This special issue of FUTURI is the result of the international conference “Electricdreams – Between fiction and society. Imagination and world building in the aftermath of a global pandemic”, that supported a debate over speculative/science/fantasy fictions across different media, highlighting their relationships to history, society and to the contingent moment. Moreover, it encouraged us to pay close attention to the influence that both utopian and dystopian narratives exert on everyday life, as they provide possible frameworks to rethink the current conditions and imagine alternatives. How do novels, short stories, movies, TV series, comics, and video-games imagine the apocalypse and what kind of scenarios do they envision? How do utopia and dystopia shape our culture and collective imagination? How do speculative/science/fantasy narratives change in times of global crisis? These are just some of the questions that the international conference explored and that the articles of this special issue address.

Editors: Elisabetta Di Minico, Stefano Locati