‘Irish Science Fiction’ considers a genre not often associated with an Irish novelistic tradition, science fiction, by focusing on the work of two Belfast authors: James White and Bob Shaw. Both authors began by publishing their work in science fiction magazines. White’s major contribution to the genre has been the Sector General series, set on a vast intergalactic space station, but he has also written stand-alone novels, including The Dream Millennium (1976) and Underkill (1979), both set in a violent, dystopian future Belfast. Likewise, while Shaw has written a number of individual novels, he is best known for his two trilogies, Orbitsville (1975–90) and Land and Overland (1986–9), which can be read, on one level, as parables of colonisation. The careers of both writers overlap with that of Ian McDonald, whose Irish trilogy (1991–6) uses future worlds to reflect on events such as the War of Independence and the Troubles.

Chapter 2 looks at how the Genesis 1 and related domination-oriented onto-stories compare with accounts of domestication that emphasize co-evolution and mutuality of humans and animals. It places human domestication of animals within a broader picture of forms of inter-species relations, including mutualistic symbiosis, parasitic symbiosis, commensalism and mixed categories.

Much of mainstream machine learning research focuses on models and algorithms, but the bulk of applied data science work happens in two interaction surfaces: curating datasets and interpreting model output. In this chapter we highlight case studies drawn from computational humanities research to illustrate the problems and opportunities in these two interaction patterns.

Artificial intelligence is depicted through various perspectives, interpretations, and portrayals across diverse contexts. Narratives, whether from traditional storytelling mediums like film, literature, and TV, or other forms of media, such as news, academia, and social media, surround us. These narratives significantly influence how we perceive, interact with, and understand our artifacts, including AI. In this chapter, we explore how these narratives have shaped our understanding of AI as a technology to develop critical thinking skills when encountering different narratives.

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.

Timothy S. Murphy explores William Burroughs’ oeuvre as a “singularity” in three overlapping senses: aesthetic uniqueness, philosophical resistance to generalization, and cosmological metaphor. Burroughs’ cut-up novels – Naked Lunch, The Nova Trilogy, and beyond – embody a form of narrative experimentation that resists categorization and disrupts conventional literary logic. Drawing on concepts from astrophysics, Murphy aligns Burroughs’ work with the disruptive force of black holes, novae, and supernovae. Through a close reading of the trilogy’s stellar metaphors, especially the figure of Mr. Bradly Mr. Martin, Murphy argues that Burroughs anticipates a model of narrative that is both destructive and generative – annihilating fixed identities and control structures while offering the possibility of linguistic and ontological renewal. The “Burroughs singularity,” codenamed WSB X-1, represents a continual feedback loop between collapse and creation, producing texts as unstable, irradiated, and transformative as the cosmic phenomena they metaphorically invoke.

Despite being a writer who was celebrate for transcending the written word to work in multiple forms of media, Burroughs remains underrecognized for his contributions to the art of cinema, especially as a screenwriter. This chapter explores the history of Burroughs’ engagement with cinema, highlighting his neglected, and unrealized, screenplays from the late 1960s and 1970s. After exploring his 1960s collaborations with Antony Balch on the cut-up films, Towers Open Fire and The Cut-Ups, this chapter traces the arc of Burroughs’ screenwriting, from his earliest film treatment, “Twilights Last Gleamings,” his closet screenplay, The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, his screen adaptation of his novel, The Wild Boys, and his screenplay, Blade Runner: A Movie. After situating these works within the changing field of American cinema in the late 1960s and 1970s, this chapter considers Burroughs’ theoretical contributions to screenwriting in his lectures on the subject at the City College of New York and Naropa College in the mid-1970s. Through this overview of Burroughs’ screenwriting and thinking, this chapter argues that Burroughs’ remains neglected for offering a valuable vision of an alternate cinema at a crucial time in American culture and history.

