Imaginary Worlds - Blueprints for Utopias

Episode Date: April 9, 2025

The golden age of sci-fi was filled with utopian visions the future. These days, when sci-fi creators project ahead several decades, the world is looking a lot more dystopian. But there is a group of artists who believe that a better tomorrow is possible if we can imagine it first. Architects are finding that science fiction can be a great way to understand how their buildings will adapt to a rapidly changing world. I talk with architect and Texas Tech professor Jes Deaver about why she thinks sci-fi can inspire her students to not only think outside the literal box, but to have more empathy. Liam Young explains why he created a program at SCI-Arc to train architects who want to work in fictional or virtual worlds. And author Thomas R. Weaver discusses how he enrolled a city planner to build a pitch deck for a colony spaceship, and why floating cities may not be the best solution to climate change. This episode is sponsored by The Perfect Jean, Audible and Hims. Go to theperfectjean.nyc and get 15% off your first order when you use the code IMAGINARY15 at checkout. Go to audible.com/sunrise and listen to the audiobook of Listen to Sunrise on the Reaping. Start your free online visit today at Hims.com/IMAGINARY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. I was brainstorming ideas recently for episodes, and I thought about all the science fiction tropes I could explore. VR, AI, space travel, colonizing Mars, robots, uploading our brains to computers, mechanizing our bodies. And I realized all of this technology is no longer just science fiction. It's on the market or it's in development.

We are living in the future that sci-fi writers dreamed about 40 or 50 years ago. But I don't feel like celebrating. I don't trust the people developing the technology. And I find it creepy when they say everything will be wonderful, nothing will go wrong, don't question them, they're geniuses. Then I thought about the state of science fiction, and I noticed two very broad categories. Positive and negative futures. The positive stories usually take place very far in the future, centuries from now. People zip across the galaxy and meet aliens or robots.

Our current problems are ancient history. The darker futures usually take place in the coming decades, anywhere from 30 to 70 years from now. And by the time we get to the end of the 21st century, things look pretty frightening. It's every type of dystopia you can imagine. Just pick your poison. I can't read or watch these types of stories because when I look at the news every day, I feel like I'm already following a dystopian storyline. I can't wallow in future timelines where things get even worse within the lifespan

of people today. And just as I was having this existential crisis, a listener named Jess Deaver contacted me. She was doing a talk at South by Southwest called Brave New City Designed Through the Lens of Science Fiction. And she told me there is a community of artists who are thinking about the future in that time span. They don't see dystopias.

They see better tomorrows and bright possibilities. Who are these people? Architects. I wanna play some of Jess's talk at South by Southwest. She starts by showing images from Blade Runner. Some of the scenes were filmed in the Bradbury Building, which is a real building in downtown Los Angeles. It was built in 1893.

Blade Runner is a dystopian movie, but in her talk, Jess explains that one of the architects of the Bradbury Building, George Wyman, was inspired by a 19th century utopian novel called Looking Backwards. In the book, it imagines a 21th century utopian novel called Looking Backwards. In the book, it imagines a 21st century world with cooperative housing and workplaces made out of crystal quartz.

And so Wyman, who designed this building, thought to himself about after reading that novel, and he created this. 70 years later became what we saw in Blade Runner. It's incredible. In real life, the Bradbury building doesn't look like it did in Blade Runner. It was restored after the movie came out.

And I've been there. It's stunning. It looks historic and futuristic at the same time. You want a drink? Jess showed another example from Blade Runner. We see the apartment of Harrison Ford's character. You think I'm a replicant, don't you? The set was inspired by a real house that Frank Lloyd Wright designed.

The style of the house combines ancient Mayan motifs and patterns with futuristic art deco. It's looking at the future by connecting back to the past. Now, this is going to be a running thing we're going to think about, because the past very heavily influences how we think about the future. Later in her talk, Jess did a Q&A with the audience. She asked them to imagine the world in a few decades. What is the world going to look like? If we fail at everything we're trying

to do to mitigate climate change, what's it going to look like if we fail at everything we're trying to do to mitigate climate change? What's it going to look like? People mentioned sea level rise, pandemics, lack of vegetation, mass extinctions. Yeah, these are all horrific, right? These are awful. But I'm going to flip that question around for you. What does the future look like if every single one of

our endeavors to mitigate climate change succeeds? She got answers like species regeneration and energy transition. She was surprised she got any positive answers because a scientist that she knows in Australia tried the same thing in front of a live audience. She gave them that exact question, and what she found was that everyone could really visualize the destruction of the future. And then they were a little more hesitant,

it was a little hazy to think about what success would look like. And her point is, why are we so stunted in what we're able to imagine? That's why she says architects and city planners should embrace science fiction as a powerful tool. So a lot of cities are thinking to themselves, wow, how do I imagine my city in 20 years? What's our 20-year master plan? You should be thinking, what's my 100-year master plan?

