Season 1, Episode 3: A New World In Our Hearts: Utopias ft. Ken MacLeod

In this episode, we interview absolute legend Ken MacLeod about utopias in science fiction. And yes, we’re talking about the Culture. Of course we’re talking about the Culture.

Show Notes:

The Early Days of a Better Nation

Russian Cosmism

Utopia and the Return of History

Postwar as the war generation’s utopia

China 2019, just before the pandemic

Reading/Watching List

• The Culture, Iain M. Banks
• News From Nowhere, William Morris
• Half-Earth Socialism: https://www.half.earth/
• Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 by M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi
• The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin
• The Green-Sky Trilogy by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
• This Is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar
• Red Star by Alexander Bogdanov
• Another Now by Yanis Varoufakis
• Desert by Anonymous
• The English Utopia by A.L. Morton
• Utopia by Thomas More
• Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach
• Elysium (2013)
• The Creator (2023)
• Noon Universe by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
• We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
• Lenin Lives by Philip Cunliffe
• Merrie England by Robert Blatchford
• Ministry For the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson