Thrutopia: Stories of Active Hope with Monique Roffey, Rupert Read & Laura Baggaley

Tuesday February 17th
Doors & drinks at 6.30pm; Talks starts 7pm

This event is now fully booked. We don't have a waiting list.

With the prospect of civilisation collapse looking ever more likely, Utopian visions of any sort now appear beyond our reach. And yet the opposite, the bleak futures set out in so many Dystopia warnings, is not inevitable.

Instead, we need to look beyond the Utopia-Dystopia binary and find another way to imagine the future. The concept of Thrutopia offers such a way. Literary works like Manda Scott’s “Boudica: Dreaming”, Stephen Markley’s climate epic "The Deluge", and Megan Hunter’s "The End We Start From", recently adapted for the cinema, have pioneered the way.

Through a series of short talks and readings, followed by plenty of time for discussion, we’ll explore the concept of Thrutopia with philosopher and activist Rupert Read, novelist Monique Roffey and fiction writer for children and young adults, Laura Baggaley.

Rupert will argue that neither Utopian dreams nor Dystopian warnings are much help to us now. He’ll explain how Thrutopia, a concept he developed in 2017 influenced by Ursula K Le Guin, is needed instead. Thrutopia is “the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible". It is a process, rather than a static fantasised destination. It has no end. And it’s ambiguous - there is always more future to come. Thrutopia, he’ll argue, is our best-case North Star for a collapse-aware, reality-based future.

Monique will discuss, and read from, the Thrutopian novel she’s currently writing. Provisionally titled "Gen Dragonfly", and due to be published in 2027, it focuses on how we “get through” a full-blown poly-crisis thirty years from now.

The novel is set in Sussex in 2055 after the collapse of many of our current systems (capitalism, banking, mass agriculture), when the world has breached two degrees of warming. The UK is dealing with mass death of the elderly and sick, extreme weather events, five million refugees living in camps along the south coast, and a hung parliament of greens, eco-anarchists and a hand full of landowning Etonians.

The nation has also become a solar super power, and many have abandoned large urban cities for life on large estates which have been opened up as common land by Royal Decree. Although food is scarce and most people fast in the summer months, many cities are vertical jungles and much cooler with land, parks and gardens given over to permaculture. 2055 is a time of "active hope", miracles, alien disclosure, poetry and druidry. This is a book about how Gen Beta, through lead character Gen Dragonfly, cope with this new set of circumstances. Life will be tough and yet love will be discovered as valuable, as an unforeseen and reliable system or currency.

Laura, whose most recent book is an eco-romance called "Dirt", is on the editorial team of Bending The Arc, a Thrutopia magazine on Substack, which publishes stories, poems and features that bend the arc of the possible towards a thriving future on Earth. Laura will talk about how fiction can change the stories that society tells itself, exploring the particular challenge of writing Thrutopian stories for young readers.

The three short talks will be followed by a one-pot vegan supper and discussion.

Kairos, 84 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4TG

Doors open at 6.30pm for drinks. Talks starts at 7pm.

£8 Frequent Visitor and Supporter Members; £15 Standard (includes Community Members); £10 Struggling financially; £8 Under 30s; £20 with Donation. Food complimentary. (To find out more about membership, visit our Membership page.)

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