Exploring literary visions of greener, fairer ways of being
Mushrooms are a big thing right now in speculative fiction. I’ve enjoyed putting together this glossary of terms relating to fungi and the trend for fungal fiction. I wrote this in response to Jasmin Kirkbride’s keynote on mushroompunk at the Current Research in Speculative Fiction conference in July 2025.
Continue reading “Fungal fiction: a field guide to the mushroom trend in speculative fiction”
What’s the crossover between land work and utopia? I feel there is one, although it’s hard to articulate. Isn’t utopia science fiction, set in not-real places with fictional technology? How can that relate to working the land?
Well, increasingly utopian fiction is earthbound, with characters whose physical connection with the earth go beyond our own. Think the orogenes in N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy who manipulate seismic energy, and Vern in Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland whose fungal “passenger” enables her to communicate through mycelial networks.
Then there is movement the other way, too. I recently visited the We Feed The UK exhibition across the Royal Photographic Society and Martin Parr Foundation galleries at Paintworks in Bristol. This project brought photographers and poets to farms across the UK who are growing agroecologically, eschewing intensive farming methods. Viewing the exhibition, it was clear to me the photographers and poets had seen hope in these places and were conveying this through their work.
What follows is my review of the exhibition, with a focus on the latent utopianism within its celebration of the “custodians of soil and sea”.
Continue reading ““The constellations were at our feet this whole time”: We Feed The UK’s earthy utopias”
Let me take you behind the scenes on the video I recorded this morning for the upcoming Current Research in Speculative Fiction conference. It looks like this: a phone mount, attached to a GorillaPod, attached to some ivy, attached to a tree.
Continue reading “Behind the scenes for an upcoming video”
Last week, in the council chamber within the main building of Cardiff University surrounded by portraits of venerable white men, I attended a day long workshop on decolonial research led by Dr Leon Moosavi. As I embark on my PhD I am interested in what it takes to do the day job in a way that embodies the decolonial ideals of the utopian fictions I am studying, so that my research can work towards the same aim.
Continue reading “Decolonial researcher training – some thoughts”We went on a family trip to Cheddar Gorge and Caves and I was, like most visitors who have been in the show caves over the past 187 years I’m sure, very impressed by the rock formations. What I was particularly impressed by was their semblance to other things in nature I would usually think of as alive.
I know, and knew before I stepped inside the caves, that over a long enough timescale rock is dynamic. In terms of visualising this, I would have thought of lava, or rocks being eroded over time, or even water dripping over rock to form stalactites and stalagmites. But seeing the organic forms of the rocks within the caves made me think more about rock as a living thing.
Continue reading “The living rock: dispatches from a cave”A word at the outset of this report to note there will be spoilers for the Broken Earth trilogy by N. K. Jemisin. Also, this report is not comprehensive. Conversely, it is highly subjective and reflects what I personally found exciting and pertinent to my own areas of interest. This means mostly Jemisin, Nisi Shawl and Rivers Solomon, utopia, visionary fiction and decolonisation. As you’re reading the Just Utopias blog you’re hopefully here for this, so let’s crack on.
Continue reading “Women in the Black Fantastic conference report”Following the The Word for World is Forest symposium, I was invited to turn my presentation into a full length article for The Acorn journal. I’m pleased to say this is now available online.
Continue reading “My new publication on The Word for World is Forest by Ursula Le Guin”Waking up to the US election result was depressing for many reasons, but the one I’ll talk about here is the stark contrast between the progressiveness I see in contemporary American utopias and the fact that in reality, more than 75 million Americans voted for Trump.
Continue reading “Is utopia more or less relevant since Trump’s re-election?”
St David’s in Wales, the smallest city in Britain, has a population of less than 2,000 but a massive cathedral. This disparity is due to it having been an important site of pilgrimage for over 1,000 years. In 1123, the Pope even declared that two trips to St David’s were as good as one to Rome. This October, I was one of a number who descended on St David’s, not for a religious pilgrimage but for a gathering of poets.
Continue reading “Pilgrims: A gathering of poets in West Wales”I will be giving a paper as part of this year’s conference of the Science Fiction Foundation. The topic for the conference, which will be held online on 7-8 December 2024, is Women in the Black Fantastic. Full details of the programme and a link to buy tickets can be found here.
Continue reading “Women in the Black Fantastic: Upcoming Online Conference”