Workable Utopias

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WORKABLE UTOPIAS

Enhance your vision for a realistic, sustainable, truly healthy society.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Are you a visionary, artist, or activist? Do you want to create a better world? Put Workable Utopias in your toolbox.

Visionary

Tie your social vision to concrete steps for moving it forward.

Artist

Create inspiring, believable fictional worlds.

Activist

Tie your project to a larger, sustainable vision & find new allies.


About

Welcome to Workable Utopias, a program developed by writer and educator Arwen Spicer, which invites you to imagine inspiring futures for our world while staying grounded in the realistic and achievable. Drawing on the imaginative scope of speculative fiction and the realities of science and human nature, Workable Utopias provides a framework for social planning in two modes:

  1. Creating visions and means for social activism
  2. Creating excellent world-building for speculative fiction (itself a kind of cultural activism)

Workable Utopias approaches good social planning through the lens of Foundations. A workable, sustainable social system must be founded on an awareness of physical reality and human needs and characteristics. Workable Utopias encourages the exploration of value systems in terms of their impact on ecological relations, their effectiveness in meeting human needs, and their alignment of social goals with human nature.

How IT Works

Join utopian speculative fiction writer and educator, Arwen Spicer, for a fun and inspiring workshop to explore your values as a basis for an inspiring, realistic social vision by working with human nature, human needs, and ecological reality. One-on-one consulting is also available.

To schedule a workshop or inquire about consulting, contact me and include your name and a brief description of your project or goal and needs. My base rate is $50/hour for one-on-one consulting and $100/hour for workshops. A sliding scale is available, and I am happy to consider splitting proceeds with charities and non-profits on a case-by-case basis.


Newsletter


Resources

Looking to get started thinking about utopias? Check out our FREE downloadable PDFs.

Core Principles of How Societies Function

One page overview about how societies function and how to conceptualize workable utopias.

Utopia Reading List

A Non-Exhaustive, Very Western-Slanted Utopia Reading List which includes Fiction and Non-Fiction texts.

Arwen Spicer

Arwen Spicer

Arwen Spicer is a science fiction writer and writing teacher raised in the San Fransciso Bay Area, and Northern California will hold her heart forever, even if it turns into a desert. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on ecology in utopian science fiction and is an educator on the concept of workable utopias. Her novel The Hour before Morning was hailed as “A carefully paced, rewarding sci-fi debut” by Kirkus Indie.

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