"A Gun to the Monkey's Head"

Trying to track down a podcast on The Road I came across a whole conference full of cool podcasts tucked away in a dusty box in the Internet Archive. The conference was 'Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe' held in Australia in 2010 :

https://web.archive.org/web/20110411112713/http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/ecps/conferences/utopias/

The keynote talk was by the SF writer Kim Stanley Robinson and listening to it now was inspiring enough to get me to post it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110415141918/http://arts.monash.edu.au/ecps/assets/podcasts/2010-08-31t1530-stanley-robinson-utopias-in-the-age-of-climate-change-utopias-conference.mp3

Working through genres like Westerns (and Post-Apocalyptic SF is basically a Western in drag), Fantasy and Horror means mostly working in a conservative milieu. SF is probably the only genre that is at least 50% liberal-left in content/creators. So hearing Robison talking about being a pro-science leftist Humanist and making rational, thought-provoking argument was a great cleanser to The Road.

The talk is about 50 minutes (with another 20 minutes of questions). The are two metaphors about the "guns under the tables" and the "gun to the monkey's head" that should be heard.