Imaginary Worlds - African Sci-Fi Looks to a Future Climate

Episode Date: April 10, 2024

When the writer Nnedi Okorafor coined the term Africanfuturism, she wanted to distinguish sci-fi written about Africa from Afrofuturism, which is focuses on the experiences of Black people in the diaspora. Africanfuturism mixes the traditional with the futuristic in a way that resembles modern life in Africa, and many of these stories grapple with climate change. Although the writer Chinelo Onwualu says cli-fi isn’t a subgenre for African writers. It’s often baked into a lot of Africanfuturism because the continent is already at the forefront of climate emergencies. And the writers Suyi Davies Okungbowa and Wole Talabi explain that Africanfuturist cli-fi isn’t as dystopian as Western cli-fi. These visions of the future may feel daunting but there is often a sense of hope and the solutions are more community focused. The actress Nneka Okoye reads from their stories, and other works by African writers. This episode is sponsored by Babbel, Surf Shark and Magic Spoon Get up to 60% off at Babbel.com/IMAGINARY Get Surfshark VPN at Surfshark.deals/IMAGINARY Go to MagicSpoon.com/IMAGINARY and use the code IMAGINARY to save five dollars off Reading list from this episode: Works of Nnedi Okorafor Wole Talabi’s anthology Convergence Problems Suyi Davies Okungbowa's novella Lost Ark Dreaming Chinelo Onwualu’s short story Letters to My Mother Dilman Dila’s story The Leafy Man from the book A Killing in the Sun Mame Bougouma’s story Lekki Lekki from Africanfuturism: An Anthology Omenana Magazine Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. One of my favorite science fiction writers is Nnedi Okorafor. She's Nigerian-American, and most of her books take place in Nigeria. In 2019, she coined a term called African Futurism, all one word. She wanted to distinguish her work from Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism is typically about the black experience in the diaspora. African Futurism

is set in Africa, and those stories deal with issues which are specific to the continent. The term took off immediately, which makes sense because she was not the only person writing African Futurism. Established writers could easily fit into that category, and the term could be an inspiration for up-and-coming writers. Nnedi Okorafor and other writers have emphasized that this is a broad term, which is meant to cover a wide range of stories about African futures. But as I kept reading her work and other African futurist stories, I noticed a pattern. Climate change comes up a lot in these stories. And the way that the characters adapt to climate change is different in African futurism than a lot of science fiction stories written in

the West. And there are reasons for that. Like for me, and I think probably a lot of people in the West, climate change can feel like an act of imagination. When I read an article where a scientist says this could be our future, it's terrifying, but it feels like science fiction because it's not my everyday reality unless there's a strange weather phenomenon going on that particular day or that particular week. But the ecosystems in Africa are at the

forefront of climate change. It's not something that people can easily put out of their minds. And I wanted to look at the intersection of these two genres, African futurism and cli-fi, which is short for climate change science fiction. How does cli-fi play out differently in African stories? And at first I was thinking about technology, disaster preparation. But as I delved deeper and I talked with African writers, I realized how we imagine the future isn't just connected to the present. It's deeply rooted in the past, our values, and our culture. values, and our culture. I've mentioned that I'm learning French, and I've spent a lot of time going on Babbel, but I wasn't sure if I could speak French in the real world. Well, I finally

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voiced by real native speakers. Plus Babbel's speech recognition technology helps you improve your pronunciation and accent. It's like having your own personal language coach to help you feel confident for real-world conversations. Here's a special limited-time deal for our listeners. Right now, get up to 60% off your Babbel subscription, but only for our listeners, at babbel.com slash imaginary. Get up to 60% off at babbel.com slash imaginary, spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash imaginary. Rules and restrictions apply. Before we get to climate change, I want to explore a little bit further what defines African

futurism. Now, as I kept reading African futurist stories, I noticed that a lot of them take place in West Africa, especially Nigeria, even more specifically Lagos, the largest city in Nigeria. And then I realized a huge number of these writers are Nigerian. Wole Talabi is a Nigerian science fiction writer, and even he was surprised by how many Nigerians are working in the genre. I've also looked at the general statistics because I used to help manage a database for the African Speculative Fiction Society of published African speculative fiction broadly. Fantasy, horror, science fiction, everything. By far, the largest amount of speculative fiction writing comes from Nigeria and South Africa. That also has to do with a bit of a legacy of colonial history.