Where are we going to be in 200 years? That's why you're starting to see a lot of cities are inviting futurists to come on board when they're doing their master planning. Not because they're going to actually sit down and design you a realistic plan or city or that we've got architects for that we have city planners for that. This is so we can think differently. Talking with Jess and other people who've worked in architecture actually made me think differently about the future.

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Jess Deaver is a practicing architect. She also teaches at Texas Tech University, where she wants to inspire the next generation who haven't entered the field yet. In her class, she assigned each student a different science fiction novel. They had to pick a character and design a home for them as if the character was their client.

I wanted to get my students to think really broadly and to not be afraid of the technology not being there yet. One of the books she chose was Accidental Intelligence by Brian Chaffin. It takes place in a future where people share the world with sentient AIs and we can easily go into virtual spaces. That was creatively inspiring, but her student latched onto something else

when designing a home for the main character. She was thinking about the way that certain spaces inside of her house would need to be flexible. She was trying to think of how levels in the house would rise and lower so that the same functional space could be at a different spatial relationship to the other rooms in the house. So there was a lot of movement up and down and she was using her sort of a precedent or an idea to kind of model it after as a coffee press, like a French press. And the French press was really interesting because her character loves coffee. And so

coffee was a big theme throughout the whole time that she was reading this book. I'd say another cool technology was landing pads that were landing on the roof instead of front doors. So they were imagining that you would enter the house from the roof. She also assigned the classic book, I robot by Isaac Asimov. The student chose to design a house for the character who is a robot psychologist. She in the future, he decided would need a place to work on and work with the robots that's attached to her home. So he gave her a lovely very

intimately scaled using sort of measurements you would see in something like a Frank Lloyd Wright house. You know very intimate private living rooms and dining rooms with beautiful views out to the landscape. And it was at the ground level so that you could see nature right up to your door and right up to your windows. But then for the robots, he had them elevated. So they were up in these towers that were connected so you could access it from the residence, but they were elevated.

And I talked with him a lot about why he chose to do that. And he said, because, you know, humans need to have some separation from robotic entities, especially while they're being worked on, because they can be unsafe. And also their scale is different, like they're huge. And so because they're, they can be really big or really small, they're going to need laboratories that can fit their dimensions. But those dimensions don't really fit a human being. I told Jess that this looks like it was a lot of fun for the students, but is it practical? I mean, how is this going to help them in the real world?

Science fiction is an incredible way to develop empathy. It's something that is lacking as we become more and more technologically advanced as a society. We're losing the ability just talking through screens, through Zoom, through our phones. We're losing the ability to read micro-expressions. We're losing the ability to hear tone because we only have whatever audio device we're listening through. And what my students were forced to do was not just develop empathy by reading science fiction, I actually asked them to write science fiction about their architecture. And I realized that by having them write the story, not just read the science

fiction, but write a science fiction story, it gave them the tools to begin thinking about their client as a human being that would be living in this space. But why sci-fi though? Because theoretically you could have done this with 13 or 12 realistic contemporary novels. What does sci-fi kind of bring to the situation, bring to your mindset? The reason that sci-fi is really critical here is that it's that bridge between foresight and that logical architectural thinking. When you have rational thought, which is I would say reality-based fiction, so fiction that's happening currently or even historical fiction, we're working on a set of precepts that are very common. We're working with a set of understandings about things. Now,

science fiction is throwing all that out the window. It's saying it could be as wild as it wants to be. We have a new level of gravity. We can travel to other galaxies. We can walk through walls. So it's defying a lot of physics that is preventing us from thinking even further outside the box as builders and designers. And so science fiction really, I think, opens the mind in pretty much the only way you can open your mind to move beyond where we are currently and really have new change happen. There's another academic program which combines sci-fi and architecture.

And the goal is to get the students to imagine more positive futures. Liam Young is a designer and filmmaker. He also runs a graduate program at SciArc in Los Angeles. Liam used to work in architecture, and he says it's natural for people in that field to think optimistically. We have to be able to sell some kind of aspirational or positive future. It's very difficult to go into one of those meetings and look, I've designed this amazing thing. It's going to be horrible.

