Imagined Futures

This study provides the first substantial history and analysis of the <em>To-Day and To-Morrow</em> series of 110 books published by Kegan Paul Trench and Trubner (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 Andre 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. <p/>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. <p/>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.<br>