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Its practice is fabricated in the ‘dark satanic mills’ that romantics and radicals were keen to condemn for the brute people and despoiled landscapes that they produced.īut the later imperialism of this beast-handling word doesn’t tell the whole story. Localised craft economies were displaced by manufactories, machine production, urbanisation and also longer distribution networks via canals and trains. This bourgeois revolution rested upon a relationship to capital, of which land was only one element, but it relied as well on more complex forms of production and distribution, and consequently on organisations with more elaborate divisions of labour. It’s a really interesting word that grows in influence and application as the feudal order of fixed social relations based on ownership of land is disturbed by the rise of a mercantile class.

It is a word that originates with ideas of control, of a docile or wilful creature that must be subordinated to the instructions of the master.

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From this form of manual control, the word has expanded into a general activity of training and handling people. It is derived from the Italian mano, meaning hand, and its expansion into maneggiare, the activity of handling and training a horse carried out in a maneggio – a riding school. In English, the word ‘management’ has an interesting history, and some rather productive differences of meaning. These were grand projects of massive complexity, auguries of a modern world, and they drew their strength and efficacy – and, not least, their imaginative purchase on the future – from the new science of management. In the 20th century, the Empire State building, the Apollo space programme and the supersonic gee-whizzery of Concorde are emblems of a future in which nothing could ever be the same again. This was organising on a grand scale, and it required the coordination of people and materials in ways never imagined before. Later, the ingenuity of the Industrial Revolution was predicated on the coordination of people and things at scale, towering mill buildings and a rail network that compressed space through the precision of the timetable and technology. At the same time that ‘utopian’ fiction was invented, we find attempts to produce a new sort of mercantile world, in which the timeless sclerosis of hierarchical feudalism was gradually eroded by the speculations of projectors, inventors and adventurers who built new organisations and machines. What we now call the Enlightenment made curiosity possible, even celebrated, instead of thinking of it as a sin to be punished. Real attempts to describe (and realise) human futures have always been more dangerous. Perhaps this cultural leaning isn’t about the future at all – just the recitation of comforting stories from long ago and far away to lull us to sleep.

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Add in comics, TV and games, and you have a huge investment in the idea that we need heroes to save us. The Marvel Universe, currently at 23 movies, will soon be overtaking James Bond as the biggest film franchise of all time. Fantasy is not really that fantastic, essentially because it takes a set of tired archetypes, adds a bit of sex and chopping, and then delivers a message about singular heroes, villains and obstacles. Jon Snow and the New Avengers will come to save us, swinging swords to ensure that everything stays pretty much how it was before Voldemort, Sauron or the White Witch started messing things up. We have a lot of this fantasy futurism nowadays, with the armies of good and evil being arranged on opposing sides of the wall, or across a rift in the time-space continuum. Moorcock felt that his own ‘new worlds’ science fiction of the 1960s was a radical intervention for producing difference, while the fantasists were essentially nostalgic for a past in which everything had its proper place: the king on his throne, the dragons slain, the ordinary hobbits happy with their pastoral lot. In 1978, the science-fiction author Michael Moorcock wrote the celebrated essay ‘Epic Pooh’ that lambasted J R R Tolkien and his ilk for constructing fantasy universes in which – whatever the ‘there and back again’ meanderings of the plot – nothing ever really changes.

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