It's going to be dystopian and a nightmare. Give us $40 million so we can go out and build it. But when he was an architect, he sometimes felt like he was living in a dystopia. I became increasingly frustrated with the ways that a lot of contemporary architecture is really in the service of despots and dictators. What do you mean? Well, I mean, the dream jobs and commissions of this generation of architects is the big mega museum or the giant tower. Architects are very much in the service of capital.

We're expensive. The things we make are expensive. In many ways, the work of an architect is determined to a large extent by who can pay for the things that we do and design. In the state of the world, that often means you end up building beach houses for horrible rich people or you do some trophy iconic museum in an oil state with questionable human rights records. I was searching for ways that my skills as an architect could be deployed with the potential to shape change in how we exist and communicate and form communities across space.

So he left reality and created this master's program to train architects who don't want to build in the real world either. They want to build worlds for TV, film, video games, or virtual reality. In many cases, an architect's skills are wasted on just designing buildings, especially as now a lot of those entertainment mediums are becoming more and more immersive. The traditional language that we've built up across 150 years of thinking about film no longer is fit for purpose. In the context of VR or desired immersive experiences, the idea of an edit or the framing of a rectangular image no longer makes as much sense as terms that come out of architecture and design.

You know, it's better to talk not about an edit, but to talk about a transition or a threshold. It's more interesting to talk not about the frame or the composition of a rectangle, but to talk about scale and proportion. The back and forth between architecture and sci-fi has a deep history. The back and forth between architecture and sci-fi has a deep history. Earlier, we heard how the Bradbury Building was inspired by a 19th century science fiction novel. And there's a whole field called speculative architecture, which is like speculative fiction but using designs instead of words. Liam says his personal heroes are a renegade group of British architects who created a fantastical magazine

in the early 60s called Archigram. The title is a combination of the words architecture and telegram. Their product as an avant-garde architecture group wasn't buildings but was drawings. The architecture of the time that they were sited within was big and monumental and weighty. They created images of the walking city. One of their iconic projects was just a city on legs that would just get up and move and wander around the globe. I had trouble imagining what he was talking about, so I looked up the walking city. It was first introduced in 1964 in the pages of Archigram. The walking cities look like giant steel beetles

moving on eight legs. And speaking of beetles, I'm not the first person to notice a similarity between the animated film Yellow Submarine and the pop art style of Archigram, which started years before the movie. The architects at Archigram also imagined something called the Plug-in City, which looks like it was made of giant Tinker toys and Lego bricks.

Liam says the concept of the Plug-in City is that it's made of prefabricated modules that you can reconfigure any way you want. Today, modular design is everywhere. Some of these buildings look like giant Jenga towers or stacks of Tetris blocks. It really got a generation of architects to think about what a building could be.

That's my argument about the role of science fiction and architecture today is that at certain times in the world, it makes more sense than others. And that transitionary moment in the 60s and 70s it was critical that we were thinking in that way about what the future could be and I think we're in a similar moment right now where whether it be climate change or new technologies of AI or all of these balls in there are in the air and we really have no idea where they're going to fall and it's why I think the design of our future is really a project again.

World building doesn't have to be done with production design or architecture. You can create entire worlds with words on a page and the sound of a human voice. Audible has a huge selection of science fiction and fantasy audio books. And the voice actor, Jefferson White, does an amazing job narrating the highly anticipated new audio book in the Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins. It's called Listen to Sunrise on the Reaping,

and the audio book is available now on Audible. Revisit the world of Panem 24 years before the original Hunger Games series. At the dawn of the 50th annual Hunger Games, fear grips the districts of Panem. This year, twice as many tributes will be taken from their homes. And one of the names that's called

is a young Hamich Abernathy, the legend who will someday mentor Katniss Everdeen. Whether you're a passionate fan or just starting your journey, venture to District 12 and hear the story fans have been waiting for. Experience the worldwide best-selling series in a whole new way. Go to audible.com slash sunrise and listen with the world. and listen with the world. Liam Young wants his students to imagine a time when today's cutting-edge technology is commonplace. If drones are dropping off packages or people, where will they land?