Nigeria was a British colony. English is the most commonly spoken language there. It's also the most populous country in Africa, with about 230 million people. And there are about 2 million Nigerians living in the diaspora. In fact, everyone you'll hear in this episode is Nigerian living in another Anglophone country. Wole is in Australia. And the writer Chinelo Omwalu is living in Canada. I think there's a joke that says, if you go to a place on Earth and there isn't a Nigerian there, know that that place is not habitable for human life. Because it's true, because we are always looking for the next thing. And I think that makes futurism just kind of a natural space for us.

We are always thinking of something, always coming up with something. And even if we can't put it in the now, what if we put it in the what's to come? In 2014, Chinelo co-founded a magazine of African speculative fiction called Ome Nana. She says the magazine was created partially out of a sense of frustration over the expectations that were being placed upon them by Western publishers. So there was an industry expectation that writing from Africa had to look a certain way, had to cover certain issues and topics. It was all about dealing with government corruption, changing societal expectations in the face of, you know, coming out of the colonial era. And we were finding that a lot of what we were writing was a lot more speculative than that.

And we just didn't see a space where we could have our own voices represented. They were also tired of having to fill their stories with exposition for non-African readers. So we were looking for stories where people just didn't have to explain themselves, where we all understood the context that we were writing in, and then we could get to the business of just being cool and speculative. Wole also has an African audience in mind, in part to show the possibilities of African futurism. audience in mind, in part to show the possibilities of African futurism. I think people don't realize how much influence TV, movies, just media in general, have had on popular imagination, to the extent that so many people, even on the African continent, struggle

to imagine different anymore. I would say it's been centuries of colonial brainwashing, constantly telling you that your traditional ways and ideas and philosophies are primitive, underdeveloped, useless, unscientific, coupled with,

here's our vision of the future. It sinks into your brain that this is the way of science and technology. And some of us, at least myself, have been trying to kind of go back and say, well, what were the core philosophies and ideas and ideals in a lot of our traditional societies if they had been allowed to evolve naturally? What would they look like now? And that's kind of one thing I try to do with my science fiction. Suyi Davis Okumboa is a Nigerian writer living in Canada. And he says a lot of writers like himself

are very aware that they're in a privileged position to be able to think beyond the day-to-day and spend their time dreaming of the future. In a way, there is a duty, I think, to then invest in this futuristic thinking if it can actually do whatever work it needs to do, sound the alarm bells, influence policy, influence thinking, sprout even new imaginations. Whatever work it does, I think that's the duty of the work. And that's kind of like where I put my investment as a person, as an artist. I'm thinking this needs to exist so possibilities can exist. Wenedia Korafor was defining the term African futurism. She said that she was inspired by her

many trips to Nigeria, where she was really intrigued by how easily people could incorporate modern technology into older traditional ways of life. And she wanted to make sure that was reflected in her science fiction. Suyi feels the same way. People still in rural communities, they go to a farm with the hoe and they till the land in ridges, pretty much as we have been doing for eons and eons and at the same time they're tilling the farmer with one hand with the hoe and the other they have you know whatsapp on and or like a phone and they're chatting with someone on snapchat or scrolling through tiktok so so she is right in the sense that a future where that doesn't exist feels strange to me at least and i would see how it would

be strange to anyone who actually exists on the continent because that is the reality of things. And even when I was thinking about like my stories, right, the way the people in this space are thinking would differ, right? Those who have resources or access to those resources would still, some would rely on older technology because that's all they can afford. Which is what the whole represents, right, in farming. The whole is technology. It's just much, much older form. That mix of technologies to develop or exploit the natural resources

has come to a head with the oil industry in Nigeria. In fact, Wole thinks the oil industry is one of the reasons why the environment comes up so often in these stories. I mean, we can't really escape our history. Nigeria is a large oil-producing country. They have huge petroleum reserves. And for decades, oil companies have been operating

in a region called the Niger Delta. And it's kind of been terrible, let me put it that way. And he's not just talking about the environment. The relationship between the oil companies and the government has been plagued with corruption and abuse. So I think every Nigerian is well aware of that. I think almost every Nigerian science fiction writer probably has a story relating to the oil industry in some form,

