#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
Mothering the Future we’d be proud to leave behind – with author and activist Zineb Mouhyi
“I have come to believe something that sounds simple and is anything but: if Mothering were the axis around which we revolved, we would liberate the world. By Mothering I do not mean the biological act of giving birth, or the domestic role that has been used to confine us. I mean the practice – available to all people, in all bodies – of tending to life with full presence: protecting it, nourishing it, teaching it to know itself, trusting it.”
Grown Up Politics: A Chance for Change – Round Table with Neal Lawson of Compass and Rupert Read of the Climate Majority Project
We’re at a pivotal moment in world geopolitics. Increasingly the masks and the gloves are both off – but it’s not a binary choice any more between two sets of suits in slightly different coloured ties: now we have the right showing its true colours – and a chance for the progressive majority in this country to find its feet and lead us towards a genuinely thoughtful, emotionally literate, high-bandwidth politics that ditches the toxic tribalism and instead lays the ground for a future that could actually work.
Breaking open the Story of Bread with Abby Rose of Farmerama
We’re delighted to welcome Abby Rose from the Farmerama podcast to share how story about bread helped listeners to take action, big and small. This is Thrutopia in action and really gets to the heart of the power of story to change the future. Please do listen and enjoy!
Trust like the Web (of Life) trusts – Biomimicry for Social Innovation with Toby Herzlich
How can we bring the insights of Biomimicry to the field of human inter-being? How can we shift our sense of self and other, our communities of place, purpose and passion, our businesses, our governance structures…everything that we are and do onto a different trajectory using the web of life as our template?
STAY IN TOUCH
For a regular supply of ideas about humanity's next evolutionary step, insights into the thinking behind some of the podcasts, early updates on the guests we'll be having on the show - AND a free Water visualisation that will guide you through a deep immersion in water connection...sign up here.
(NB: This is a free newsletter - it's not joining up to the Membership! That's a nice, subtle pink button on the 'Join Us' page...)