Out of the mainstream but ahead of the tide, that is Scottish Science Fiction. Science Fiction emphasizes "progress" through technology, advanced mental states, or future times. How does Scotland, often considered a land of the past, lead in Science Fiction? "Left behind" by international politics, Scots have cultivated alternate places and different times as sites of identity so that Scotland can seem a futuristic fiction itself.This book explores the tensions between science and a particular society that produce an innovative science fiction. Essays consider Scottish thermodynamics, Celtic myth, the rigors of religious "conversion," Scotland's fractured politics yet civil society, its languages of alterity (Scots, Gaelic, allegory, poetry), and the lure of the future. From Peter Pan and Dr. Jekyll to the poetry of Edwin Morgan and the worlds of Muriel Spark, Ken Macleod, or Iain M. Banks, Scotland's creative complex yields a literature that models the future for Science Fiction.

Chapter 1 AcknowledgmentsChapter 2 IntroductionChapter 3 Scotland's Fantastic Physics: Energy Transformation in MacDonald, Stevenson, Barrie, and SparkChapter 4 The Other Otherworld: Didactic Fantasy from MacDonald and Lindsay to J. Leslie MitchellChapter 5 Allegory and Cruelty: Gray's Lanark and Lindsay's A Voyage to ArcturusChapter 6 Speculative Nationality: "Stands Scotland Where it Did?" in the Culture of Iain M. BanksChapter 7 Between Enlightenment and the End of History: Ken MacLeod's Engines of LightChapter 8 The Cosmic (Cosmo)Polis in Naomi Mitchison's Science Fiction NovelsChapter 9 Non-Violence, Gender, and Ecology: Margaret Elphinstone's The Incomer and A Sparrow's FlightChapter 10 Past and Future Language: Matthew Fitt and Iain M. BanksChapter 11 Scottish Poetry as Science Fiction: Geddes, MacDiarmid, and Morgan's "A Home in Space"Chapter 12 Brave New Scotland: Science Fiction without Stereotypes in Fitt and CrumeyChapter 13 Alba Newton and Alasdair GrayChapter 14 BibliographyChapter 15 Notes on ContributorsChapter 16 Index