talking about it. I have one for sure. Like, we all think about it. The coastline is a big factor in Suyi's upcoming book, Lost Ark Dreaming. It's a sci-fi thriller set in a future where sea level rise is consuming Lagos. The story is about a series of towers which are built on a privately constructed island. The premise was inspired by real life. When Suyi was working in Lagos, he noticed a version of these towers being proposed off the shoreline. And I think that just sparked the idea of like, what do these become, you know, in the future where that is definitely going to happen, the future of like possible submergence,

the future of these coastlines not existing in the next 20, 30 years, the future where the city itself is disappearing because the land itself is receding. And where do they exist in the cultural imagination of environmental futures? Sea level rise is frightening enough, but Suyi wanted to explore another theme. The Atlantic Ocean is not a neutral space for West Africans. And I was thinking, first of all, like what histories the Atlantic Ocean itself has seen. So we're talking everything from transatlantic slavery

to the history of communities that have existed on the water in Lagos that have been many times removed for some of these hypercapitalist projects as well. Here's the actress Nneka Okoye reading from Suyi's book, Lost Ark Dreaming. Making home in the heights is the future of luxury, he says, as he takes me on a tour ahead of the grand opening of his newest project, the smallest of five towers he has named the Diekara Atlantic Community.

The price is right, Diekara says, when I raise the public's concerns about the prohibitive cost of securing a spot on his towers. No product is ever meant for everybody. We have a target market. He talks me through construction. As a journalist and not an engineer, I only followed the phrases of interest and impact.

Underwater electricity generating turbines, for instance, flood-proof levels up to a third of each tower's height above sea level. I ask him why Diakara Industries is so invested in preparing for a submerged future. Does he think his island will be swallowed soon? Swallowed? He laughs. Listen, this is a project built to last generations, centuries. So yes, we need to prepare for all possible futures, including one of submergence. But that's not for us here, no.

It's for you all over there. We're standing at one of the expansive windows of the concourse. I follow his arm, pointing at the rugged cityscape of Lagos that stares back at us. This high up, the economic stratification is quite evident to any keen eye. The economic stratification is quite evident to any keen eye. Rusted zinc slums, already half-submerged by rising floods, stand next to glittering skyscrapers that spot paved, elevated roadways, sidestepping the rapidly rising waters like a disgusted foot.

Nobody wants to live in that impending chaos, Diakara says, so they will fight to come up here when that is no more. They will stand in that same spot you're standing and say, thanks to Diakara, we escaped. Wole wrote a short story called Ganger, which explores similar themes. It's part of his new collection of stories called Convergence Problems. Ganger takes place in a futuristic Nigeria where people live in a dome city to protect themselves because the air has been ruined. Tech people, geoengineers, tried to fix the climate by developing this technology that could strip out CO2 from the air and then direct it somewhere else. And what has happened in the background of the story is that that technology has gone horribly wrong and the solution has now become an even bigger problem. And that has completely made

the environment unlivable. The inspiration for this story also came from real life. The inspiration for this story also came from real life. Alongside being a fiction writer, Wole is an engineer. I wanted to use what happens in that novella to kind of talk about something I encounter in my day job as well. Something I do, which is this idea of CO2 storage as a geoengineering solution to climate change, where we can basically take out CO2 from the environment and shove it underground. My philosophy of it is that it's a temporary measure while we figure out a better way. But in itself, it is not the solution. And I kind of feel pursuing a purely technical approach to just say, oh, we'll just come up with a new technology to fix the problems we

created with our old technology is just repeating the cycle. The main character is a teenage girl. In this scene, she's gone outside the Dome City with her medical droid LG-114. But she stayed outside too long. Laide turned around sharply and ran back the way she'd come, tearing past leaves and tassels and silks and stems as she bounded with great big steps of the droid's frame, throwing soil up into the CO2T-saturated air.

She wanted to take it all in as she had before the sunrise, but she was now too worried to enjoy the feeling of flying through the field. She had to get back. She tore past the curtain of stalks and back onto one of the radiating tracks, leading back to the clearing that surrounded the dome. There was a giant harvester machine ahead of her. She followed it, the feet of the LG-114's frame, digging into the loamy red and brown soil with every powerful step. The dome loomed ahead, its smooth surface of gun turrets more imposing than ever in the cold clarity of daylight. What if Mama Peju woke up to eat already and panicked when she didn't see LG-114?

