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.

This chapter explores the histories of transgender expression, identities, communities, and activism globally in both premodern and modern eras. Histories of settler colonialism, slavery, war, and imperialism have transformed the terms and conditions by which people of transgender expression and experience understood themselves and were perceived by others. While an abundance of archival records chart widespread practices of “transing” gender globally, a complex web of factors influenced how a given community or individual defined, understood, and judged such efforts. Race, religion, region, culture and class are some of the key contextual forces that gave meaning to trans and gender variant sexualities throughout history. A wide range of concepts have been used to describe and make meaning of gender variant people throughout history, from two-spirit, hijra, and third gender to the more recent transgender, nonbinary, gender expansive. Many other terms that have been used throughout history were deemed derogatory by those individuals and/or communities to which they refer at the time or have since been determined to be derogatory by later generations looking back. This creates a fundamental tension for everyone writing these histories between the importance of recognizing the past on its own terms and the importance of not further perpetuating harm against a long-stigmatized group.

The chronology in which a narrative concludes is itself an argument. Therefore, ending States-in-Waiting in 1966 – with the demise of the Nagaland Peace Mission, the dissolution of the World Peace Brigade, and the International Court of Justice’s refusal to make a judgment on the legitimacy of South African rule of South West Africa/Namibia – spells out a narrative of disillusionment: of disenchantment with the inability of the liberal internationalism of both the United Nations system of international order and of transnational civil society organizations to find peaceful solutions to decolonization that could effectively support national self-determination as a universal right.

The myth of Argentina as a uniquely white European nation dominated throughout the twentieth century. This myth gave rise to the belief that race and racism do not exist in and are irrelevant to Argentina. The literary canon not only reflected these dominant narratives but played an instrumental role in their construction and dissemination. Early canonical works lay the groundwork for Argentina’s long-running fictions of extermination, insisting on the physical disappearance of nonwhites while redefining “negro” as an implicitly dark-skinned symbol of the politically dangerous masses. Rewritings and parodies of these fictions have abounded in Argentine literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Contrary to the widespread insistence that race and racism are extraneous to Argentina, these works show that race and the trope of racialized class struggle – in which the survival of one hinges on the elimination of the other – have been a central concern in Argentine literary and national imaginaries. Meanwhile the unquestioned assumption of racelessness forged a critical silence and blindness that did not comply to the notion of whiteness. Recently, however, literary works and criticism have begun to pose a significant challenge to narratives of white Argentina.

This chapter explains what we mean by “fields” and “waves” in physics, and argues that quantum waves are just as “real” as other waves we experience in daily life, such as water waves and sound waves.

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.

In the moments before the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947, nationalists in what is now the Indian state of Nagaland declared their own region independent. The Naga claim is key to understanding postcolonial state-making in the decolonizing world because it represented the limits of what could be an independent state in an era of seeming nationalist possibility. A Nagaland articulated the boundaries of national self-determination by demonstrating the practical restrictions of an international system in which national self-determination remained an aspiration rather than a right. Postcolonial state-making foreclosed the prospect of international recognition for many nationalist claimants, yet sovereignties that can only be seen outside the lens of their ruling state government persisted, even as they held conflicting claims of statehood.

Christianity was easily the dominant faith of Victorian Britain but it was also ‘much more disunited and quarrelsome than it is now’. One important strand of Victorian Christian faith was represented by the Evangelicals. Ripples from the Evangelical revival of the eighteenth century had spread over into the 1800s: existing denominations were reinvigorated and new ones were born. Those holding to Evangelical theology could be found within the Church of England as well as many Dissenting or Nonconformist groups, including Baptists, Independents, Methodists and Congregationalists, who all agreed about the doctrines of the Trinity, the inspiration and authority of Scripture, human sinfulness and the justification of sinners by faith through the agency of the Holy Spirit, amongst other doctrines. The proportion of churchgoers who joined Dissenting congregations increased from about 10 per cent in 1790 to almost 50 per cent by 1851. Often, different Evangelical groups could overcome their differences and work together, as will be illustrated later.

The Tractarians represented a very different tradition. In the 1830s, the Oxford Movement burst onto the religious scene via a series of tracts on theological matters written by Oxford University academics, including John Henry Newman, Edward Bouverie Pusey and John Keble. Tractarians endeavoured to restore the Catholic heritage of the Anglican Church, asserting that the nineteenth -century Anglican Church was still, essentially, Catholic. As the century progressed, followers of the Oxford Movement often adopted more elaborate ceremonial ritual. Such ostentatious harking back to medieval Catholicism provoked the ire of many Protestants, especially when it coincided with the re-establishment of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales (in 1850).

The Tractarian ministry differed greatly, and very visibly, from that of the Evangelicals. The Tractarians worked towards building a Eucharistic community, whilst the Evangelicals sought to build God’s kingdom soul by soul.