If people walk out of their homes wearing headsets or smart glasses that show a digital world layered on top of the real one, should architects accommodate them when designing the physical landscape? The example that he gave is that I could download a Star Wars package to my futuristic headset or glasses. When I walk out the door,

the buildings look like they're in the world of Star Wars, or maybe I see Star Wars characters walking around. A store or a building could offer a specific virtual experience for anyone who goes there. If architects aren't designing these systems, then someone else will. And that's a reason why architects need to get ahead of these technologies and start to speculate and imagine through a lot of the genres of science fiction that we might talk about. That's the way that architects working in science fiction can be valuable is to figure

out where these limits are to play out these imaginaries. So we can start to think through like like what of these technologies we should be investing in, what regulations need to be put in place before they're rolled out, what are these technologies we need to be running away from, screaming and doing everything we can to put in place barriers to their entry. As I've discussed on the show before, many Silicon Valley moguls have been inspired by science fiction. That's not always a good thing. Sometimes they misread cautionary tales and see them as cool stuff they want to make. That's one of the reasons why Jess and Liam try to pick positive or optimistic sci-fi.

The work these students create in their professional careers could end up inspiring the next generation of tech moguls. But cautionary tales are the wheelhouse of science fiction. A good story needs a conflict. And for the record, Jess does appreciate those kinds of stories. But she wonders... Jess McNeil-Does the future always have to be an antagonistic quality to the story itself? I think that's a big question to ask. And so that's one of the key problems with using science fiction as a lens to see the future in the built world. Storytelling is inherently designed to have a problem in an antagonistic villain. And so how do we have a villain that

isn't the future? That's the real question. Thomas R. Weaver has grappled with that question in his novels. And before he was a science fiction writer, Tom worked in architecture. I had a very interesting and bizarre role, which was I would get involved in projects somewhere at the very early stage of trying to imagine what the future was going to look like. If you were designing a school that was going to be a building that was there for the next hundred years, should it be designed like a 19th century school? Or if you were designing a school that was going to be a building that was there for the next 100 years Should it be designed like a 19th century school or if you ask the right questions? Can you forecast a little bit into the future and say, you know, what does a school look like in? 30 40 50 years time and how do we design the right buildings for that now?

Do you feel like this is something when you read other science fiction novels you wish they did more of in terms of world building? Yeah, I mean, science fiction and fantasy are obviously, sometimes suffer from world builders disease where people spend too much time on the world building and not enough time on thinking about character and plot. I'm always very careful to make sure this is the impressionistic stuff, that you're painting images in people's minds without going into so much detail that they just feel like they're reading large bolts of text.

His approach is definitely working. After he self-published his novel, Artificial Wisdom, Penguin Random House bought the rights in order to sequel. We'll get to Artificial artificial wisdom in a bit, but first I want to talk about another novel that Tom is working on. It's called Futility Town, and the story takes place on a generation ship of space colonists. Because of his background in architecture,

Tom thought it would be a good idea to enlist an urban planner. He asked her to create a pitch deck to imagine how the ship would function like a flying city. He sent the pitch deck to me and it's very impressive. It's sleek and detailed. I had no idea really what she was going to produce. She went through everything from what was going to be the density and the population and the kind of land areas that might be in use on this spacecraft. What would the form of the spacecraft be? What kind of shape? If a deck was the size of a city, how do you get around it? But she looked at things all the way through to the kind of materials that might be in use for sustainability and what kind of clothing people might be able to produce, how we might look at energy and waste and

recycling and food production, everything. So she really produced a very detailed report. Yeah, so we have page one here is space environment. Talking about the outer space environment. Page two is density. There's a whole thing on the Tokyo's historic core and looking a little bit at Manhattan as well. You know, and giving these examples as to what it's inspired by.

And then it shows on page three, spacecraft form. What this would be like in terms of the amount of the decks. She says that, well, Tom envisions this as having 13 stacked decks, 12 of which are habitable. There's a whole thing on linkage system, you know, sort of how everything is moved, like through a hyperloop. So she went into like materials, production techniques,

how is made food production. How much of this had you given thought to already and how much of this were you like, whoa, I had not thought of this at all? I think what was interesting was I'd given the one line kind of thoughts to some of this. This was my off-world colony equivalence and some of these things that she was able to take

and say, well, what would that look really look like? You know, I'd mentioned maybe there's some sort of Maglev monorail to get people around the edge of the deck. And she was able to say, well, that would make sense if it was double deck and you actually had kind of inbound and then rises up to an outbound level and it kind of goes 360 degrees around it rather than trying to change up and down. So she would flesh out some of these ideas and say, this is how we could practically kind of make that happen within the space limitations that you have.

