It's our season finale, where we bid a fond farewell to Freya, ship, and the cast of KSR's transcendent Aurora! We're experiencing some good ol' audio issues, but they're nothing compared to Freya's mythic struggles with the sun and the ocean.

It's hard to sum up this book, and somehow equally as hard to sum up this chapter, but we do our best. This chapter is a lot about the difficulty of putting the feeling of being on earth into words--some call it defamiliarization, others call it estrangement, we call it art, and it rocks.

For Hilary, this chapter is about feeling. For Matt, it's about overcoming the difference between reality and fantasy. For both of them, it's a joy.

Takeaways: Utopia is hard, but necessary. It's not going to be found "out there." It's going to be built, like a beach or a work of art. Freedom is found in letting go. Don't feel bad if you have trouble letting go of your ideas, or if you find that others can't help but live in their ideas: that's where we live! And, go to the beach!

Our next season will be on THE YEARS OF RICE AND SALT, and folks, it's kickass. Get yours from your favorite independent bookseller while you still can, like maybe the Seminary Co-op or find one on bookshop.com.

Read KSR on the structure of feeling in The New Yorker.

Read KSR's Dystopias Now in Commune Mag.

Read about grunion here. 

Thanks for listening and stay safe!

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Music (usually) by Spirit of Space (this time by two folks whose names we don't want to mention by name because it would be a pain to re-edit the show to avoid litigation)

See you in a few weeks in a new season!