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This chapter opens with a study of Robert Heinlein, an author at once extremely patriotic and extremely critical, whose works often display a violent switch of direction: apparently because Heinlein’s core belief was that the American way, while often at fault, was inherently self-correcting. His work was carefully noted and built on by Kim Stanley Robinson, whose “Orange County” trilogy offers three views of a future America: apocalypse, dystopian capitalism, and utopian socialism. Two other works by Tom Disch and Geoff Ryman move the critique of America into the regions of fantasy and perhaps allegory. All the later works demonstrate science fiction’s increasing sophistication in terms of narrative structure.

YA dystopias frequently investigate what it means to inhabit a human body; dystopias and other speculative fictions often track how turmoil in the body politic effects subsequent turmoil for the human body itself. This chapter thus relies on material feminism, including ecofeminism, to explore embodiment in literature for the young, and the chapter also examines the nuances of neoliberalism as a concept that complicates twenty-first century feminisms in adolescent literature. This chapter traces a range of novels that follow a spectrum from predictable (and not particularly successful) feminism to more innovative forms of feminism. This chapter thus moves from an examination of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, to Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Lissa Price’s Starters, Adam Rex’s The True Meaning of Smekday, and Sherri L. Smith’s Orleans.

Jeshua Enriquez, in “Crossing the Threshold of B-Mor: Instrumental Commodification and the Model Minority in Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea,” examines how Lee’s 2014 novel presents an acutely globalized and market-driven dystopian vision. In the aftermath of a national collapse, American civilization rearranges itself into stratified sub-societies—Charters, Facilities, and Open Counties—with B-Mor (formerly Baltimore) the ultimate example. Consequently, Enriquez provides a nuanced reading of Asian American commodification as the model minority and the importance of communal story-telling in defeating an oppression generated by racial framing as social control through the novel’s key figure-Fan.

With “India, Geopolitics, and Future Wars,” Suparno Banerjee demonstrates the importance of future-war narratives in the shifting geopolitical posture of India by exploring the genre, origins, and patterns of this SF motif. With particular attention paid to Humphrey Hawksley’s Dragon Fire (2000) and Ruchir Joshi’s The Last Jet-Engine Laugh (2001), Banerjee focuses on perceptions of India by Western as well as Indian authors as they speculate about future-wars, highlighting the disillusionment of a postcolonial nation discarding its utopian ideals by involving itself in regional power-struggles. Banerjee effectively illustrates the different patterns that such contemporary future-war narratives create.

The chapter takes a keyword approach using figures of modernity to supplement the narrative approach of Chapter 3 to rethinking modernity. It argues against terms like alternate, other, minor, and marginal and argues for terms like multiple, plural, and recurrent. It proposes clusters of relational keywords to characterize planetary modernities across time: rupture, conjuncture, vortex; sped, acceleration, velocity; network, system; circulation, route, contact; utopia, dystopia, heterotopia. Examples taken from world history in the longue durée and from the arts accompany each keyword.

Chapter 2 provides an inventory of the theoretical strains pertinent to the discussion and elaborates the concepts introduced. Starting from the premise of science fiction as a cultural mode that is ideally suited to negotiate technoscience and its influence of socio-political structures, the chapter introduces and defines the cultural formation of 'biopunk' from its pre-cursor cyberpunk. Then, biopunk will be situated as a creative intervention into posthuman discourses by elaborating the origin and use of the 'posthuman,' anchoring it in discussions differentiating between transhumanism and critical posthumanism as two oppositional theoretical positions. Further, the chapter establishes the sociological frame, positing contemporary society as formed by 'liquid modernity.' The chapter elaborates the dissolution of social institutions and the shifting of focus from public debate onto private life-choices, the global dimension of current political issues and, in contrast, the individualization of solutions to those issues. Liquid modernity, as critical dystopian present, consequently demands to be understood as warning about current tendencies in society, as criticism and even more importantly as an education of society in regards to its own needs and desires. In reviewing the utopian imagination, the chapter concludes the theoretical frame, in which to read contemporary biopunk culture.

This essay focuses on what can be considered as French Film Noir in its purist form. Thus I am deliberately limiting the choice of films in terms of time-scale and their adherence to the definitions that, to my mind, embody the spirit of this generic typology. This means leaving réalisme noir films and most gangster films to one side (whilst acknowledging that a looser definition of noir might encompass them). I begin, therefore, in 1947 with Clouzot’s Quai des Orfèvres and end, in 1979, with Série noire. This has produced a selection of 17 films which offer an interesting arc when examined against the evolving economic climate of this thirty-year period as France moves from its post-war trauma through the so-called trente-glorieuses years of economic recovery.