I mean, she goes into like, you know, aluminum. No, actually, how do you pronounce aluminum? I always think this is interesting. Aluminium in the UK. I can never say that. Al-al-al-aluminium. There's a transparent aluminum or al-aluminium I can never say that. Alalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalal vertical farming. Was it almost too tempting to put all this in here and to just sort of start like just like name dropping materials because you had it in there? No, I'm always very careful about that. I think again, this is helping to give me a

feel for what an environment needs to be. You want to be able to sprinkle it with just little references to make sure, you know, that the deeper world is there, but nobody would want to read the, you know, an architectural deck turned into a fiction piece. And it's very important that you've got to represent through the eyes of the character and the characters wouldn't know any of this. They just see the effect of it, the consequence of it. And so once you start to think through that, as you keep writing, if you need to, OK, I need a different kind of setting over here,

or I need something to go wrong over there, well, there's an endless source of inspiration that is logically consistent with the world you've already created. Tom's book, Futility Town, is on hold for now because he's focusing on writing a sequel to his first book, Artificial Wisdom. That series takes place in a future grappling with climate change, among other things, and there are floating cities. These cities can travel the oceans to avoid storms and find the most ideal climate.

Earlier, Jess Deaver said that if you're telling a futuristic story and you don't want technology or the future to be the villain, what's the conflict? In artificial wisdom, class is a big issue. Only the wealthy can afford to live in these floating cities. Yeah, it's ultimately economics. And the movement to try and create much nicer, beautiful environments depends on a government that is willing to spend money in that way. And we're not seeing very much of that at the moment. Floating cities are not a new idea. Tom based them off real proposals by architects. And by coincidence, in 2010, I interviewed an

architect for a public radio story where he talked about his proposal for a floating megastructure in Boston Harbor. That struck a chord with me since Boston is my hometown. Boston is rooted in a very specific history, architecture, and climate. It's also under threat from sea level rise. Thinking about a hundred years from now, imagining that Boston could be underwater, but there could be this floating city called New Boston, feels sad to me. Even if New Boston is open to everyone, has a museum of historic buildings,

and a reconstruction of Fenway Park. You've hit the nail on the head, and in a funny way, we have characters on both sides of that within the book. You know, characters walking around going, this is lovely but it is just a theme park, it's all fake. This is the Disney-fied kind of, you know, it's got cobbled streets but these aren't real cobbled streets. And you've got characters that adore it. You know, what was fun in the book was then to look at the other environments, you know, in the world that people are inhabiting and, you they going to, and what do those look like? Kind of face the opposite problem. They are more dystopian,

but actually they're more real and authentic and the characters actually want to go back to them. And it's a parmy that wants to see the city tip over in an awful Titanic way. Is that ever going to happen? So interestingly, in the book, there is, so the main character is shown a simulation of this happening, like if things get too bad. If you don't make certain decisions to turn around this crisis, this is what could happen to the city. So I do explore that and we'll have to see in the sequel whether those things come to pass or not.

By the way, Liam Young hates the idea of floating cities. Hey, we can all live on the oceans and let's urbanize the oceans in the same way we've urbanized the rest of the planet. And somehow this is a positive and good thing. And I think we need to be really wary of that. So much of science fiction is about time, slowing down time, speeding it up,

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Results vary based on studies of topical and oral monoxidil and finasteride. Prescription products require an online consultation with a healthcare provider who will determine if a prescription is appropriate. Restrictions apply. See website for full details and important safety information. Everyone I talked with is well aware that climate change is the big unknown factor. Jess Deaver says if any architect wants to build something that stands the test of time, climate change is not just a test, it's the final exam.

And she believes that every architect should be thinking. What is the lifespan of this building? How does that balance against what will happen during its lifespan? You know, if we think about them as living entities, you know, buildings need to breathe, they sweat, you know, they need to dry out. They work a lot like our bodies, especially now with all the technology, they're really functioning like little mini ecosystems.

If you're creating this entity that's now so complex, the ecosystem has so many different toggles that you can switch on and off, how do we create it so that it can die better? And a lot of that comes down to how can we take it apart in the most respectful and yet thoughtful manner. Some of that is twofold. It's not just taking it apart, it's taking apart the pieces that don't work anymore and being able to use the structure that's there in a positive manner.

