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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editors’ MessageJennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor, Editor, Stephanie Peebles Tavera, Assistant Editor, A. Elisabeth Reichel, Book Review Editor, and Manuel Sousa Oliveira, Editorial AssistantThis second issue of Utopian Studies 34 comprises a variety of historically and theoretically grounded contributions, ranging in time and place from medieval Persia to Cold War America to contemporary global media culture. The issue opens with a surprising look back at utopian myth-making... by the U.S. frozen food industry. Author Justin Nordstrom reads a 1954 short story, “Frozen Foods 2000 A.D.,” which foresees global cooperation, new technologies, and the emancipation of women from domestic labor—all thanks to the advent of frozen meals and microwave cooking. Nordstrom demonstrates how this “frozen fantasy” of the Cold War period reflects the structure of earlier utopian motifs (from Cockaigne to Bellamy)—but also challenges their essential arguments.The next several articles reach back in time, first to twelfth-century Persia. In “Utopia’s Cauldron: Travelers’ Lore and Korea (‘Belisa’) in the Persian Epic of Kush the Tusked,” author Kaveh Hemmat revaluates the role of the medieval epic Kushnameh, as an anticipation of later utopian sources connected to Islamic political theory. Hemmat argues that the epic’s focus on the formative processes that make its “quasi-fictional” society of Besila possible results in an important precursor to More’s sixteenth-century text. The “invention” of the utopian genre may have deep roots, the author concludes, in the Kushnameh, with its interest in the development of a paradisiacal city, its articulation of universal monotheism, and its focus on geographical knowledge and travel.The geographical character of the island of Utopia is the subject of Chun Liang Lin and Mark Hansley Chua’s article, “Mapping Utopia as an Enclosed Renaissance Garden.” Participating in the longtime scholarly effort to “map” More’s island nation, the authors report on a mapping experiment that attempts to understand the geomorphology of Utopia according to metaphorical ideals of Renaissance humanism, rather than through mathematical calculation.“An Archival Paradise: John Wilkins’s Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language and Early Modern Info-Utopianism” by Georgie Newson focuses on the seventeenth-century British philosopher’s proposal for a new “universal language” for use by scholars, travelers, diplomats and others during an expansionist era of exploration and trade. Newsom reclaims the “Essay” as “legitimately” utopian, contesting earlier critical dismissals of it as such and instead claiming it as an early example of what she calls [End Page vi] “info-utopianism.” An info-utopian tendency can be located in a number of other early modern utopian works, the article contends, and it concludes with implications for contemporary utopian theory.The next two essays look toward anticipations of, and responses to, future crisis society: Rafael Baquero asks us to revisit the understudied contributions of Spanish-born Mexican philosopher, Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, to contemporary efforts within the Marxist tradition to reclaim utopian Hope. By exploring Sánchez Vasquez’s Philosophy of Praxis and by highlighting its anthropological assumptions, this study demonstrates the extent to which his works provide theoretical underpinnings and resources for contesting contemporary discourses on the “end of history” and for recovering utopia after the fall of the Berlin Wall.Finally, literary scholar M. Keith Booker revisits the stunningly drawn global posthuman world(ing) of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009) in his article, “A New Expansion: Climate Change, Posthumanism, and the Utopian Dimension in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl.” Booker argues that despite the twenty-third-century postapocalyptic setting, the text offers clear elements of hope and “utopian energies,” driven particularly, he argues, by “the motif of genetic engineering,” which opens up possibilities of a more enlightened politics, and of new kinds of relationality between the human and more-than-human world.The second half of this issue marks the appearance of several new Utopian Studies sections. We are delighted to launch The Critical Forum and Desire Lines. The Critical Forum is a space for critical conversation in a “bloc” of essays addressing together a specific theoretical problematic related to utopian, dystopian, and speculative texts or thought. The first Forum features four essays that emerged from a two-day...