In this chapter, urban and natural ecosystems are compared and contrasted. The chapter starts with definitions of both ecosystems and presents the case of the urban ecosystem as a striking example of environmental engineering typical for various living organisms. It proceeds by describing differences in overground and underground structures of natural and urban ecosystems. Energy, water, and nutrient inputs required for the functioning of both ecosystems are discussed thereafter. An overview of gaseous, liquid, and solid outputs from urban and natural ecosystems concludes this chapter. The consequences of these differences for the environment and humans are discussed in Chapters 4, 5, and 6 in detail.

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 traces the alignment between the Victorian novel, the articulation of geological, or “deep” time, and the emergence of the Anthropocene. The Victorian era is usually understood in terms of “uniformitarian” geology, in which Earth changes slowly and gradually, an understanding that has also informed understandings of the novel in the period. By contrast, this chapter unearths a latent “catastrophism” in Victorian fiction, examining geological events and underground spaces that reconfigure the conditions of possibility in works by Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, and Thomas Hardy.

This chapter considers how Australian poetry of the 1970s participated in major social changes that were fuelled by a range of factors, including greater access to higher education, the sexual liberation movement, a drug subculture and Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. It traces how Australian writers turned to America for influence and were able to utilise new technologies to generate a vibrant small press culture. The chapter outlines the surge in collaboration, collectives and overlapping literary circles. It also examines a series of anthologies that sought to feature new energies and voices, with some seeking to demarcate such poetry from earlier or more traditional forms. Lastly, it analyses the significance of the poetry workshops based at Melbourne’s La Mama Theatre, little magazines, and the development of small presses that produced poetry collections during the decade of the 1970s.

The Epilogue reflects on the afterlife and legacies of the rise of gray literature during World War II. Most of the ephemeral texts produced in the memorandum culture analyzing Nazi Germany were discarded and only few texts survived as part of the historical record. The institutions fostering gray literature on Nazi Germany either focused on new problems or were disbanded entirely. The majority of intellectuals involved in the memorandum culture quickly moved on, some, like Thomas Mann, returning to Europe, and others, like Gregory Bateson, staying on to shape the intellectual life in the United States. The basic practices of World War II text production and distribution, however, had a second life during the Cold War era, as they were employed for the circulation of underground literature in the context of newly emerging artistic groups and political movements.

This chapter begins by exploring the professionalization of Czech rock under the influence of The Beatles in the 1960s, exemplified by the group Olympic. The second part of the chapter focuses on the distinction between official and unofficial types of popular music that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. An examination of the output and reception of the groups Blue Effect and The Plastic People of the Universe during this period illustrates how rock music became politicized during normalization and how this politicization influenced later Czech historiographies of rock.

Examining rescue during 1940–1945, this chapter asks what possibilities of self-help were available and what strategies were developed to take action? Could Jewish organizations continue to operate under the Nazi regime? What forms of cooperation were forged with non-Jewish organizations and individuals, such as members of the Christian churches, and did these raise chances of survival?

This chapter briefly surveys the Australian Electronic Dance Music (EDM) scene throughout the 1990s. It examines the impact of financial investments from major labels and how this provided a fertile ground for specialist EDM labels to create scenes that connected back to the techno, rave, and club communities. Brief histories of Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane, and Adelaide are provided, noting their different characteristics and prominent players in the field. Links between the post-punk electronic music scene and how they impacted the first wave of EDM creatives are also discussed. As one-half of Sydney techno band Itch-E & Scratch-E, the author (aka Paul Mac) provides a personal, practice-based, lived history of the period.

Contemporary perceptions and discourses of Arctic mining are linked to concerns of local and global futures, especially in relation to climate change and its diverse ramifications for the Arctic and the world. Both the far North and the subterranean world have been imagined as mysterious and enchanted in European mindscapes. This chapter explores how extractive industries in the Arctic, and more generally, are entwined with such beyond-the-rational conceptualizations and the associated long-running fears and dreams linked to otherworldliness and danger but also treasure and a better future. These ideas and perceptions have a substantial affective potential, which is evident in historical and contemporary discourses of mining and the North. We propose that the controversies around and affective qualities of contemporary mines and mining are entangled with the broader cultural ideas and perceptions of the subterranean. The emotional and affective power of mines and mining – their ability to elicit responses such as fear, excitement, and fascination – must be accounted for in order to unravel our complex historically and culturally mediated relationship with the world underneath.

