This volume https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-95963-0 is now available in electronic and hard copy. Edited by our Leverhulme Visiting Professor Dr Lars Schmeink and myself, it contains fifteen chapters on recent German SF film, TV and books. My own chapter, ‘Dark Mirrors? German Science Fiction in the Twenty-First Century’, looks at recent German SF novels (Thomas von Steinaecker’s Die Verteidigung des Paradieses and Sibylle Berg’s GRM: Brainfuck), to analyse why and how they establish their dystopian worldview. But, in contrast to most of the contributions to this volume, I am also looking at the green shoots of positive visions (Tom Hillenbrand’s Qube, Andreas Brandhorst’s Die Eskalation, Judith and Christian Vogt’s Wasteland, and Andreas Eschbach’s Eines Menschen Flügel). These give us glimpses of “concrete utopias” even as they contemplate the destructive impact of human activity on our planet. I argue that these latter works demonstrate a radical rethinking of the purpose of writing SF in the twenty-first century, offering a “progressive fantastic,” and a new hope.