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.

This chapter argues that Scottish author Naomi Mitchison’s 1962 novel Memoirs of a Spacewoman is an exemplary critical feminist utopia. Touching on many of the literary utopian genre’s foundational tensions and ambiguities, Mitchison’s novel offers readers a world of freely accessible abortions, inter-racial and multi-gendered parenting, queer and alien sexual practices, and universal child-led education. Despite the obviously utopian contours of this speculative narrative world, however, Mitchison’s narrative uses the utopian society for its backdrop of spacefaring alien adventure. By creating a utopian society, only to leave it behind as her protagonists visits stranger alien worlds, the chapter argues that Mitchison manages to maintain a focus on the utopian missing ‘something’, even whilst depicting a feminist utopia. Rather than arriving at a static utopian locus, Mitchison’s eponymous spacewoman journeys in an ongoing process of utopian searching, in which many of the literary genre’s pleasures and dangers are laid bare. With its focus on a female scientist attempting to avoid the harm historically perpetuated on alien flora and fauna by British colonial scientific institutions, Mitchison’s text reveals the utopian prospect of an anti-colonial feminist science.

This chapter explores Scotland’s relationship with utopia, arguing that this relationship is complicated by Scotland’s perceived peripheral, and potentially oppositional, identity within the United Kingdom. Twentieth-century Scottish fiction has often been reticent to engage with fully developed utopian paradigms, instead focusing on quotidian experience. However, utopian communities are also positioned as an opportunity to look beyond the nation to examine questions of individual and collective desire. The chapter focuses on three main strands of Scottish utopian fiction from the post-war to the present: the unusual emphasis on death and cyclical return in key utopian texts; utopian novels that explore communal life and homosociality; and queer works that employ storytelling as a utopian act. The texts discussed in this chapter reveal that in Scottish literature utopia is not located in some far-off future but, rather, operates within the continuity created by shared narratives of identity, community, and desire. Examining these themes, the chapter concludes that Scottish utopian fiction is more varied than previous accounts have noted.

In his chapter, Gregory Castle explores the cultural need for heroism expressed by W. B. Yeats and Alice Milligan at a time (the first decade of the twentieth century) when hope for the future was an explicit component of revivalist discourse across the arts and the political spectrum. Yeats’s In the Seven Woods (1903) offers a vision of legendary and contemporary heroism in which love and desire are transformed in a process in which the experience of beauty and its loss, as well as the representation of this experience, become heroic endeavors. In Milligan’s Hero Lays (1908), heroism does not rely on a transposition of love into the context of heroism. Rather, her vision is informed by political activism; her poems mine the ancient legends for a model of heroic action that would be suitable for the nationalist cause of her own time. For both poets, the heroic ethos of the legendary past is sustained as part of the contemporary poet’s bardic responsibility.

The book concludes with sober thoughts on how propagandist language use threatens Indian democracy. One of the primary reasons for the book is to underline the urgency of studying and identifying linguistic trickery. While each chapter does so, the conclusion highlights the consequences of linguistic trickery for Indian Muslims. Academic work on language use such as this has argued for studying not just the language but also what is actually does to people.

Chapter 11 summarises the arguments in the book. It concludes that, although the evidence is incomplete, there is little reason to believe that the severe disfigurement provision is inducing positive attitudinal or behavioural change, nor providing an effective remedy for people discriminated against because of the way they look. It concludes by noting that other social changes may bring this issue into sharper focus, and suggests some ways in which holes in the evidence could be filled.

Reinach understood the specific temporality as an important structural element of law. It requires its own phenomenological assessment, which distinguishes the being of law from that of physical and psychological, but also mathematical objects. For him, however, the foundations of the temporality of law do not lie in consciousness, as in the later phenomenological theory of law, but in the a priori nature of the forms of law themselves. This is reconstructed here for the first time from the scattered fragments of Reinach’s phenomenology of the temporality of law and contrasted with Gerhard Husserl’s theory of law and time, which can draw on his father Edmund’s phenomenology of inner time consciousness and Heidegger’s “Being and Time”. Both make important contributions to a theory of the temporality of law.

As the providers of care work, women experienced the painful losses of male bodies during the Civil War acutely. This chapter explores the way Elizabeth Stuart Phelps used her works—particularly her successful sentimental novel, The Gates Ajar (1868)—to imagine faith as a way to manage this pain. Yet, Phelps’s popularity stemmed from the way her notion of faith also complicated the orthodox Calvinist belief in a disembodied spirit: an ontology premised on the soul’s difference from, and superiority to, the body. By developing what Phelps calls “spiritual materialism,” she puts the lived experience of embodiment at the very center of belief, not drifting or working between mind-centered and body-centered paradigms, as we have seen, but operating beyond them both at the level of faith. Precisely the way this re-embodied faith moves beyond mind-centered and body-centered ontologies allows Phelps’s sentimental novel itself to move beyond the restrictive gender politics of sentimentalism, “minding the body” to tell a less repressive story of domesticity and reveal a more capacious understanding of female desire.

This chapter looks at the history of climate change, the failure to act, systemic thinking and truth.

By exploring issues of energy, efficiency, growth and systemic resets, the reader is able to see the trajectory humanity is currently on and how it needs to change in order to survive and thrive moving forwards.

The introduction sets out how Mike came to write the book, why it is so important for us to face up to the challenges ahead for humanity, how dismally we have so far failed to do so, how the book is structured and what kind of future we can hope for.

Prediction science is likely to push on toward distinct reconceptualizations or the dismantling of the cornerstones of traditional cognitive science, away from rule-based symbol manipulation and toward a comprehensive systems prediction science, toward theoretical unification and simplicity, toward figuring out the pros and cons of the representation-light and representation-heavy, toward incorporating analog representations and common codes, toward proactive, probabilistic, mechanistic, and formalized theories, and computationally specified models of the predictive mind. The paradigm shift of the predictive revolution is no longer only emerging: it is continuing at an ever-increasing pace.

This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Sue Atkins, the Grande Dame of lexicography, who passed away in 2021. In a prologue we argue that she must be seen on a par with other visionaries and their visions, such as Paul Dirac in mathematics or Beethoven in music. We review the last half century through the eyes of Sue Atkins. In the process, insights of other luminaries come into the picture, including those of Patrick Hanks, Michael Rundell, Adam Kilgarriff, John Sinclair, and Charles Fillmore. This material serves as background to start thinking out of the box about the future of dictionaries. About fifty oppositions are presented, in which the past is contrasted with the future, divided into five subsections: the dictionary-making process, supporting tools and concepts, the appearance of the dictionary, facts about the dictionary, and the image of the dictionary. Moving from the future of dictionaries to the future of lexicographers, the argument is made that dictionary makers need to join forces with the Big Data companies, a move that, by its nature, brings us to the US and thus Americans, including Gregory Grefenstette, Erin McKean, Laurence Urdang, and Sidney I. Landau. In an epilogue, the presentation’s methodology is defined as being “a fact-based extrapolation of the future” and includes good advice from Steve Jobs.