This chapter traces the influence of paperback books on American literary subcultures after World War II. Cheap, handy, and accessible for most readers, the mass-market paperback format at once democratized the culture of letters and exploited stereotypes for profit. When it came to race relations, paperbacks’ capacity for disrepute collided with African Americans’ struggle for civil rights in a subgenre called “black sleaze.” In the 1940s and 1950s, books that tackled racial violence were repackaged with prurient covers that emphasized the taboo of interracial sex. This set the stage for the 1960s, when direct-to-paperback books bracketed social upheaval in the real world for sexual hedonism in fantasy. White readers’ problematic consumption of black sleaze was epitomized by the release of Iceberg Slim’s autobiographical novel Pimp in 1967 by the white-owned, tabloid-oriented Holloway House. However, after seeing the racial composition of its readership change in the 1970s, Holloway House sidelined sleaze for black pulp fiction formula stories by black authors for black readers. The switch may have appeared to vanquish sleaze, but elements of it remained embedded in this masculinist subgenre of books, which went on to inspire key figures in rap and hip-hop culture.

Chapter 5, “Information Wars,” is the opening case study of four intelligentsia-built resistance systems, which consider how the intelligentsia responded to Nazi persecution with projects bent on maintaining national traditions and rebuilding a Polish state. It examines the one that undergirds the rest: underground information creation and trafficking that kept the elite connected and funneled news into and out of the city. In response to the closure of Polish-language press, radio bookstores, and libraries, a number of educated Poles created an underground world of secret newsletters and journals to keep the city informed about occupier behavior and the circumstances of the wider war. This project involved entangled networks of individuals who were brutally punished if caught, and the work of writing, editing, couriering, and reading underground press initiated many Varsovians into anti-Nazi “conspiracies.” Information sourced in the occupied city was not merely for local consumption but was painstakingly smuggled out by a sprawling network of Polish and international couriers toting encrypted information to the states of the Grand Alliance. This chapter argues that the ability of Poles in Warsaw to counter Nazi propaganda narratives with their own information was essential to all later successful opposition.

Chapter 7, “Matters of Faith: Catholic Intelligentsia and the Church,” asks how Catholics behaved in Warsaw and why. Roman Catholicism was the religion of the majority of Varsovians and had played an important role in the development of the Polish national project. In the absence of a Polish government, the Church provided a potential locus of authority for Poles. Warsaw’s priests drew particular negative attention from the Nazi occupation for their potential influence and they were viciously persecuted, imprisoned, and often sent to the concentration camp at Dachau. Nevertheless, leaders of the Church, from the pope in Rome to local bishops, were hesitant to provide guidance, support Nazi occupation, or encourage opposition to it. Despite the lack of a top-down Catholic policy, this chapter argues that individual priests and lay Catholic leaders were motivated by their religious faith to form everything from charities to a postwar clerical state. Crucial among Catholics was the question of the developing Holocaust and the role of Polish Jews in Polish Catholic society, which sharply divided them.

Chapter 6, “School of Hard Knocks: Illegal Education,” considers the second great intelligentsia occupation success: illegal underground education. From fall 1939, the Nazi General Government administration closed schools, universities, seminaries, and conservatories that served Polish students, arresting and imprisoning teachers and professors. This was a deliberate German attempt to control Poles in the long term and ensure German control over Lebensraum in the Polish space, since Nazi plans intended to utilize Poles as unskilled laborers and wanted to deprive them of education and the opportunity for social advancement. Warsaw University and city high schools re-formed underground, and “illegal” education taught pupils from childhood into their twenties. Studying initiated young people into underground political conspiracy, exposing them to great danger. It also kept teachers and professors employed and trained a new Polish intelligentsia to replace those killed in the genocidal campaigns of 1939-1940. As occupation continued, teaching and studying increasingly became the purview of Polish women as more and more Polish men turned to violent resistance. Despite draconian punishments, underground education was one of the most important successes of the occupation.