{"id":2123,"date":"2019-11-20T06:30:58","date_gmt":"2019-11-20T06:30:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/?p=2123"},"modified":"2019-11-16T21:08:18","modified_gmt":"2019-11-16T21:08:18","slug":"to-day-and-to-morrow-the-rediscovered-series-that-shows-how-to-imagine-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/2019\/11\/20\/to-day-and-to-morrow-the-rediscovered-series-that-shows-how-to-imagine-the-future\/","title":{"rendered":"To-Day and To-Morrow; the rediscovered series that shows how to imagine the future"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n

by Max Saunders<\/a>, Professor of English; Fellow of the English Association; and Director of the Centre for Life Writing and Research.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/em>. Genetic modification. Wind power. The gestation of children in artificial wombs, which he called \u201cectogenesis.\u201d Haldane\u2019s ingenious book did so well that the publishers, Kegan Paul, based a whole series on the idea. They called it\u00a0To-Day and To-Morrow<\/a><\/u><\/em>, and between 1923 and 1931 published over 100 volumes, byrising stars like Haldane, and leading thinkers like Bertrand Russell, who answered\u00a0Daedalus<\/em>\u00a0with a much gloomier warning about the future of science, called\u00a0Icarus.<\/em><\/p>\n

The books were highly diverse. They covered technological subjects \u2013 aviation, wireless, automation, politics, the state, the family and sexuality. Others focused on culture and everyday life topics \u2013 theatre, cinema, the press, language, clothes, food, drink, leisure, and sleep.<\/p>\n

They got people talking. Aimed at educated readers rather than a mass market, they still had a profound impact. Winston Churchill read\u00a0Daedalus<\/em>\u00a0and immediately wrote an essay titled \u2018Shall we all Commit Suicide?\u2019 Haldane\u2019s friend Aldous Huxley also read it, and in\u00a0Brave New World<\/em>\u00a0imagined a society in which ectogenesis was combined with mass production.<\/p>\n

A publishing sensation until the Depression hit, the series attracted leading writers \u2013 Vernon Lee, Robert Graves, Vera Brittain, the scientist J. D. Bernal, Hugh MacDiarmid, critic Bonamy Dobr\u00e9e, philosopher C. E. M. Joad, novelist and biographer Andr\u00e9 Maurois \u2013 and many more. Other major modernist authors knew them. Joyce read twelve of the books. T. S. Eliot reviewed some, saying: \u201cwe are able to peer into the future by means of that brilliant series of little books called To-day and To-morrow.\u201d Virginia Woolf\u2019s husband Leonard reviewed at least eight. Evelyn Waugh tried to write one, called\u00a0Noah, or the Future of Intoxication<\/em>, but it was rejected.<\/p>\n

There were some duds. Eliot was right to be unimpressed by\u00a0Pomona<\/em>, Basil de S\u00e9lincourt\u2019s waffly book on the future of the English language. He would have thought less of R. C. Trevelyan\u2019s\u00a0Thamyris; or, Is there a Future for Poetry?<\/em>\u00a0(He admired John Rodker\u2019s understanding of modernism in\u00a0The Future of Futurism<\/em>.) Some are unsurprising. Some are mad. Tank strategist J. F. C. Fuller, in\u00a0Pegasus<\/em>, which sounds like it should be about flight, suggested the world would be a better place if half-track vehicles were careering about off-road, tearing up the landscape. There is some chilling eugenics, though the series also contains some of the period\u2019s most cogent critiques of eugenics\u2019 scientific claims. Other writers betray assumptions about class, gender, and race that make us wince now.<\/p>\n

But, overall, this is brilliant, exuberant writing, rich with bracing ideas which can make subjects we thought we knew well look fresh and different. So why are these books not well-known?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n

Perhaps it\u2019s because they elude the stereotypes of literary history. They don\u2019t conform to the image of a generation traumatised by the war they had just been through. Here, even the writers best known for their iconic works about such trauma, Graves and Brittain, are enjoying looking ahead; being playful and witty while simultaneously writing\u00a0Goodbye to All That<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Testament of Youth<\/em>.<\/p>\n

They seem equally hard to square with traditional ideas of modernism. They are (of course) future-oriented, where modernists are usually perceived as placing a present seen as degraded against a classical past. To-Day and To-Morrow<\/em>\u2019s Latin or Greek titles were perhaps a bit of camouflage, or at least a provocation.<\/p>\n

In terms of genre they are hard to place too. Hybrid, shapeshifting from essay to prediction to science fiction to future history to satire and parody, they don\u2019t conform to more familiar modernist genres of story, novel, or poem.<\/p>\n

Most of the writers were socially progressive: advocating women\u2019s rights, sexual liberation, experimental redesign of relationships and families, socialism, internationalism, and anti-imperialism. As such, they were anathema to Tory modernists.<\/p>\n

The series illuminates the inter-war period. But it can do much more. It can tell us about our time too, about how we think about the future \u2013 or don\u2019t. One of the most striking things about reading it now is how different its visions are from today\u2019s tomorrow. Contemporary futurology is mostly unremittingly bleak, dystopian. Certainly we\u00a0should worry about climate catastrophe, antibiotic resistance, mass extinctions. But such future anxiety inhibits constructive thought about how best to avoid disaster and remake society.<\/p>\n

To-Day and To-Morrow<\/em>\u2019s writers wanted prediction to be more scientific. The period they helped usher in transformed its methodologies. Nowadays prediction comes from multi-disciplinary teams, think tanks. Methods of scenario planning, horizon scanning, forecasting, and above all the use of machine learning to analyse data patterns, have vastly increased the accuracy of short range predictions, from weather to epidemics.<\/p>\n

Yet the individual visionaries represented in the series have not been superseded. The long form essay allowed them greater scope than in speeches or journalism. They could elaborate their visions, take them further than more systematic methods can reach. Big data, after all, is past data. It can tell us what\u2019s trending, and we can extrapolate those trends. Group-based futurology irons out idiosyncrasies. But it\u2019s the individual imagination that, sometimes, can make the quantum jumps that bring the genuinely new into being. That\u2019s what we need more of now \u2013not to delude ourselves that we can know the future with any certainty, but to imagine futures that are worth working towards.<\/p>\n

\n

Imagined Futures: Writing, Science, and Modernity in the To-Day and To-Morrow Book Series, 1923-31<\/a><\/em>is available now from Oxford University Press.<\/p>\n

\n

This blog is kindly reproduced from OUPblog.<\/a><\/p>\n

Featured image credit: \u201cSkyscrapers in China\u201d by Maksim Samsonov. CC0 via\u00a0Unsplash<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Blog posts on King\u2019s English represent the views of the individual authors and neither those of the English Department, nor of King\u2019s College London.<\/i><\/p>\n

\n

You may also like to read:<\/p>\n