#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
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?
Love, Anger and Betrayal: Stories from the front line of Climate Action with Jonathan Porritt and Daniel Knorr
“Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals. But the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels. Investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure is moral and economic madness.” Antonio Guterres, UN General Secretary
Honouring the Web of Life – Thoughts from the Edge #5 with Manda Scott
How does it feel to honour everything: the things we take for granted, the things we judge as being bad or wrong, the things that disturb us, as well as the things whose loss we grieve so deeply? Manda explores the idea that shifting to a place of honouring can transform our entire worldview and help us to find meaning and purpose in a world on fire.
Building Scaleable Trust – Of Identity, Commons and Governance with Grace Rachmany of Sideways Earth
If we can build communities of place, purpose and passion, how do we find other communities to link with so we can scale from community to region, keep one another accountable, scale behaviour change beyond a closed or Dunbar-number community to multiple communities, scale actions and collaborations to regional levels without a hierarchical coordination structure and coordinate actions and behaviors based on the commons we share, whether or not we share “values”.
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