The idea behind Nine Worlds is to create a large fan-run multi-genre geek event in London. For years we've been going to huge US sci-fi cons like Dragon*Con and GenCon and SDCC, and we got to wondering why nothing like that exists in the UK. France can drum up over 20,000 sci-fi fans for Utopiales, even Finland can find 15,000 fans for FinnCon. But when it comes to large fan-driven residential multi-genre sci-fi cons in the UK, pickings are pretty slim.

That said, we're not really a sci-fi con either; we're more than that. We started off self-defining as a sci-fi con because there aren't really any other models (or words) for what we're trying to create. But we always intended to be inclusive of all kinds of things from board games to costumes to Doctor Who fandom to skeptics. As we're been developing the project, the label Sci-Fi Con has been fitting less and less well, and eventually, we decided that GeekFest is a better description. And while there'll be lots of sci-fi/fantasy TV/film & lit stuff going on at Nine Worlds, there'll be even more other stuff like science and creative writing and film making, that have no direct link to sci-fi (other than a degree of overlap in fan bases).

Red Dwarf is iconic not only for its Emmy award winning comedy, but also for the way it explores deeply human issues through the medium of a group of people trapped together in circumstances beyond their control. Using Sci-Fi tropes and sometimes lowbrow, sometimes highbrow, comedy it considers issues which have troubled philosophers down the ages. These include the will to power (Nietzsche) though the medium of a marooned android (Kryten II-1); The self in the gaze of the other (Sartre) through the medium of a mind-controlled terrain-morphing planet (Terrorform V-3); The Demon's curse (Nietzsche) through the medium of a time-travelling robot-judge (The Inquisitor V-2) and time altering photo-ink (Timeslides III-5); The nature of fate and selfhood, whether with or without a guiding hand, (Kierkegaard) through the medium of a emotion sucking alien (and Duane Dibbley) (Polymorph III-3 and Emohawk: Polymorph II VI-4). And of course the overall idea of being (trapped) with others and what we do about it weaving throughout the seasons can be found in Sartre's work in No Exit, Heidegger's being thrown in a world-with-others, and Buber's I and Thou.

In this workshop the presenters, who are both existential psychotherapists and academics (we're hoping for a place on-board The Enlightenment but are not, quite, smug enough) will run though some of the philosophical topics in the show, and then invite participants to consider how these might help to inform the way we all live and view the world. So if it's ever struck you that there might that there might be something more...
...something greater.
...something unimaginably more splendid than heating bread.
- then this is the workshop for you.