Happy New Year everybody. We'll be back with new episodes of Imagineing Worlds in two weeks, which is good timing because as you can hear I caught a cold over the holidays.

So this week I'm going to play an episode from the podcast The Last Archive.

The Last Archive is a show about the history of knowledge.

They look at how conventional wisdom is built up and how it can be dismantled. And they did this really interesting

episode about the science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Gwen. In the 1960s

Ursula K. Le Gwen's books were groundbreaking.

For a long time, American science fiction was very influenced by colonialism, with heroic

conquering spacemen and aliens taking the place of indigenous people.

Laguin questioned and critiqued that narrative inner stories.

But most of this episode is not about science fiction.

It's actually the backstory to how Laguen

came to that understanding

and why these issues of racism, colonialism,

were personal for her. Here is the host of the last archive, Ben Nana Faffery.

When I was a kid, there were a few books and movies that we watched all the time, because my dad taught them every year.

He's a professor of business ethics, just not the way you'd think.

Instead of case studies about business, he teaches stories about everything.

In our house, a story was never just about what she thought it was about.

It was about something else entirely.

For instance, if you ask most people to describe the film Blade Runner, nine times out of ten,

they're going to tell you it's a movie about Harrison Ford hunting robots.

They might mention he's struggling with the possibility that he is also a robot.

...