Can we reject the future? Right now, around the world, right-wing conservatism is turning, again, into intolerant fascism; robber barons nakedly assert political power; environmental disasters speed along the effects of climate change; wars are waged with disregard for international law; and epidemic disease spreads for lack of public health measures. Even for those outside of these epicenters of instability, things do not feel very promising. All this has led to some people adopting futures that accept—and even actively build upon—the terrible future we will likely soon inhabit.

What do such “no future” sentiments look like when turned into practice? There are adults now choosing to not have children, who articulate this choice as based in the awareness that the world any children might grow to inhabit will be worse than that in which we currently live. There are also people moving off the grid and turning to lives of homesteading, who cast their decisions as based in an awareness that the infrastructures that support modern everyday life are crumbling and that the governmental responsibility to maintain them is fading. These are just two visible iterations of “no future,” but we’re likely to see more as the limits of our current future trajectory become more palpable for more people.

In some cases, they might articulate alternative futures, thereby rejecting the futures we have been given in favor of another path. In other cases, they may accept that there is, simply, no future: that the world as we know it will end in a generation or two.

Even so, anxiety about the future is nothing new. In fact, rejecting the future’s seeming inevitability has defined thought and practice around the world, likely for the whole of human history. Since at least the 18th century, for example, apocalypticism has marked religious traditions, while attention to the constraints of social organization have informed revolutionary political movements. In both contexts, communities have been bound together by a shared understanding of the likely future. But, also, both such communities ultimately were forced to reckon with how the future did not change as they anticipated, or how their actions were inadequate to bring about the futures they want.

These failed revolutions and aborted millennial moments are the shadows cast over the political and religious movements of today. If the future hasn’t changed in the past, how could it possibly change now?

But, in fact, not having a future is nothing new. As both fictive and factual accounts attest to, lives can be built in the rubble of colonial destruction, which, in turn, offer more inclusive futures to be articulated and inhabited. Indeed, the post-apocalyptic conditions of our current world have already been articulated by writers working in Afro-pessimist and Indigenous speculative fiction. Still, even such inclusive futures have their limits: however local and sovereign they might be, they cannot protect themselves from the effects of climate change that exceed geopolitical borders, nor render themselves immune from epidemics that are transmitted through nonhumans that cannot be curtailed in their movements or governed through regulation. Our collective post-apocalypse may show us how to understand new futures within this already existing “no future.” Still, a shared future depends on articulating a world or worlds that we can inhabit in sustainable and inclusive ways.

This lexicon is a move in this direction. It knows that the futures provided and attuned to have limits. And it also knows how breaching those limits might create new ways of conceptualizing and remaking shared terrain.

This lexicon provides readers with a set of keywords for conceptualizing, resisting, rejecting, and confounding the futures on offer. Each entry focuses on a specific keyword and places it into dialogue with recent scholarship in the humanities and social sciences; each explores how our current, protracted moment is straining words into new meanings. Sociolinguistic approaches to words, their usage, and meanings, has demonstrated how meaning drifts, often becoming an echo of a word’s original usage. This typically occurs when words move from one group to another, as when slang used by the disempowered is adopted by those in power. What the words collected in this lexicon demonstrate, however, is the evolution or mutation of words, as authors use them to grapple with the world as it changes.

These words may be insufficient. But, as they mutate in their usage, they open up space to imagine the future anew: rejecting what we are given and articulating possibilities for things to be otherwise.