Chapter 3: “Armageddon it been in Effect”: Utopia, Dystopia or UNtopia? A Conversation With Ursula K. Le Guin, Sarah Pinsker, and N. K. Jemisin

Chuck D and Flavor Flav invite N. K. Jemisin, Afrofuturist and MacArthur Fellow, Sarah Pinsker, lead singer of The Stalking Horses, songwriter, science fiction and fantasy author, and Ursula K. Le Guin, speculative fiction writer, to a dinner party on Long Island. Professor Griff, Terminator X, and DJ Lord drop by for coffee and dessert. Political scientist, mystery and science fiction writer Walter Mosley and physics professor and speculative fiction writer Vandana Singh both crash the party. What do they talk about?

This chapter evolves from a thought experiment conducted with the students in my peacebuilding and social justice seminar—IDS 300V—Building Community, Building Peace—over the course two spring semesters of 2021 and 2022, the first and second years of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Our topic: how to construct sustainable, just, intentional peaceful communities in which hierarchies of human value and anthropocentrism become distance memories. Our seminar established context included visions of home and community ranging from the Western classic, Plato’s Republic to Arne Naess’ ecosophy, Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience and Walter Mosley’s untopia as applied to anarchist visions of horizontally organized, radically egalitarian (pragmatism with a soupcon of idealism) communities.