I'm imagining all those scenes where you see a futuristic New York and the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building are there in this flooded New York or amidst all these super advanced skyscrapers. And you got to wonder what's even inside there. Have they just kept the top, the iconic top, and then could be something completely different on the inside? Right, and so that's the question is, are these just armatures?

Like, are they just sort of a structure that we can use to begin to build? Maybe, you know, if so, how do we build that structure better so that it lasts longer and becomes multifunctional? Like, how do we create that? That brings me to the sub genre of solar punk. I did an episode about solar punk in 2020 and it was one of the most popular episodes I've ever done.

One of the things I like about solar punk is that it bypasses the question of whether we can ever get our act together. If humanity fails to address climate change, you can take care of yourself and your loved ones on a smaller scale. You can MacGyver your home with solar and wind technology, and it's scalable to a certain degree.

The images of solar punk buildings in cities look really cool with lots of glass panels and greenery. But I was surprised to learn that Liam is not a fan. You know, we see trees on rooftops, we see solar panels and wind turbines scattered around cities, we see a return to localism. The idea that we're no longer going to be shipping our food across the planet, but instead are going to be growing things in community gardens and through shared resources and so on.

So I think it's really valuable as a genre, but I don't think it's any kind of blueprint for a future. I'm interested in starting to think about what new punk genres we need right now. I've talked about this term planetary punk, visualizing collective action at the scale of the planet. And I would guess I would characterize most of my work as being forms of planetary punk. Well, that seems like a complete contradiction. You know, it may be punk in your mind, but for everybody else who's living in this city-wide planet you've designed, you're a despot. I guess planetary punk is defined by collective action at the scale of the planet.

It speaks to some of the limitations I see in something like solar punk, where on the surface the images produced seem productive and in many ways ideal and hopeful, but they're often predicated on scales of the local, which we've blown past long ago. A banana is a planetary object. What's a local iPad look like? What's a local mobile phone? We've created a world built from planetary infrastructure and relationships. It's a great and viable solar punk project, I think is really to imagine

what a viable end to fossil fuels look like. You know, what is that? And how can architects and science fiction imagery play a role in mapping out what that post fossil fuel future might be? It's planetary scale urban change and totally rewiring, you know, the way that we generate and consume our energy. I think what he's saying is that if we can imagine anything in the future,

why limit ourselves to survival mechanisms? And when I looked again at some of the artwork of solar punk cities, I stopped focusing on all the greenery and began to notice how many building materials could never be locally sourced. On the other end of the spectrum, Liam doesn't think that architects should try to design ecological megastructures and try to squeeze people into them. I thought that's what he meant when he said planetary punk. Instead, Liam wants to imagine a future that takes place after governments and real estate

developers commit to making positive long-term solutions. If architects imagine buildings in that environment, we might be inspired to think, I want to live there or I hope that future generations get a chance to live there. But we have to be the catalyst of change, social and political change, before those worlds can be built. This also comes down to your view of human nature. Can we as a species make the best choices for ourselves and think as a global community? Or do we succumb to our worst instincts?

I'm not feeling hopeful some days. I suspect that dystopias are right. That's why they make me nervous. But I am glad there are people who don't feel that way. And I can't wait for them to prove me wrong. The next episode will dive deep into the career of Sid Meade. He was a pioneering futurist who was relentlessly optimistic, even if he's best known for designing the dystopian world of Blade Runner.

That's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Jess Deaver, Liam Young, and Tom Weaver. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. We have another podcast called Between Imaginary Worlds. It's a more casual chat show. It's only available to listeners who pledge on Patreon. I recently talked with AJ Jacobs from the podcast The Puzzler. You might also know him from his books The Year of Living Biblically and The Year of Living Constitutionally. We discuss why Greek myths are so much racier than the sanitized versions written for children. And we talk about the days when riddles were like verbal combat in ancient tales and real

life. And that is an aspect of riddles as well. Like in ancient Greece, you would have these, they were rap battles basically. You would have riddle battles where these nobles would go and get drunk and try to stump each other with riddles. Between Imaginary Worlds comes included with the ad-free version of the show that you can get on Patreon. You can also buy an ad-free subscription on Apple Podcasts.

If you support the show on Patreon, at different levels you get either free Imaginary World stickers, a mug, or a t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has the full length interviews of every guest in every episode. And you can join some of our group chats about shows like Severance and Daredevil. And I'm gonna start a discussion group about Andor when season two premieres.

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