What if the guns turn on me? Elayde forced herself to slow down as she approached the dome, bringing LG-114 to a brisk walking pace close to the edge of the field. She was trying not to panic, but it was hard to keep her composure, despite the uncertainty. panic, but it was hard to keep her composure despite the uncertainty. The gate of the sanitization chamber at the base of the dome opened ahead of them like a lazy mouth. Laide thought she saw the guns angled slightly down toward them, but she was sure it was just her imagination. Don't panic. Laide thought herself calm and kept moving behind the harvester with the convoy until she'd cleared the gate. There was the hiss of venting and a flood of red lights.

Her mind was overcome by the sensation of her skin crawling as she imagined the nanobots pouring over every nanometer of LG-114's frame again, hunting for the viral CO2T nanoparticles she brought with her. When the lights turned green and the exit opened, she wanted to sigh with relief, but she couldn't. When you're traveling, it's important to feel a sense of safety and protection. So when I recently traveled abroad, I was relieved to have Surfshark on my phone and my laptop when I was using public Wi-Fi at the airport or the hotel. Surfshark is a virtual private network, or VPN. It covers up everything you do online, so all your information is encrypted.

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Disney+, which have different content in different countries. Get Surfshark VPN at surfshark.deals slash imaginary. Enter the promo code imaginary for three extra months for free. That's right, three extra months for free. That's surfshark.deals slash imaginary. Earlier, we heard from the writer Chinelo Onwalu. She's given a lot of thought to the crossover of african futurism and cli-fi and she came to a realization i had an interesting discussion with the author toby ogundira in which we were talking about what is it that afric fear? And it was premised from the understanding that when you look at what the West fears, it fears that the things it has done to others will be done to it.

Something like we will be enslaved and our physical autonomy and freedom will be curtailed by something outside of ourselves. But what do Africans fear? He had a great answer because it was the fact that you will, you have profaned the sacred spaces, you have abandoned the sacred ways, and you are being punished. That really got me thinking that what I think so many of us are reaching for when we sometimes write these futurisms are ways in which we have rediscovered, envisioned that equilibrium that we used to live in, that we've lost because those sacred spaces were destroyed in acts of colonial genocide and a cultural and cultural ecocide, right? And so some of us are rediscovering how to bring these things back. If we look to our past, we will find some of the answers that we need for our future.

She thinks a great example of this is a short story called The Leafy Man. It's by a Ugandan writer named Dilman Dilla. In this story, a bioengineering company has created a genetically modified mosquito that doesn't carry malaria. They actually gave it a nickname, Miss Doe. The government decided to try Miss Doe in a village to see if it could replace the regular mosquito population.

But Miss Doe ended up mutating into a monstrous swarm which devours people. The main character is a survivor of the village, and he used traditional knowledge to protect him. Even though Miss Doe has mutated, the mosquitoes are still repelled by the smell of citrus, so he covers himself with orange leaves. Here's the actress Nneka Okoye reading from The Leafy Man. The chopper touched down. He could barely see it through the smoke. The engine shut down. The buzz of Miss Doe was faint, but still eerie coming from the sky. As he started toward the helicopter, four men came running out of the mist. They wore protective white clothing that covered every inch of their bodies. Each had a small tank on the back and a spray muzzle in one hand. Emblazoned on their breasts were four letters in bright green.

PGCC. Japya's legs turned to water. These men worked for PGCC, the people who brought this apocalypse to his village. It was not a rescue. He turned and fled. Hey! One man shouted. Don't run! What's that? The radio said. The leafy man ran. Japia heard the reply coming out of the radio and from behind him. Why? I don't know. He just saw us and ran. Japia was weak from hunger, but he was faster than the four men

who were burdened by the heavy tanks on their backs. He knew it was foolish to run. They probably meant him no harm. They might have come to rescue him, but he could not trust them. Not after what they had done to his village. What I liked about that particular story was the fact that it was being told from the perspective of someone that you usually would not hear from. Even in African futurism, it's often written by people who have a Western education, so have a particular class background that we're coming from. And so we, without thinking of it, without necessarily realizing it, we tend to privilege, you know, middle class or upper middle class voices,

people who have the experiences that we have. So it was very interesting to read that because it was such an inversion of who are the usual voices you hear from, even in, you know, who are the usual voices you hear from, even in, you know, African futurism, but particularly in cli-fi, a colorful side character in the story of the NGO person on their way to doing the great work. The guy who opened the gates and smiles, you know, gives you the big smile and the helusa. But a story told from his perspective looks very, very different. There's another way that African cli-fi is different than Western cli-fi. In a lot of African futurism, climate change is more in the background of the story. But that doesn't mean it's unimportant.