Los Angeles literature’s historically marginal place in the American canon can partly be attributed to the prominence of “popular” literatures in its cultural production. Perhaps no literary genre has made such a dramatic journey from critically dismissed literary margins to the critically lauded literary-lauded mainstream as science fiction, a genre in whose development Los Angeles played a significant role, as David Sandner demonstrates throughout his chapter. Sandner’s narrative takes us from early zine culture in the 1940s and 1950s, via Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (famously written at UCLA on rented typewriters), to countercultural works of the 1960s and 1970s. Beyond this point, Sandner identifies LA, in all its multiethnic complexity, as playing an inevitably central role in the genre’s diversification, represented in the form of Ernest Hogan’s pioneering Chicano science fiction and Pasadena native Octavia Butler’s frequent collocation of Southern California settings with both speculative worlds and speculations on Blackness. Other counter-futures and alternate histories are found in works by Kim Stanley Robinson and Sesshu Foster.

Revolutionary theories were paradigms for transforming future modes of production, social relation, and cultural representation, and for assessing past and existing relations of inequality and unfreedom. In this light, revolutionary theory was its own form of speculative fiction. Contemporary speculative fiction and film by Indigenous and Latinx creatives is a continuation of this revolutionary theorizing. If 20th-century revolutionary movements “failed” Latin American, Latinx, and Indigenous subalterns, then speculative fiction responds to this failure with a 21st-century anti-colonial/decolonial hermeneutic for understanding social relations of power as legacies of colonialism, while the aesthetic conventions of speculative fiction reanimate the genre as a vision of future worlds. Latinx and Indigenous authors and directors of science fiction, neo-gothic, adventure and dystopic/utopic genres explore the legacies of colonialism, neocolonialism, dispossession, and extractivism by creating shared public visions for their audiences of these events, as well as visions of future worlds yet to come.

This chapter explores the cultural obsession with entropy in the London-based magazine, New Worlds. Associated with the 1960s New Wave, New Worlds was instrumental in bringing an experimental literary sensibility to the genre of science fiction. Writing against the grain of prevailing academic criticism, the chapter unearths a latent utopian impulse within the metaphor of entropy. Artists, writers, and critics associated with New Worlds considered the second law of thermodynamics, or entropy, to be a fitting image for the dystopian mood of post-war British literature and culture. The chapter argues that their obsession with the disintegration of society at a time of post-imperial decline reveals, rather, hope among the ruins. It offers a close reading of British-based artist and writer Pamela Zoline’s short story “Heat Death of the Universe” (1967), in which the boredom of a Californian housewife stretches into a Dadaist utopian daydream about the heat death of the universe, the theoretical endpoint of entropy. By situating fictions published in New Worlds within the wider political contexts of anti-colonial resistance, the New Left, Second Wave Feminism, and Gay Liberation, the chapter uncovers a persistent strain of utopian possibility through Britain’s cultural obsession with entropy in the 1960s.

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, which introduces the collection, maps a distinctively British utopian impulse in literature and culture from the end of World War II to the present. Drawing on philosophical works by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and Ernst Bloch, the chapter explores the utopian impulse in literary works, films, zines, poetry, art, and music. It situates these works in their materialist contexts, from the swinging 1960s and more apocalyptic 1970s to the political riots of 1980s British cities and blistering critiques of Thatcherite neoliberalism that persisted into the 1990s and early 2000s, concluding with the utopian turn in the 2010s and 2020s as financial, ecological, and political crises gripped the British state. Taking its inspiration from the Welsh cultural materialist Raymond Williams and British postcolonial scholars Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, the chapter argues that British countercultures and subcultures have yielded a powerful utopian surplus that persists into the present. Like an explosive, the image Bloch privileges for utopian rupture, the texts, novelists, filmmakers, poets, zine-makers, and playwrights explored in this collection rip through the prevailing discourse to reveal a utopian surplus; ‘that which is not yet fulfilled’.

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 discusses world-building in the realm of fantasy and science fiction and its connection to conlanging. It explores the connections between language and culture and offers suggestions and a set of guided questions to build a fictional world associated with your conlang. This chapter also covers fictional maps and texts and introduces the fictional realm and a short text connected to the Salt language, a conlang that will be developed throughout the book. The chapter ends with a list of resources and references to explore further.