Published against a backdrop of preparation for the millennium celebrations, the key focus of Socialist History 15 is the role that conceptions of the future have had in shaping and resourcing political projects of the left.

David Purdy argues for the abiding importance of experiments in utopian thought as tools for moral and intellectual enquiry, while Philip Coupland focuses specifically on the forms of utopian language which were used on the British left during the 1930s. Science fiction has become an important genre within which visions of the future are elaborated. It is explored here from a feminist perspective in a piece by Maureen Speller.

There is also a collection of reviews on aspects of the twentieth-century communist movement, including a biography of J.T Murphy and a collection of essays on the Communist International.