The chapter studies Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871) and Gabriel Tarde’s Underground Man (1896). Drawing on the pictorial and literary reception of the Thames Tunnel and the Parisian underground, the chapter investigates how the material change of subterranean space in nineteenth-century Britain and France stimulated the conception of a “new” underground associated with the technological future. Comparing the two authors’ intersection of the new underground with climate control, it ventures that Bulwer-Lytton Lytton demonstrates the calamitous aesthetic consequences of climate technology employed by an underground race. In contrast, Tarde portrays the flourishing of decadent underground civilisation prompted by the heat death of the sun. The chapter concludes that the discursive network turning the underground into an inorganic, climate-controlled place peaks in Underground Man, where the climate becomes an engineerable simulacrum, spelling out a progression from dystopian to utopian depictions of deliberate climate change.

This chapter studies H. G. Wells’s integration of climate control as the atmospheric background of the Victorian empire, future, and utopia. In the Victorian period, dubbed the Crystal Age, British engineers such as Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward (case), John Claudius Loudon (conservatory), and Joseph Paxton (palace) all built glasshouse structures, increasingly fit for human inhabitation, hoping to construct the climatological statis of eternal summer on a regional scale. Engaging with the aesthetic, architectural, and ideological development, the chapter argues that Wells examined the anthropogenic climate of the Victorian empire, future, and utopia in the short story “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” (1894), the novella The Time Machine (1895), and the novel A Modern Utopia (1905), speculatively thematising the long-term socio-biological consequences of the planetary greenhouse.

This chapter studies the works of Jules Verne, primarily his forgotten work The Purchase of the North Pole (1889). Providing ideational background, it compares Charles Fourier’s fantasy of the anthropogenic correction of the Earth’s axis in Theory of the Four Movements (1808) with Eugène Huzar’s secularisation of the apocalypse as the result of technoscientific intervention in The End of the World Through Science (1855). Delving into The Purchase of the North Pole, the chapter analyses how Verne exposes the Promethean ambitions of the Baltimore Gun Club by acutely describing the imminent natural disasters following their attempt to correct the axis and climate of the Earth. It concludes that Verne represented climate intervention as a potentially catastrophic practice, rendering the planetary consequences of anthropogenic climate change intelligible through an apocalyptic rhetoric.

How has modern Arabic literature imagined the future? Focusing on dystopian narratives as cultural responses to political, environmental, and social crises, this chapter examines the shifting concept of “the future” from a modernist ideal of progress to a site of uncertainty and threat, shaped by posthumanist and ecological thought. The analysis centers on Ahmad Khalid Tawfiq’s novel Utopia (2008), which portrays a near-future Egypt marked by extreme inequality, environmental degradation, and social collapse. The novel exemplifies “critical dystopia,” blending pessimistic visions with moments of resistance and open-endedness. The analysis situates Utopia within a broader tradition of Arabic speculative fiction, tracing its roots to the Nahda and its evolution through contemporary climate fiction. It argues that Arabic literature offers a vital space for reimagining temporality, critiquing slow violence, and envisioning alternative futures amid ongoing regional and global upheavals.

In the previous chapter the fragmentation of the modern age has been discussed. In this chapter I will show that for the Romantics this fragmentation is a form of stagnation of time, where the transformative power proper of Becoming is missing and where, therefore, freedom is not deemed possible. How can the transformative power be re-introduced into history without falling into the illusion that the self could be the sovereign agent of such a transformation? The Romantic answer to this question deals with three key concepts: critical thinking, humanity, and utopia. Critical thinking is viewed as a creative act that detects in the present signs of a better future, humanity as the future non-sovereign subject of history, and utopia as the imagination of a possible future that, at the same time, does not imply a concept of history as ‘progress’. Together, as will be analysed at the end of the chapter, they allow us to think the relationship between history and nature neither as opposition nor as identity, providing thought-provoking and original perspectives on the actual debate in environmental philosophy.

