The erosion of democracy has shown itself to be a necessary political precondition for the implementation of neoliberalism. Utopian culture quickly attuned itself to this crisis of democracy, and while there certainly are not many works of utopian culture that uncritically embrace the dominant post-1989 narrative that hails democracy as the universal cure for whatever ailment may exist in the world, we begin to see the emergence of works that foreground the profound danger inherent in the waning of democracy precisely in times of its instrumentalization by Western capitalist nations and the forces of economic globalization. Authors reveal neoliberal utopias as antidemocratic dystopias against which democracy must be defended. Moreover, we also see the emergence of novels that address a second pressing question: how can democracy survive when populations decide to democratically abolish it?

This chapter looks at how the notions of black escape and black wishland have been conceptualized in African American utopianism since the post-WWII conception of the Beloved Community, a conception mostly associated with Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement. Through its discussions of Sun Ra’s “Space is the Place” (1971), Parliament’s “Chocolate City” (1975), Reginald Hudlin’s “Space Traders” (1994), Octavia E. Butler’s “The Book of Martha” (2003), and Chesya Burke’s “The Teachings and Redemption of Ms. Fannie Lou Mason” (2011), this chapter argues that these texts, if read collectively, not only reveal that the debates between black utopians and antiutopians parallel those between the opponents and proponents of Afropessimism, but they also suggest that liberating black life from social death requires combining the best of Afropessimism and black antiutopian critique with the best of black aliveness, Afro-fabulation, and the black utopian imagination.

Technology has served a recurrent role as a utopian imaginary for speculative fiction writers and consumers. As a utopian promise, technology appears to provide individuals, communities, and whole societies with the means to overcome nature – whether it is base human natures, relationships with one’s environment, or the perceived limitations of one’s body. This chapter focuses on two similar technological fantasies, James Cameron’s Terminator films and Martha Wells’ Murderbot series. In both series, central figures – namely the T-800 played by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Murderbot – approximate being human but are limited by their technological being. Yet, in being not-fully-human, they expose how technology always serves as a false utopian promise: there is no way out of our humanness through technology. In this way, technological fantasies serve as a form of horror, at once tempting readers with possibilities, but revealing those possibilities to be empty – or malignant.

A long tradition of pandemic – or plague – literature, dating back at least as far as classical Greece, has used catastrophic communicable disease as a backdrop to explore the human condition: what it means to live in a community of other humans, and, as awareness of the crises of environmental devastation and climate change grows, on a planet with other living organisms. In different ways, and with differing resolutions, twentieth- and twenty-first-century works of pandemic fiction show how pandemics stem not only from human practices, but also from the values, beliefs, and stories about the past – the histories – in which they are rooted. Whether dystopic or utopic, apocalyptic or contained, literary pandemics warn that in order to change the way humans collectively inhabit the world, we need to change the dominant stories we tell about it.

John Herschel grew up in a world of intense scientific activity. From an early age, he was surrounded by examples of science in action. His education was supplemented at every stage to ensure exposure to and training in the highest, most up-to-date mathematics. At the same time, John also experienced an indirectly political upbringing, one that showed him not only a changing world but also the power of education to challenge and change tradition. The politics he witnessed growing up illustrated dramatic transformations taking place in England and abroad. Family friends were caught up in the aftermath of the French Revolution. In England, family holidays and changing consumer tastes evidenced the effects of England’s industrial revolution. In adulthood, these two strands – the scientific and the political – influenced his outlook and choices. He chose friends at university, such as Charles Babbage (1791–1871) and George Peacock (1791–1858), who wanted to change the world through mathematics. He attempted to earn a living from natural philosophy rather than train for the church or fall back on family wealth after graduation as his father wished. He chose to marry an evangelical free thinker, keen to use knowledge and religion to improve the lives of others. He chose to never completely pursue science in isolation but instead advise governments both in South Africa and in England on using science to improve education and society. He chose to train his children to be both scientifically curious and socially minded. These choices shaped Herschel’s life.

Ever since its publication in 1830–31, John Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy has been recognized as epoch-making and canonical. It is rather surprising, therefore, that to date there exists little to no consensus on any aspect of the book, not even on what it is really about. This chapter provides a brief overview of the available literature on Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse. In doing so, it attempts to both improve upon and go beyond current Herschel scholarship.

Despite John Herschel’s extensive work in the fields of chemistry, optics, geology, mineralogy, and the philosophy of science, it was primarily as an astronomer that he was recognized during his lifetime and remembered after his death. Herschel’s astronomical endeavors can be summarized as establishing and extending the astronomical projects of his father William Herschel (1738–1822) and his aunt Caroline Herschel (1750–1848). By establishing, Herschel brought an observational and mathematical rigor to his father’s observations that transformed them from the results of an individual with unique instrumentation to data useful and accessible to the wider astronomical community. By extending, Herschel continued the observational program of his father and aunt, revisiting his father’s observations, updating his catalogs of double stars, nebulae, and star clusters, and extending the Herschelian project to the skies of the southern hemisphere. Yet the observational aims and methods of William and Caroline Herschel were markedly different from the astronomy being pursued by most other astronomers during their lifetimes. To understand John Herschel’s long astronomical career and influence, an overview of the scope and aims of the dominant form of astronomy during this period is needed that can provide the background to the work of his father and aunt and the context of his own.

John Herschel’s destiny lay in science. Ahead was a career of creation in astronomy, botany, chemistry, geography, meteorology, photography, and much else. Not least would be the attention he paid to mathematics. His royal road to becoming a leader in Victorian science was paved by William and Caroline Herschel, his celebrated father and aunt, both of whom were acknowledged authorities in astronomy. William, a German émigré to England, held the position of ‘King’s Astronomer’ and in this role established a rapport with George III, an amateur astronomer himself. William gained wider recognition as the discoverer of ‘The Georgian’ (known later as the planet Uranus) and Caroline as the discoverer of comets.

As early as 1826, John Herschel wrote, “astronomers are seldom draftsmen, and have hitherto … contented themselves with very general and hasty sketches.”1 This was more than a passing complaint with past depictions of astronomical objects. It was an exhortation to a generation of astronomers to begin taking draftsmanship seriously. With its increasing focus on the physical features of astronomical bodies like the Sun, the planets, comets, and the Moon, as well as the intricate physical complexities of the Milky Way, celestial nebulae, and clusters of stars, the astronomy of the nineteenth century demanded a new and systematic focus on draftsmanship as a means of observation. In this way, astronomy was very much in line with other observational sciences of the period like geology and minerology, botany and zoology, archaeology and ethnography, all of which required, alongside detailed descriptions, more exact pictures of their respective subject matter.2 As the act of drawing became embedded into routine scientific recordkeeping practices, it also became closely tied to what counted as proper scientific observation. Herschel was not just in tune with these important developments, he exemplified them in his own observational performances. This is evinced by his exquisite skills and techniques in drawing in the service of science and, above all, astronomy. Herschel’s observational practices were embodied in a set of visualizing instruments, techniques, and materials. What follows is a survey of some of these practices as they range over a lifetime of carefully observing and drawing many sorts of phenomena.