This book explores the dreams, plans and hopes as well as the nightmares and fears that are an integral part of alternative thinking in the Western hemisphere. While ideological struggles of the twentieth century focused on the macro level, the real impetus for change came from blue-sky thinking that imagined alternatives to the status quo.

Ricarda Vidal is a lecturer, curator and translator and teaches cultural studies at King’s College London. Her monograph (Peter Lang Oxford, 2013) examines the fascination with speed and the car crash in cultural production. She has also co-edited a collection of essays on contemporary approaches to death, (2014). She is currently exploring the impact of macro-engineering on the cultural imagination as well as leading a research and exhibition project into the theory and practice of translation within the fine arts and literature, ‘Translation Games’. Ingo Cornils is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Leeds. He has published widely on German science fiction, the German student movement and Hermann Hesse. Recent volumes include (2010, with Sarah Waters), (2009) and (2008, with Gerrit-Jan Berendse). He is currently writing a monograph on the construction of ‘1968’ in Germany.

Contents: Ricarda Vidal: Atlantropa: One of the Missed Opportunities of the Future – Daniel Garcia-Castellanos/Ricarda Vidal: Alternative Mediterraneans Six Million Years Ago: A Model for the Future? – Philip E. Steinberg/Elizabeth A. Nyman/Mauro J. Caraccioli: Atlas Swam: Freedom, Capital and Floating Sovereignties in the Seasteading Vision – Patricia Silva McNeill: The Last ‘City of the Future’: Brasília and its Representation in Literature and Film – Elena Solomides: The Post-War High-Rise: Promise of an Alternative World – Christopher Daley: ‘The landscape is coded’: Visual Culture and the Alternative Worlds of J.G. Ballard’s Early Fiction – Maya Oppenheimer: Designed Surfaces and the Utopics of Rejuvenation – Boukje Cnossen: The Alternative World of Michel Houellebecq – Susanne Kord: From the American Myth to the American Dream: Alternative Worlds in Recent Hollywood Westerns – Marjolaine Ryley: Growing up in the New Age: A Journey into Wonderland? – Peter Dickens: Alternative Worlds in the Cosmos – Ingo Cornils: Between Bauhaus and : The Iconic Style of (1966) – Rachel Steward: Blue Sky Thinking in a Post-Astronautic Present.