Richard King is an author and critic based in Fremantle/Walyalup, Western Australia. His work has appeared in The Monthly, Griffith Review, the Sydney Review of Books and Australian Book Review. He is a contributing editor to Arena Quarterly and the author of three books, including Here Be Monsters: Is Technology Reducing Our Humanity? which was shortlisted for the 2024 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.
Brave New Wild: Can Technology Really Save the Planet? (2025) is his latest book which he will be discussing at three events at the upcoming Sydney Writers’ Festival.
We caught Richard at home in Western Australia, just before he was about to go on a whistle- stop tour of literary festivals, taking in Sorrento, the Sunshine Coast, and Victoria for the Words in Winter, all before he gets to Sydney.
In his book he talks a lot of about the problems of what is called eco-modernism – solutions to environmental problems that attempt to engineer us and our surroundings to fit in to the new paradigms, rather than trying to reverse the damage.
As always, we know you can’t change the world without the right tunes, so not only did we discuss what real political and technical solutions could look like, we have another great playlist to start working with.
How much do you love getting out to the festivals?
Richard King: When you’re writing books, it’s all about not getting out of the house. Festivals are when we emerge. I love them.
Have you spoken at Sydney Writers’ before?
I came after my first book was published in 2013- I had less grey hair then and I had a wonderful time. It was my second literary festival, but my first away from home. I’d written a book called On Offence: the Politics of Indignation. A strangely neglected book!!
It was about the way in which feelings of offence and offendedness are whipped up and weaponized by politicians and activists- so quite in the zeitgeist!!
Apart from Sydney of course, which Australian festivals are you especially fond of at the moment?
Mildura is really unique out in the country in Victoria. It’s not like a literature festival, because everybody’s together all of the time. I’ve met some lovely people there. Brisbane does well because they make great use of that Powerhouse which now has three or four really good theatres inside it. Sorrento is really nice and doing really well. That’s Corrie Perkin- she’s just been fantastic!
Brave New Wild is obviously a bit of a play on words referencing Huxley’s Brave New World. That book is quite dystopian and a warning. Where do you land yourself on the warning versus hope and optimism scale?
What Huxley is doing in Brave New World is imagining a society deep in the future that is integrated and productive and rational and logical, but in which human beings, in their natural state at least, don’t do terribly well. And so rather than create a society that engenders happier human beings, they change the human beings such that they can flourish in the society that they happen to have made.
It’s really that inversion that I’m playing with. I’m not saying there’s going to be a sort of dystopian scenario in the future, although, of course, you know, there could be! But I think the logic of eco- modernism, that we can reengineer the environment such that it becomes safer for us is the same logic that Huxley was playing with in his great satire.
And on optimism and pessimism?
I’ve just been writing about this for Griffith Review. I think people, to the extent that they can imagine a future, feel like it will be a very techie kind of world and I think people are quite pessimistic. Towards the end of the book, try and think through this question of what it means to be hopeful. Optimism can’t be something that you just carry around in your head and take out at parties. The whole half glass-full half- empty thing is nonsense, because it’s both. If hope is to be meaningful, it needs to be embodied and about our conduct in the world. The great revolutionary Antonio Gramsci once recommended something I’ve aways really liked- pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.
Humans have created four or five ways in which we could, if not to completely destroy ourselves, significantly cut down our numbers. Anyone that is just blindly optimistic is not getting the whole picture, but, as much as I don’t want to misuse the Ghandi quote, I do think its about being the change you want to see.
Al Gore has been talking about empowering the next generation and climate optimism for decades, and would describe financial investments as activism and a way of being the change. Do you think it’s a useful vehicle and do you think it’s strange we haven’t had a new political climate leader for such a long time?
Al Gore is the man that really fired the starting pistol on what we now call the Green New Deal. The idea that you can sort of swap out dirty technologies for cleaner ones. He has a very different perspective and comes from a very different political tradition than I do. He’s trying to use the system we have in order to affect the change that we need to see. I just don’t think that the system we have is up to that. Capitalism doesn’t seek high social or environmental returns.
It will always seek high private returns. If profit necessitates growth, and you can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet, then I agree more with the degrowthers – that we really need wholesale change.
In the book you talk about eco-modernism and how that is trying to make the numbers work
Yes, you could probably have some kind of capitalist dispensation in which you made the world liveable for at least some of its human inhabitants. But what you’d have to do in order to give effect to that would be so transformative of the environment that I think we’d be in a very strange place indeed, and what that would do to us emotionally, morally, and in terms of our sense of what is possible and permissible, is anyone’s guess. It’s like the old joke- you ask the yokel for directions and he says –Well, I wouldn’t start from here!.
If we can face up to the fact that the system we have built is destructive of the non-human environment, that which surrounds and sustains us, then we can start to talk about what we need to do.
What do you think a new system should look like?
It would need to be a layered approach. Use the state to bring certain public goods into social ownership – all that old Labour stuff that’s gone missing from the political discourse – but you would also need to make people an offer. Make do with less, but you get more security, maybe a shorter working week- more time for creativity, more fun, more time for drinking tea, for playing chess and making love or whatever it is that you want to do. I get the sense that people are increasingly open to that.
Do you mean people you know are open to it, or something bigger?