This chapter examines William Burroughs as a radical world builder within science fiction, exploring how his early and late works engage deeply with the genre’s tropes – time travel, space opera, interplanetary conflict, and dystopian urban control. From the Cut-Up/Nova trilogy to The Wild Boys and the Red Night trilogy, Burroughs constructs fragmented urban landscapes and hybrid futures that destabilize genre conventions and resist linear narrative. Situating Burroughs among proto-SF, Golden Age authors, and the New Wave of the 1960s, Hougue explores how his stylistic innovations – especially the cut-up method – helped redefine the speculative tradition. Clémentine Hougue traces Burroughs’ influence on writers like Samuel Delany, William Gibson, and Kathy Acker, showing how his mutating urban imaginaries prefigure cyberpunk and experimental SF. Moving from dystopian insurrections to utopian reimaginings of space and time, Burroughs’ work becomes a site of poetic and political speculation, operating at the boundaries of genre and form.

The past three quarters of a century have witnessed humanity remake the planet on which it lives, but also begin to imagine better and worse ways in which this process might proceed. So, science fiction has acquired a peculiar centrality to Anthropocene culture. As Amitav Ghosh explains, climate change is a fundamentally collective process, whereas the dominant Western culture is one “in which the idea of the collective has been exiled from politics, economics, and literature alike.” So, “serious prose fiction” has become overwhelmingly committed to versions of literary realism that depend for their efficacy on notions of everyday probability. By contrast, extreme climate change – and the Anthropocene more generally – necessarily involve everyday improbabilities. Radical improbabilities have therefore been banished from “literary fiction” into the “generic outhouses” of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. In short, the Anthropocene has itself generated the wave of recent anthropogenic eutopias and dystopias. The chapter concludes by endorsing Kim Stanley Robinson’s view that “utopia has gone from being a somewhat minor literary problem to a necessary survival strategy.”

The American Dream and its utopian “America” are tropes that transcend US geographical boundaries. They distinguish between a nation-state and a myth that can be interpreted differently around the world. American popular culture has relied on this myth as a global export, a form of corporate imperialism attempting to Americanize the world – best exemplified by the Hollywood film industry. Recently, however, the global media landscape is more diversified and fragmented due to social media, digital platforms, and streaming services. The transnational success of South Korean popular culture, MTV Europe, and Netflix illustrate how contemporary cultural differences are recognized and absorbed in American-modeled popular entities. For example, the global TV talent shows Pop Idol, American Idol, and The Voice deliver American identification regardless of country of production. Another recent example of unstated “Americanness” as a global phenomenon is singer Taylor Swift, whose worldwide popularity is connected to an explicit cultural identity

This chapter considers Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and William Morris’s New from Nowhere (1890) through the lens of the commons and what counts as “common sense.” Taking its cue from a question Morris poses about art’s role in radical social transformation, the chapter asks if the recent environmental turn in Victorian studies is interested in piecemeal or systemic change. Considering both modes of change, the chapter proposes a “poetry of the commons,” grounded in Carroll’s and Morris’s very different approaches to both the commons and common sense, as an alternative to the market economy and as more accurate approximation of how the commons traditionally worked. Accordingly, Alice and News can be seen as laying the foundations for something like “commons sense” and a practice and poetry of the commons adequate to the demands of the climate crisis.

What is it to belong to, and yet be in distinction from, a broader environment? Recurring to earlier discussion of Mingei, this chapter discusses the aesthetics of form in relation to individuals and organizations, using examples of Gestalt theory (Kurt Goldstein), architecture (Peter Zumthor) and poetry (Rilke (via Rodin)), as well as craft workers Mary Watts, Gary Fabian MIller and Gertude Jeykll. It culminates in a study of Ethel Mairet’s weaving workshop The Gospels, and her sustained and arguably utterly original attempt to blend the biotechnic thinking of urban planners like Geddes and Mumford, the aesthetic sensitivity and skill of weaving and an enduring and vibrant small business venture.

