Social Center
• April 15, 2011 – Olympia, WA, Sabot Infosquat, Evergreen State College
• April 16, 2011 – Portland, OR, Law and Disorder Conference
• April 18, 2011 – Seattle, WA, Left Bank Books

These events should be really, really worth attending.

I’ll be playing a show as Nomadic War Machine on January 28th at the Semi-Legit in Brooklyn, which appears to be at 6 Charles Place. I’m excited as hell to be playing alongside Rosa Apatrida! All proceeds from the show are going to benefit imprisoned anarchists.

Bilingual Trilingual anarcho-darkwave act Rosa Apatrida will be playing tomorrow night at We Will Dance Together As We Watch Their World Burn in Brooklyn.

I’ll be reading from a personal zine tonight in Baltimore at Red Emma’s.

My partner Enola is traveling the US on a zine-reading tour for her amazing (and prolifically-produced) zine No Gods, No Mattress. She discusses the travails of her travels as a woman alone with a frankness and clarity that I find breathtaking. Here are her tour dates so far:

-december 20: cyberpunk apocalypse, pittsburgh, pa.

-december 21: big idea books, pittsburgh, pa.

-december 28: book thug nation, brooklyn, ny.

-december 30: red emma’s, baltimore, md.

-january 3: firestorm cafe, asheville, nc.

-january 5: end of the line cafe, pensacola, fl.

-january 7: civic media center, gainseville, fl.

-january 11: iron rail, new orleans, la.

-january 14: sedition books, houston, tx.

-denver, co, january 16 or 17? ….

-january 20: red and black cafe, portland.