I have a new friend called Claire Marshall. She’s a futurist and she works for TACSI. She says people don’t have any trouble imagining different futures. What they have is trouble with the idea that you could get from here to there. For her, it’s a problem of the agency. She’s lived in communities that have been subject to catastrophic flooding and bushfires, and she sees how people change in those scenarios, and how their sense of what is important changes very, very quickly and quite radically.
So we’re talking about people’s characters, versus the priorities the system we live in gives people?
We’re all scared about the rent, or paying down our mortgages. But I always think the idea that greed is a kind of dominant force in society isn’t right. I don’t think people are actually greedy. On one hand, physical things are build to break so people have to buy more stuff, but the system is set up to privilege profit. Of course some people will always crave luxury, but already people are resolving not to buy so much, not least because of the cost of living. I don’t think people are as wedded to consumerism as is often claimed.
There have been lots of moments in history and at points of political inflexion when there has been talk about the 4-day working week and people getting lots of free time – do you think it’s realistic? And how does the AI revolution help or hinder that idea?
The idea that AI is going to save us from all the dross work we do, is I think, dross. It’s the trick that’s pulled every time a new automation comes along. With AI we’re talking about automating or counterfeiting human creativity.
If you take the 19th century example, when automation really begins, we’re talking about automating human movements. That doesn’t begin when the machines are installed in the factory, it begins when Frederick Winslow Taylor comes in, with his time and motion studies, and says- Hang on a minute, we seem to have a lot of skilled artisans here who understand the whole process, and who as such can lord it over the boss, who actually knows nothing about the process.
So what he created was unskilled workers, doing one job each. That’s when automation begins.
We at Irresistible have often suspected management consultants are the problem!
Haha yes! So once you’ve deskilled people and then the machines came in, it was easy to say- Well, it was a shit job anyway, why do you want to do that?
So people went from living in a community where they could control the pace of work, where they had a certain respect, and it was presented as a kind of liberation. And that’s what’s happening now.
Do you think that if we leave capitalism behind, we’ll likely get something much worse before we get something better?
Some people might think my solutions look a bit twee, and say if we can’t even ban plastic bags properly how can we create a whole new way of living. But I do think people want more embodied contact with others, more creativity, more freedom from want, and there is potential.
With tech and AI, it’s becoming actually a very strange form of capitalism that’s runs an algorithmic economy. Because data can be stored and distributed for close to free, it starts to not make sense. If there’s too much competition, when everyone is doing the same thing, you can tip over into something more like feudalism than capitalism. That’s possibly already happening.
It feels like a bit of an echo of what’s happening to democracy versus authoritarianism. Do you think AI could ever help us lay out the steps to get us to something closer to what we really want?
AI is being used a hell of a lot now in the environmental space, sometimes it’s hype because AI is in search of a good news story. Bill Gates has his Our World in Data initiative, and his protégé Hannah Ritchie is very interesting figure. She wrote a book called Not the End of the World, and she’s a very techno-solutionist thinker. They want to model the environment and the climate, and give those models greater resolution than they have now. They think that if they can do that, they can get a better grasp or what needs to be done.
You talk about next-gen nuclear reactors in your book. How does the nuclear question and the price of energy fit into your hopes for the future?
I don’t think anything is inevitable, but I think modular nuclear energy is highly probable.
We were once told that in the future everyone would have a mini nuclear reactor in their garden! What did your research find out about what the industry is still talking about?
I’m not a nuclear physicist, but I think there was an early hype about how small they could be, but people are designing modulars that are the size of a garage or small building. They would have to be highly securitised, and are uniquely such a dangerous technology. I cannot imagine why, especially with the world as it is, we would populate the Earth with nuclear reactors. I think the whole atoms for peace argument is very suspect. I find it incredible that some green parties around the world are now spruiking for nuclear. I don’t think its techno- scientific exuberance. It’s despair. The risk calculus is changing very quickly.
There are all kinds of things we don’t understand about radiation -penetration of plant and animal DNA, genomic instability. There are examples from all over the world. It’s a bad idea.
What do you hope your book will achieve? Maybe in the hearts and minds of its readers?
I’d like to change the terms of how we think about this problem of the environment. To encourage people to have perhaps a more modest, but also a more embodied and a more local notion of what it means to be hopeful.
Sometimes the Degrowthers frame everything about an enemy, which I don’t agree with.
But I suppose if I’m really honest, what I’m hoping is that it gets into the hands of the few people who can do the kind of thing that I could never do- which is write policy or manifestos.
It sounds like the kind of thing the Irresistible team would be able to do for you! We can take your book to Davos!
Yes! If I get lucky then maybe some of the arguments that I’m making in this book, many of which are old arguments that have gone missing at exactly the time we need them, will break through.
We have this environmental challenge – the storm is breaking in the skies above us. There’s no swerving it. We’ve got to go through it.
We need to think of it not as a technical challenge only, but as a social, political, moral, and emotional challenge. It’s a challenge to our sense of what kind of creatures we are and what we want, and we need to build a fuller sense of that into our solutions. This will make the solutions land. Our greatest desires aren’t three cars parked outside our house. It’s security, creativity, and each other.
Sydney Writers’ Festival
17- 24th May 2026
