#Manda Bonus: Word Magic 2025 – Accidental Gods’ pick of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and podcasts through the year
Here’s Manda’s round up of (some of) the best books, poetry and podcasts she’s come across this year. Most of the links are to Bookshop.org in the UK where you can link to an independent bookshop of your choice. In some cases, we’ve linked to the authors’ website.
Non-Fiction
Economic Space Agency (Dick Bryan, Jorge Lopez and Akseli Virtanen) – Protocols for Post Capitalist Expression
Richard Schwartz and Thomas Hübl – Releasing our Burdens: A Guide to Healing Individual, Ancestral and Collective Trauma
Julie Brams – The Nature Embedded Mind: How the Way We Think Can Heal Our Planet and Ourselves
Tristan Gooley – How to Read a Tree: Clues and Patterns from Roots to Leaves
Justine Afra Huxley and Anna Kovasna – Co-creating with a Living Intelligent Earth: Pathways towards Kincentric Leadership
Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares – If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies: The case against superintelligent AI
Permaculture magazine – link to find out more and/or subscribe
Fiction
Rachel Neumeier – Rihasi, Marag, Sekaran, Hedesa – all four are part of the TUYO series. 8 Doors from Dawn to Midnight is a stand alone.
Natasha Pulley – The Hymn to Dionysus
Antonia Hodgson – The Raven Scholar
Katherine Addison – The Tomb of Dragons
Amal El Mohtar – The River has Roots
Jacqui Morris and Tamsin Abbott – Wild Folk Wild Gods Rising (+ our Podcast with the authors)
Richard Morgan – Altered Carbon
Becky Chambers – A Long Way to A Small Angry Planet
Poetry
Andrea Gibson – You better be Lightning
Joy Harjo – A Map to the Next World: Poems and Tales (+ YouTube Interview on the Power of Poetry)
Podcasts
Nate Hagens The Great Simplification – If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies: How Artificial SuperIntelligence Might Wipe Out our Entire Species w Nate Soares
Your Undivided Attention – Feed Drop: “Into the Machine” with Tobias Rose-Stockwell
Upstream – A World out of Balance: Introducing Doughnut 3.0 w Andrew Fanning
Point of Relation with Thomas Hübl – Becoming an Ally of Life
Love and Philosophy by Andrea Hiott– Moving Beyond Binaries in Eduction: Andrea Hiott in Conversation with Tim Logan of Future Learning Design
Future Learning Design – What’s Love Got to Do with Education? A Conversation with Dr Laura Penn, Khadija Shahper Backthiar, Jamie Bristow and Andrea Hiott
You may also like these recent podcasts
Autumn Equinox 2026
Here is an Autumn Equinox Meditation to help set you up for the shift from the long days to the long nights.
The Stewardship Freehold Village – an idea whose time has come – with Michael Taite
“When we build, we first remove the soil and replace it with rubble, concrete and tarmac. When we grow, we exclude all life from the land bar the one crop we want. Where we belatedly recognise our ultimate dependence on nature, we confine it to intensive ‘nature only’ areas such as rewilding zones, field margins and beetle banks.” Michael Taite 2026
Making Glorious Trouble with Uffe Elbaek, activist, system builder and author of Doubt, Hope, Action
We talk a lot on this podcast about the need for a new system: politically, culturally, in business, media and art…in everything we do. And yet, we don’t often have the opportunity to talk with someone who has set up a new political party – still less one explicitly predicated on the core values of courage, generosity, transparency, humility, humour and empathy. You’d think it would be hard to argue against these, but, as Uffe Elbaek discovered when he entered the Danish Parliament…the system doesn’t always want to be courageous, or transparent, or generous, or to embody humility, humour and empathy.
We All Came By Boat’ – exploring Ireland & Britain’s ancient myths and the world’s future mythologies with Clare Murphy
Cupla Focal! (Irish Gaelic for ‘A Couple of Words’) – so here are a couple of words and then a few more: what happens when the Fires in our Hearts become tsunamis of feeling that take us beyond the narrow imaginal cul de sacs our culture has created, and throw our doors wide open to the wonder of the past and the absolutely unknowable, glorious, constantly surprising possibilities of the future we haven’t built yet?
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