This chapter analyses the American Pastoral in the first terraforming boom of the 1950s. Referencing Ernest J. Yanarella’s discussion of terraforming in The Cross, the Plow and the Skyline: Contemporary Science Fiction and the Ecological Imagination, this chapter begins with the image of the pioneer farmer that attracted westward expansion and its obverse, the portrayal of dystopian societies where the promise of the pastoral is co-opted. This section recalls the “Garden of the Chattel” image of American colonialism, in which pastoral themes sublimate and so conceal the historic fact of slavery that underlay agricultural production in the American South. The final section considers the propensity to extend human moral systems to aliens and how the pastoral and elements of the sublime converge to offer counter-narratives highlighting the ecological devastation caused by the human expansion into space.

This chapter analyses how modernism in Berlin vacillates between utopian and dystopian modes and moods from the end of the nineteenth century to the conclusion of the Weimar years in 1933. It argues that the culture of modernism in the city is marked by the twin features of spaciousness and restlessness. It analyses the rise of Expressionism as a dominant form in the city, linking its particular mood to the technological modernity embraced by Berlin in the early twentieth century. It illustrates these arguments by considering how Expressionist artists (e.g. Ludwig Meidner) represented a particular space in the city (Potsdamer Platz), before discussing work by Walter Ruttmann, Alfred Döblin, the expatriate Russian community (e.g. Viktor Shklovsky), and the American magazine, Broom. It then discusses cafés and queer spaces in work by W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. It concludes by analysing the geographical emotions prompted by Berlin in two important memoirs by English visitors to the city: Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin and Bryher’s The Heart to Artemis.

This Chapter details how the Irish housing systems, and housing systems across the world, are experiencing a structural ‘shock’. We are in the midst of an unprecedented housing and homelessness crisis. This details the dramatic increase in housing inequalities and exclusion, from the rise in homelessness, mortgage arrears and foreclosures, to the collapse in home-ownership rates and, in particular, the emergence of ‘Generation Rent’ and ‘Generation Stuck at Home’. This new Generation Rent is being locked out of traditional routes to affordable secure housing such as home ownership, social housing and secure low-rent housing. They are being pushed into private rental markets with unaffordable high rents and insecurity of tenure, or forced into hidden homelessness, couchsurfing, sleeping in cars, or pushed back to live with their parents. Ireland has had the largest fall in home ownership rates among European Union (EU) countries in the past three decades. This chapter shows that the current housing situation and crisis is not a temporary blip, but a deep and profound structural crisis that is in danger of becoming a permanent crisis. Our national and global housing systems are in crisis and this is a key juncture.

This chapter discusses how it is notable that ‘speculative fiction’ – fiction that creates alternative worlds – frequently addresses themes of deviance, transgression and ordering. It identifies themes of surveillance and spectacle; hyperreality and virtual reality; memory and the suppression of history; and hierarchy and difference in dystopian fiction aimed at young adults – The Hunger Games (Collins, 2008), The Maze Runner (Dashner, 2009), Divergent (Roth, 2011) and Red Rising (Brown, 2014). The chapter explores the role of this fiction in cultural imaginings of social control, repression and resistance, and argues for greater criminological attention to novels, including bestselling fiction.

The iconic moments in the ANC road to freedom (the 1923 Bill of Rights; the 1943 African Claims; the 1955 Freedom Charter) are juxtaposed to an alternative political tradition comprised of the 1926 ICU Manifesto; the CPSA’s 1928 Native Republic Thesis; the NEUM’s 1943 Ten-Pont Programme; and the PAC’s 1959 Manifesto. In imagining alternatives to capitalism and the nation state, this tradition of ‘failed’ dreams exceeds the prescriptions of centrist liberalism. Conclusions about the literary dreams of freedom discussed in the book include: that literary dreams expressing hope out-number those expressing despair; that a majority of the dreams emphasize economic equality as much as political freedom; and that most of the literary dreams of freedom were produced at specific historical conjunctures (the 1920s and the 1940s). Contrasting the dreams of freedom from the 1880s to the 1970s with a selection of forty short projections of the future produced in 2014 (twenty years after the formal end of apartheid), it is evident that dystopian visions have replaced the tendency to utopianism in the earlier period.

The diverse horde of nineteenth-century utopian visions was united by a consistent call to abolish urbanism and replace it with a future in gardens. A short discussion of the consequences of these visions in real landscapes of the twentieth century is presented in this conclusion: the suburban revolution has evolved in ways that would probably have prompted ambivalence in the minds of many Victorians, had they lived to see their dreams come true in some ways, and fail in others. Their longing for reform was often motivated by genuine desires to improve the lives of their fellow beings, although it is also a tragic fact that their altruism was often tarnished by bigotry, arrogance, simplistic thinking, and other corrupting influences. In the end, perhaps the most valuable legacy of the Victorian utopian visionaries is their demonstration of the incredible power of human dreams to change our world—and the need for humans to continue dreaming, with compassion and humility, to make the world better, in part by undoing the damage of old dreams that have become modern nightmares.