Imagined Futures

Writing, Science, and Modernity in the To-Day and To-Morrow Book Series, 1923-31

Max Saunders

Rediscovers a unique collection of superb volumes and presents some of the best writing in the twentieth century on science, technology, and culture
Contextualizes the series, introducing its general editor and writers, their social and intellectual backgrounds
Provides clear analysis of the individual volumes by writers such as J. B. S. Haldane, Bertrand Russell, Vernon Lee, Robert Graves, Vera Brittain, Sylvia Pankhurst, Hugh McDiarmid, James Jeans, J. D. Bernal, Winifred Holtby, and André Maurois
Represents a new contribution to science and technology studies in the period; not just to how people thought about science and technology, but how they thought about science and technology changing thinking, including thinking about the future

Imagined Futures

Writing, Science, and Modernity in the To-Day and To-Morrow Book Series, 1923-31

Max Saunders

Description

This study provides the first substantial history and analysis of the To-Day and To-Morrow series of 110 books, published by Kegan Paul Trench and Trübner (and E. P. Dutton in the USA) from 1923 to 1931, in which writers chose a topic, described its present, and predicted its future. Contributors included J. B. S. Haldane, Bertrand Russell, Vernon Lee, Robert Graves, Vera Brittain, Sylvia Pankhurst, Hugh McDiarmid, James Jeans, J. D. Bernal, Winifred Holtby, André Maurois, and many others. The study combines a comprehensive account of its interest, history, and range with a discussion of its key concerns, tropes, and influence.

The argument focuses on science and technology, not only as the subject of many of the volumes, but also as method—especially through the paradigm of the human sciences—applied to other disciplines; and as a source of metaphors for representing other domains. It also includes chapters on war, technology, cultural studies, and literature and the arts.

This book aims to reinstate the series as a vital contribution to the writing of modernity, and to reappraise modernism's relation to the future, establishing a body of progressive writing which moves beyond the discourses of post-Darwinian degeneration and post-war disenchantment, projecting human futures rather than mythic or classical pasts. It also shows how, as a co-ordinated body of futurological writing, the series is also revealing about the nature and practices of modern futurology itself.

Imagined Futures

Writing, Science, and Modernity in the To-Day and To-Morrow Book Series, 1923-31

Max Saunders

Introductions
PART I: Science, Imagination, Language, and Communication
1:A Scientific Age': Science, Imagination, and Popularization
2:Conflict, Connectivity, and the Tropes of Futurology
PART II: Human Sciences
3:Human Sciences
PART III: Technology, Media, Culture and the Arts
4:'The machine man of 1925': To-Day and To-Morrow and the Technological Extension of Man
5:To-Day and To-Morrow, Cultural Studies, and Everyday Life
6:To-Day and To-Morrow, Literature and Modernism
Conclusions
Appendix A: The Book History of the Series
Appendix B: Complete Chronological Listing of the To-Day and To-Morrow Series

Imagined Futures

Writing, Science, and Modernity in the To-Day and To-Morrow Book Series, 1923-31

Max Saunders

Author Information

Max Saunders, Director, Arts & Humanities Research Institute, King's College London

Max Saunders is Professor of English and Co-Director of the Centre for Life-Writing Research at Kings College London, where he directed the Arts and Humanities Research Institute, 2012-18. He studied at Cambridge and Harvard, and was a Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge. He is the author of Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life (1996) and Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (2010). He was awarded an Advanced Grant from the ERC for Ego-Media, a 5-year project on digital life writing. In 2019 he became Interdisciplinary Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham.

Imagined Futures

Writing, Science, and Modernity in the To-Day and To-Morrow Book Series, 1923-31

Max Saunders

Reviews and Awards

"In his entertaining and fascinating new book, Imagined Futures, Saunders offers a bracing counter-history, overturning both our received notion of the disillusionment following World War I and challenging our by-now habitual and complacent pessimism. I defy any reader of Saunders book to come away indifferent to the treasure trove he has uncovered. Just his quotations from the thirty or so volumes he discusses in some detail whets this readers appetite. The writing is lively, and the imaginations on display energizing. He devotes chapters to the natural sciences, the human sciences, technology, the everyday, literature, and the genre of futurology. Some of these chapters are more satisfying than others, but every single one will, I am certain, provide inspiration for subsequent scholars. Again and again, Saunders exhibits the impressive imaginations of these scientists." - John McGowan, Modernism/modernity

"Max Saunders has produced what will surely be the definitive study of To-Day and To-Morrow. Perhaps the outstanding feature of Imagined Futures is the breadth of its coverage of the series and its implications. Virtually every To-Day and To-Morrow volume receives probing and erudite commentary in successive chapters devoted to the natural sciences, politics, the human sciences, technology, everyday life, and literature and the arts. In the vast majority of cases, he succeeds in arousing our curiosity. Anyone interested in the confluence of sf and futurology will want to read this book. Saunders has made a deeply insightful and thought-provoking contribution to the field that is becoming known as critical futurities scholarship" - Patrick Parrinder, An Encyclopedia of Futurity, Science-Fiction Studies

"Highly comprehensive and insightful, this landmark study offers a critical re-evaluation of modernism against the background of twentieth-century futurology." - Maxim Shadurski, Modern Language Review

"Saunders is an authority on the literary and cultural currents of the early 20th century, particularly modernism, and takes pains to show how this extraordinary sustained exercise in futurology emerges from that world and merges into our own. That is why this is an important book. OUP have done author and subject proud by producing a handsome volume" - Alan Judd, The Spectator

Imagined Futures

Writing, Science, and Modernity in the To-Day and To-Morrow Book Series, 1923-31

Max Saunders

From Our Blog

To-Day and To-Morrow; the rediscovered series that shows how to imagine the future

Almost a century ago a young geneticist, J. B. S. Haldane, made a series of startling predictions in a little book called Daedalus; or, Science and the Future. Genetic modification. Wind power. The gestation of children in artificial wombs, which he called 'ectogenesis.' Haldane's ingenious book did so well that the publishers, Kegan Paul, based a whole series on the idea.

Posted on November 15, 2019

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