What If We Move Not in Lines But in Circles?

What you are about to encounter is a piece co-written by the Utopian Book Collective.The Utopian Book Collective is a book group based in Bristol, UK. We meet at 7 p.m. on the first Monday of the month at an independent café bar in central Bristol to discuss a pre-chosen utopian (or sometimes dystopian) text. In between book groups, we meet for monthly utopian (or dystopian) film screenings and to attend exhibitions or other events relevant to our utopian interests.The group was founded in 2011 with a view to debating alternative perspectives on society from fiction and nonfiction, with an interest in political activism and the value of visions of a different world. Regular meetings lapsed in 2016 when several members had babies, moved away, and/or became too busy in local politics, then restarted in 2019, went online during the pandemic until everyone succumbed to Zoom fatigue, and then, finally, relaunched in person in 2022. The group has more than 185 members on Facebook and over 200 on MeetUp (there is some crossover), but at in-person meetings we usually have around eight to ten people. Seven members chose to be involved in writing this piece.When it came to writing about our experience of the Utopian Book Collective, we thought about and discussed how we found UBC and why we decided to come along, what makes us keep coming back, our hopes for the future of the group, and which texts have had an impact on us. We also discussed what form our essay might take. We decided that, like utopia, it should be a communal effort, with no authoritarian oversight, and no delusions of having reached a fixed and perfect end. And so, we present a collection of artifacts from which you might know our collective, and especially concerning the texts that have made us.We are indebted to Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” here applied to our Desire Lines essay. Le Guin’s theory proposes that “the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.”1 As the Utopian Book Collective is not a fiction, what we have made is perhaps a carrier-bag anthropology, containing our thoughts, conversations, memories, inspirations, questions and hopes.Le Guin’s own utopian anthropological study in the carrier bag form, Always Coming Home, examines a fictional people, The Kesh, living in a temporally distant version of North California. That work (and world) is held together symbolically by the “heyiya-if, two spirals centered upon the same (empty) space.”2 We were excited to learn that this shape has been adopted in the redesign of this journal and can be found opposite the contents page and in stylized form on the cover. We have held our thoughts together with the image of a circle. The circle as a synonym for group, as a perfect and unattainable form, as the concentric ripples that spread out and interlock as raindrops hit water, the waves that encompass, the raindrops that cause the impact, and the cycle that means that once a raindrop hits the surface its story is never over.The Utopian Book Collective is a circle, of course. The circle is also utopian. It is perfect, and we can find perfect circles in nature. In The Eye of the Heron by Ursula Le Guin, the protagonist Luz muses: “Because she was human, she had the mind and eyes and skilful hand to imagine the idea of a circle and to draw the idea. But any drop of water falling from a leaf into a pool or rain puddle could make a circle, a more perfect one.”3 We can imagine a circle and recognize one when we see it. Yet if we try to make a circle, freehand, we will make something imperfect. In this sense it, like utopia, is an ideal form we can aim for but never achieve.Timothy Morton says: “A circle is thinkable yet impossible to execute, the very opposite of agrilogistics.”4 Agrilogistics is his term for the logic homo sapiens have lived by since we transitioned from hunter-gathering to farming. He sees it as the root cause of our disassociation from ecological systems and hence the climate and biodiversity crises we find ourselves in, and still orchestrating, today. The opposite of agrilogistics would be a new way of thought that might reconfigure our relationships with our environment and the others around us, for the better. This, by my definition, would be a utopian thought. The opposite of agrilogistics is the circle, is utopia.We put up amateurish posters in Café Kino and then started the group!The utopian text I’ve chosen is adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy. Not just for the ideas in the book itself (although they are great), but as an entry into what I think of as the “adrienne maree brown Extended Universe.” There are layers—there’s the book itself, there’s the new ways of seeing and relating the book leaves you with, there’s the teachings of Octavia Butler it builds off. Then there’s the understanding you gain of Butler’s novels themselves. And on top of those there’s brown’s podcast exploring Butler’s novels through all these layers and more.Spending time in this universe has pulled together utopian ideas I was already thinking a lot about (climate action, food growing, dismantling structures of power, new ways of working together and leaderless teams) and opened me up to so many more (community organizing, Black feminism, centering compassion—for yourself as much as for others—and being in right relationship with change).I think of Emergent Strategy not so much as a book but as a system for understanding and effecting change toward a more hopeful future.The Dispossessed wasn’t the first utopian book I’d ever read, the 1930s novel Lost Horizon by James Hilton made me wonder if a better place was possible, if only I could find somewhere secluded from the rest of the world full of like-minded people. This may have been part of the impetus behind me joining a religious group, and changing continents to be part of a commune in which I tried to realise some of these goals, but which ultimately left me disillusioned.Although I lost faith in religion, The Dispossessed restored my faith that it was possible for