When we are talking about cli-fi, a lot of the writers that I've encountered are not approaching it as this sort of sub-genre of a sub-genre. It's kind of built into how many of us understand our future. We are seeing the effects of climate change in ways that are much more immediate. That's how she approaches writing about climate change in her work. What often happens with me is trying to marry this outside thing with this inside thing. And so the outside thing might be climate change and population changes, but the inside thing is what happens in a family when something terrible happens, and we all cope really, really badly with it.

Chinelo wrote a story called Letters to My Mother. It's about people in a world that's been reshaped by climate wars. In this scene, an archivist finds a letter from the climate wars, which is her distant past but our future. It's a heartfelt letter addressed to somebody's mother. But the archivist doesn't know anything about the archives bearing such effect. We had been taught that the founders of the homesteads were enlightened ones

who had evolved beyond the vagaries of the egoistic self. After the climate wars, they had seen the dark fate awaiting humanity and took the bold steps necessary to avoid the extinction of our species. But the longing and grief of that short letter was unlike anything I had ever felt. Could such raw emotion truly have belonged to a founder? I avoided touching the book after that. I returned it the next morning, wrapped in cloth, and hurried from the records room as if it was also to blame for what had happened.

Returning to the forest, I thought I had left the book behind. I was wrong. For something in it remained in me. Cinello didn't want the characters to fit the stereotype of lone survivors battling each other for resources. When I see the issues

of climate change tackled in the West, it's often with a sense that this is going to bring doom upon us. We're going to lose all these comforts that we are used to and suddenly the first world, quote unquote, will look like the third world.

And you do see the sense of like, we have to hold on to everything that we can because God forbid we lose, you know, 24 hour access to power. God forbid we might have to start like fetching water from a central water source, which are both facets of everyday life in many other parts of the world. Whereas I think that when you have been through the apocalypse,

when you have the apocalypse as part of your past, it can inure you almost to some of that doom and gloom because you know you survived the worst. You will survive again. Suyi agrees. They know how to survive an apocalypse. And this is specifically thinking about the African continent, not even just in general, but like specific places that I am from. i'm thinking of how people would typically react to things like this and there tends to be a stronger community-driven approach and so even in interpretations of the future or projections of whatever iteration of dystopia manifests itself

there tends to be an imagination therefore also from a communal standpoint in terms of like how do we you know tackle this as a group how do we tackle this as you know a collective unit as opposed to you know what is my specific role as a person or how can I save these people and I would say I tend to see that sort of collective voice in the telling of the story in itself as well. So even on a craft level, right, the manner of narration, the manner of voice, the manner of approach tends to sort of come from a collective place

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The entire continent of Africa contributes a small fraction of global carbon emissions, but they are bearing the brunt of climate change. The cause of these problems has been mostly out of their hands, but the solutions are not. That's why Wole sees a lot of DIY technology and solar punk in these stories. Or what I would even call, I hate, I don't want to invent a new thing, but maybe even culture punk in the sense that the idea that considering the environment as a person, an entity, or even a spirit, which is something that comes from a lot of traditional African

just practice of community, tends to show up in a lot of African futurist work. Wole edited a collection called African Futurism and Anthology. And one of the stories in the book is called Lekki Lekki. It's by a Senegalese writer named Mam Bogumba Dien, in which basically humans converts themselves into a kind of biological information matrix and merge with nature. So it's this idea that we are part of nature, not apart from it. It's an idea I personally really like just for the kind of radical reframing that it

performs in your mind once you start from that position. The environment is not a victim of your actions. It is a person or a spirit to be respected. And you just haven't been doing that. In this scene, the main character has a trial run, projecting her consciousness into a tree. But these characters in the distant future are not doing it as a thrill ride. Some people in the community think

this is the only way they can save humanity because human life has become more and more unsustainable. You'll be scanned and fitted into a transmission pod for testing today and on the day of. Don't worry, it's painless. We just need to verify a few things. Many of you are married women. We need to check that you are not with child before we can try the machines. We must also ensure that your own brain waves are compatible with the biochemical network matrix. Is everybody with me? They all nodded agreement, some slower than others.