Chapter 6 turns to the relation between philosophy and politics in Plato’s Republic. The question here is how to understand Socrates’ proposal of philosophical rulership in Kallipolis. For all three post-Heideggerian Platonists, this is not to be read literally (pace Heidegger’s 1933 disastrous appropriation of the proposal), but ironically. For Strauss, Socrates’ argument ironically points to the opposite claim: philosophical rulership is impossible, and this is a symptom of the irreconcilable tension between philosophy and the city. For Krüger and Gadamer, the irony points to an “in-between” position: while philosophers cannot rule directly as kings and queens, they can rule indirectly. For Gadamer, this indirect rulership takes the form of the philosophically educated citizen’s participation in the political life of the community, and, most importantly, the task of civic education. For Krüger, it takes the form of a philosophical critique of existing political institutions. Despite their differences, all three ironic readings of the tension between philosophy and politics in the Republic converge toward what I call the “political finitude” of philosophy.

Revival processes appear central to folk musics across different cultural and national traditions. Consequently, this chapter argues that, rather than perceiving revival as the exception, processes of revival and change should thus be perceived as a central feature of tradition. As is outlined here, revival needs to be approached from a much broader perspective. Falling back on case studies from England, Latvia, and Germany, this chapter further analyzes how acts of revival are entangled with themes of authenticity and nostalgia. Utilizing different claims of authenticity as elaborated by Denis Dutton, these waves of revivalism might be described as a defensive mechanism against eras of accelerated global change. Following scholars such as Svetlana Boym and Ross Cole, folk revivalism can thus be understood as an act of imaginative investment in the past and future, a nexus where nostalgia and utopia – as a counterpoint or solution to this sentiment of loss – meet.

This chapter offers a utopian reading of the British science fiction subgenre of the cosy catastrophe. Coined by Brian Aldiss in 1973 as a pejorative term, the cosy catastrophe names a distinct group of English fictions written after World War II. Writers such as John Wyndham, John Christpher, Rose Macauley, J. G. Ballard, and Charles Eric Maine imagined apocalyptic disasters in which middle-class male protagonists ‘have a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying off’, as Aldiss put it. Whilst Aldiss dismissed such fictions as ‘devoid of ideas’, the chapter presents an alternative reading, arguing that cosy catastrophes offer powerful allegories of a distinctively English postwar sensibility. Within this curious narrative pleasure of a masochistic embrace of decline we can identify a paradoxical utopian longing for the dystopian smashing of systems. The chapter concludes that the cosy catastrophe is best understood as a cultural articulation of English declinism at the moment when decolonisation confronts postwar Britain.

This chapter examines the dialectic of positive and negative utopian tendencies in China Miéville’s Bas-Lag trilogy. Critically acclaimed as a landmark series in the British New Weird subgenre, Perdido Street Station (2000), The Scar (2002), and Iron Council (2004) offer readers rich worldbuilding, blending neo-Victorian steampunk with semi-fascist capitalist oppression. Within the largely negative terrain of Perdido Street Station moments of utopian positivity can nonetheless flourish – most memorably in the inter-species love affair between the scientist protagonist and his insectoid partner. The Scar, which is set on a floating city-state, offers a positive utopian space partly modelled on the social organisation of real-world pirate ships on the eighteenth-century Atlantic. However, it also plays on Ursula Le Guin’s notion of the ‘ambiguous utopia’, with counter-utopian as well as counter-counter-utopian narrative elements. The third novel in the series, Iron Council, sees a transition towards communism, focusing on the political construction of revolutionary utopian ideals. Together, Miéville’s novels present readers with a heady mix of fantastic worldbuilding and Marxist utopian politics, with overt references to the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, and, more recently, the anti-globalisation protests at the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle in 1999.