people to work together to build a better world. Its imperfect society of fallible people who applied its Anarchist principles with varying degrees of success, showed me it was still something worth striving toward. I saw in the country of A-Io, (as seen through the protagonist Shevek’s eyes) a version of the world I knew, and many of the things wrong with it, especially in contrast to the ambiguous utopia of Anarres.Le Guin has the gift of making philosophical concepts easy to understand, and to put them in a context in which they are not weighed down by historical background or scholarly disputes. Her desert moon seems real and the people realistic, even if its origins and way of life is very different from our own, it remains relatable.The book had a profound personal impact on me, and led me on to question the role of hierarchy in my life and the world, to focus my personal time and efforts (at least in my spare time) on trying to imagine and build a little part of a better world around me. It showed me what was possible with words, and I have since spent thousands of pages trying to understand, capture, and convey the concepts around this (and which Le Guin inherited from great thinkers before her).I now try to share my love for the book by purchasing cheap copies wherever I can find them, and giving them away to anyone I get into a conversation with about its themes. As well as dropping them off at little libraries, train station waiting rooms, cafés with bookshelves, and anywhere else it might be read. It is what led to me joining the Utopian Book Collective, and to reading the many novels I’ve read through it since (a few of which were undoubtedly inspired by Le Guin).I read this book in my early 20s when I was getting immersed in many radical and utopian ideas and initiatives. This was also challenging in terms of my comfortable assumptions and privileges, but I relished the circles and ideas I was moving in. This included a radical, co-operative bookshop I joined, and groups of friends recommending this novel.The feminist ecotopian visions in the book, contrasted in the parallel chapters characteristic of the author depicting the present-day situation of the main protagonist, were illuminating, and positive; to me they showed how things can and should be different from the world of private wealth, oppression, public squalor, cuts, and pollution. There was also the warning vision of a techno-dystopian society that might be created too, if we don’t work to put in place the ecotopia.To me this sums up the value of imagining better worlds and challenging the ones we don’t want to have emerging to follow the present.I shifted from being a traditional technological, male-centred science fiction reader to thinking about social fiction and better worlds that help us explore the progressive future I want to see at this time. Woman on the Edge of Time, and its follow up Body of Glass, were key books that helped me move into this space in my life. For the last decade discussions in the Bristol Utopian Book Collective have helped me continue that journey.Interestingly enough I think the one that had the most impact was the one about the guy who invested the disposable razor. “King G. Gillette”—something like that. It showed how dreamers really CAN change the future—even if it was with disastrous results—hindsight is a wonderful thing! But also JUST how much the world can change in a short amount of time. Strangely it gave me a lot of hope. And it was almost unbelievable—and short—so everyone actually read that one and we had a superb conversation!I first read News from Nowhere as a student. When it was suggested for the Utopian Book Collective my memories of it were of ruddy-cheeked folk enjoying implausibly good English weather. I had previously dismissed it as a bucolic romantic fantasy, so when I re-read it for the book group it blindsided me a bit.By that time, I was working full time in a corporate job. What struck me on my re-reading was what William Morris was suggesting about the nature of work. In News from Nowhere, no-one works for money. It prompted me to think about what we would do with our time if we didn’t spend our days working to earn. If money was taken out of the equation, what would I do? What would my, your, everyone’s collective life’s work be? What would we produce, create and achieve if only we weren’t stuck working for a wage, hoping to save enough to enjoy a retirement where we could finally do the things we wanted to do?These must be the sorts of things we discussed at the book group meeting. Not long afterward in a reshuffle at work I took redundancy and decided to work part-time and go back to university to do a Master’s degree, where I studied ecological fiction and utopias. There are many utopian texts I could have chosen as having impacted me but this one brought about a tangible change in my life. When I announced my change in direction, it was the Utopian Book Collective who congratulated me and thought it was a brilliant idea. The reaction outside the group was more one of slight concern, so I was glad to have the support of my utopian friends.You know I used to live overseas a lot and I did actually get to tell Ursula Le Guin that whenever I travelled Always Coming Home is the first thing that went into my bag. She said thank you, I was just glad I was able to tell her that. I come from this place, it’s part of my heritage, what little heritage I have. The story takes place in what she calls the Valley of the Na, which is the Napa Valley in California. There’s a map in there that shows what it looks like after the big earthquake. One of the things she talks about at the very end in the appendices in the back, she says that cultures evolve in the same way that species evolve and that cultures adapt to circumstance in the same way that species do. That is something that kind of like made me stop and think about, well you know, this is how we get where we get.After reading over our conversation all I had were questions . . .If you like what you’ve read, you can start your own Utopian Book Collective.