#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
Sculpting Invisible Materials: Expanding Empathy in the Hot Mess of Now with Dylan McGarry of Empatheatre
Empathy lets us do more than just step into another’s shoes, it opens the doors for us to step into their heart and soul with the vast generosity of spirit we’d like others to bring to us, so that we can see through their eyes as the best of who they are. Obviously, we can do this with other people, but we can do it too, with whales, with elephants, with horses, and red kites and moles and spiders – and mountains and trees and landscapes… empathy is the spark that connects us to the More than Human world.
Towards the Symbiocene: Building an Eco-Civilisation with thought-leader, Jeremy Lent
Jeremy Lent is a long time friend of the podcast. His new book, ‘Ecocivilization: Making a World That Works for All’ is coming out at the end of April 2026 and so we got together to discuss what an Ecocivilisation is, why we so badly need to become one, and how we might get there.
The Joy of Becoming Lost: Maps, Myths and Navigating the meta-crisis with Sam Crosby of Recalling Fire
We are a storied species – we live and breathe and love and learn by the rich tapestry of stories that shape our lives. Everything we do from picking a career to moving house, from finding our life’s co-creator(s) to choosing what to have for lunch is underpinned by stories of who we are and how the world works. Often, we take these stories so much for granted that we don’t even recognise they are stories – we genuinely believe the world works like this…
Pull from the heart, don’t push from the head: Spreading Stories that Work with Matt Golding of Antidote
How do we create stories powerful enough, moving enough, inspiring enough – and grounded enough – to shift the trajectory of our culture onto a totally new pathway?
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