This chapter considers the ambiguous utopian impulses of literary, filmic, and television works published and produced in the 1970s. Drawing on the concept of post-imperial melancholy, the chapter traces the utopian contours of these texts’ forceful, often shocking, critique of British imperial nostalgia. It focuses on sub-genres that emerged during this significant decade, including the British alternate history, the dystopia, and reworkings of the classical literary utopia, with reference to writers such as Daphne Du Maurier, Len Deighton, Anthony Burgess, Emma Tennant, Angela Carter, and J. G. Ballard. These three genres, the chapter argues, critically interrogate the utopian impulse in the 1970s and its possible instantiations in national and transnational imagined communities, as well as the built environment in which the modernity of these communities is expressed. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Derek Jarman’s Jubilee, identifying how this iconic 1970s punk film reframes the classical narrative structure of literary utopias.

This chapter examines the ‘peculiar’ utopian temporality of the contemporary moment as expressed in the fictional works of three Black British female writers: Queenie (2019), by Candace Carty-Williams, Swing Time (2016) by Zadie Smith, and Girl, Woman, Other (2019) by Bernadine Evaristo. The chapter argues that these novels represent a particular incarnation of utopian realism. This names a strong commitment in contemporary British fiction to articulating post-racial futures. In utopian realist texts, writers use realism not to convey mimetic depictions of the present here and now but, rather, to convince readers of the viability of alternative, transformed futures. Utopian realists such as Candace Carty-Williams, Zadie Smith, Bernadine Evaristo, Monica Ali, and Diana Evans foreground a relationship between utopian thinking and models drawn from personal and historic experience. Like design fictions, the term given for fictional narratives used by designers of prototype products and technologies to help imagine their future use, these texts offer readers identifiable utopian alternatives to contemporary Britain. Shaped in relation to the long history of Black experience in the United Kingdom, as well as gender and queerness, these novels reveal the need to consider the future not as a speculative possibility but a realisable plan for how we might live.

This chapter analyses the utopian possibilities of the British counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Countercultural aesthetics and politics responded to contemporary crises in urban planning, ecological destruction, and fractured identities of nation and class – issues that remain pressing in the twenty-first century. Tracing the origins of post-punk utopianism, the chapter argues that the ambiguity of the British counterculture’s utopian possibilities may be explored via an excavation of its class basis. Drawing on the work of Raymond Williams, Ernst Bloch, and Herbert Marcuse, the chapter analyses the 1974 BBC TV play Penda’s Fen. It suggests that Penda’s Fen contains conflicting utopian visions, reflecting the differing class factions that comprised the counterculture and anticipated the neoliberal present of twenty-first-century Britain. The chapter concludes by suggesting that this iconic TV play has lessons to teach us in the contemporary moment. Its class politics, which explores homosexual desire between working-class and middle-class characters, offers a utopian image of cross-class solidarity and sexuality set against the backdrop of a mythic vision of Britain.

This chapter considers Doris Lessing’s engagement with utopia, from the Children of Violence series which is set in 1950s–60s London to her near-future ecocatastrophic Mara and Dann novels (1999, 2005). The necessity of utopian hope in Lessing’s novels is set against a seeming disavowal of the possibility of positive systemic change. Utopian possibility in Lessing’s Canopus in Argos series (1979–83), for instance, is driven by cosmic patterns rather than human action. Similarly, her excoriating descriptions of colonial and capitalist life in the Children of Violence series (1952–69) possess an energy that can be considered utopian. However, the apocalyptic strain in many of Lessing’s works renders this utopianism highly ambivalent. In their critique of societal progress or political change at scale, Lessing’s novels often sit at odds with the literary utopian tradition. In Lessing’s works, read alongside American contemporaries such as Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler, the prefigurative mode is less concretely utopian. Enclaves of survivors persist, but the texts indicate that political struggle will return with each generation and the same problems recur across history. The chapter concludes that Lessing’s late ecocatastrophic fictions exhibit a stronger utopian impulse, which resonates with twenty-first-century discussions of the climate emergency in the United Kingdom.