The pods had slid shut, and the red cushion squeezed her warmly into darkness. Not sleep, not quite sleep. Fully at rest, yet aware of herself. She'd sunk deeper into the darkness, her head bursting through the soil into sunlight. aware of herself. She'd sunk deeper into the darkness, her head bursting through the soil into sunlight. A city gleaming in the distance where the desert stood now.

A river streaming through it to a sky of deep blue abysses. In a flash, she stood 50 feet above, in another a hundred. And as she grew, the city shrunk, her arms impossibly long and stiff, until there was nothing but dust swirling woolly death to the horizon. And all the while, a mama, soft with radiant energy, calling her into its roots. soft with radiant energy, calling her into its roots. Julde! Julde! Dammit, wake up! Jake!

She screamed, throwing her arms around him, her head on his chest. Did you hear? Did you see? Don't you see now? It's real, all of it! Jake pushed her back and turned around. I didn't hear anything. I'm not going. Reading that story, I kept thinking about the singularity. This dream of Silicon Valley tech moguls and some sci-fi writers, that they could someday upload their consciousness to computers.

But this is a very different kind of thought experiment. African futurist views, especially when it comes to cli-fi, helps, you know, do what they call diversify the Anthropocene imagination of being able to think of alternatives, of realizing that sometimes alternative philosophies have existed already. that sometimes alternative philosophies have existed already. I am that person that whenever I come upon an idea that makes me feel like, you know, some part of my mind has been unlocked, like I've never seen it presented in this way. I've never seen this idea, you know, established so clearly to me before. I literally go like, ooh, that's so good. And it's like, I get this almost like a high from my mind being unlocked. And I think African cli-fi, just global cli-fi in general, will help us move away

from a kind of fixed mindset of what the future could be. Although Tonello thinks that African futurism could be even more original in its thinking. One of the things that I think those of us writing African futurisms can sometimes fall prey to is the idea that the future has to look like the West. I think there's more varied understanding of what a good future looks like. of what a good future looks like. Another thing that I would love to see less of is the idea that we'll keep certain traditions wholesale

and not enough reimaginings of how cultural shifts will also be reflected in the future. So I think I would love to see more African futurisms where patriarchal systems that aren't very much traditionally entrenched and maybe even beloved are challenged a little more. Now, I didn't actually used to read a lot of cli-fi. I'm already very worried about this issue. And when I see a description of a new novel that says, set in a future ravaged by climate change, I just can't read it because I

assume it's going to fill me with despair. What I like about these stories is that they're presenting a future that's not hopeless, but it's not painless either. In fact, Chinelo wrote an article called The Case for Reckless Climate Optimism, and she based it on what she describes as a Nigerian practice of suffering and smiling. The attitude of suffering and smiling, it comes from a phrase by the musician Fela. It's this sense of shit's gonna get bad, So you just, you keep your humor about you and you just keep at it. You still have to wake up every day, feed your kid, go to work, do the things you need to do and get through it. Even if things get really, really bad, life is going to go on because what's the alternative? When I hear people say life goes on,

it's usually a sense of cynicism or resignation in their voices. But when it comes to climate change, life goes on can feel like a victory to me. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Wole Talabi, Chinelo Onwalu,

Suyi Davies Okomboa, and Nneka Okoye, who did the readings. I have links to their works and all the other stories we talked about in the show notes. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. If you like the show, please give us a shout out on social media, leave a review, or forget your podcast, or just tell a friend who you think would like the show. The best way to support Imaginary Worlds is to donate on Patreon. At different levels, you get free Imaginary Worlds stickers, a mug, a t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has the full-length interviews of every guest in every episode. You can also get access to an ad-free version of the show through Patreon, and you can buy an ad-free subscription on Apple Podcasts. You can subscribe to the show's newsletter at imaginaryworldspodcast.org.