Imagined Futures: Writing, Science, and Modernity in the To-Day and To-Morrow Book Series, 1923–31 by Max Saunders

Abstract

Reviewed by: Imagined Futures: Writing, Science, and Modernity in the To-Day and To-Morrow Book Series, 1923–31 by Max Saunders Maxim Shadurski Imagined Futures: Writing, Science, and Modernity in the To-Day and To-Morrow Book Series, 1923–31. By Max Saunders. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2019. xiv+423 pp. £60. ISBN 978–0–19–882945–4. Highly comprehensive and insightful, this landmark study offers a critical reevaluation of modernism against the background of twentieth-century futurology. Focusing on ‘To-Day and To-Morrow’, a book series of 110 volumes edited by C. K. Ogden during the inter-war years, Max Saunders examines how futurology provided a mode by which writers expressed their modernity. For Saunders, the series primarily popularized expert scientific knowledge, heralding thus a ‘third culture’ between sciences and humanities. This enterprise also produced a distinct category of writing, ‘speculative non-fiction’ (pp. vii, 9), evocative of H. G. Wells’s ‘province’ of ‘speculative philosophy’ (H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898), in H. G. Wells: Classic Collection I (London: Gollancz, 2010), p. 361). Saunders’s study construes the series with a peculiar historical consciousness and future-oriented chronotope. Overshadowed by post-Darwinian degeneration and post-First World War despondency, ‘To-Day and To-Morrow’ emerged on the cusp of ‘radical commencement’ (p. 51), a time when the scale of modern innovation and change reinforced the status of futurology. On a futurological timeline, the series occupies an intermediary position between Wells’s practice of anticipations as a scientific method, on the one hand, and the eclipsing credibility of scientific planning after the Second World War, on the other. Saunders convincingly ascribes the project’s curtailment to the 1930s economic slump, ‘a blow to confidence in the future more generally’ (p. 341). Being a modernist phenomenon, ‘To-Day and To-Morrow’ invests modernity with hope. Its orientation towards the future differs from the temporality of classical modernism, which frequently renders all time commensurate with the past or fears the prospect of a robotizing future. The series’ engagement with space equally embraces a positive faith that science can transform the human body and everyday life. Such a future-oriented chronotope occurs simultaneously with instances of self-reflexivity throughout the volumes, and this occurrence ensures freedom of discussion and imagination. The study investigates ‘To-Day and To-Morrow’ in three parts, broadly divided into the specialist areas of sciences and humanities, as well as their technological and cultural applications. This structure permits Saunders to map out a multiplicity of imagined futures, which variously include: human agency above divine intervention; world unity on linguistic, commercial, and governmental lines; a rapprochement between mind and matter; the machine’s liberating effects on humanity; the transformation of the everyday, be it sleep, sport, domestic architecture, or clothing; and the endurance of past writing. Albeit selective, Saunders’s analyses look both at and beyond the series’ most famous contributors: J. B. S. Haldane, Bertrand Russell, J. D. Bernal, Vera Brittain, Robert Graves. The resulting intervention is nuanced and illuminating, particularly in how it contextualizes the volumes alongside the modernists’ preoccupations with their content, expression, and spirit. Whereas Aldous Huxley quarried the series for ideas of ectogenesis, [End Page 122] contraception, and hypnopaedia, James Joyce captured its new vocabulary. T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis reacted against the series’ scientific claims: while the former disavowed a mundanely devised future, the latter repudiated science as a new creed. Saunders’s study surpasses the remit of book history and its contemporary affiliations. Rather, it furnishes a sustained commentary on how ‘To-Day and To-Morrow’ partakes of futurology and predicts ‘biospheres, mobile phones, and virtual reality, but not the digital processor, the crisis in obesity, or the resurgence of religious fundamentalisms’ (p. 40). To Saunders, accuracy of predictions matters only as a reminder that any ‘horizon scanning’ has blind spots. The series may indeed leave ‘a computer-shaped hole’ in its imaginings (p. 25), yet this gap hardly compromises either the project’s poetics or its audacity. Saunders deplores the recent cultural tendencies to relegate the future to a museum or extrapolate its fulfilment to the present moment. His arguments against the end...