To-day and To-morrow
To-day and To-morrow (sometimes written Today and Tomorrow) was a series of 110[citation needed] speculative essays published as short books by the London publishers Kegan Paul between 1923 and 1931 (and published in the United States by E. P. Dutton, New York).[1] As Fredric Warburg proudly recalled in 1959:
It was a unique publishing event. Many now distinguished personages made their debut in this series or contributed an early work.[2]
Content and reception
[edit]The series was one of several series initiated at Kegan Paul by C. K. Ogden. The first essay to appear, in November 1923, was J. B. S. Haldane's Daedalus; or, Science and the Future, an extended version of a lecture to the Heretics Society at Cambridge University on 4 February 1923.[3]
In 1926 Evelyn Waugh offered to provide a book in the series to be called Noah; or the Future of Intoxication. Though completed in 1927, Waugh's manuscript was rejected for the series and never appeared.[4]
Influence on fiction
[edit]Brian Stableford noted that the To-day and To-morrow series provided "an important stimulus to the discussion of future possibilities among the British intelligensia", and hence an increased interest in fiction extrapolating the ideas the series discussed.[5] The work of J. B. S. Haldane and J. D. Bernal in the series influenced later science fiction writers like Olaf Stapledon.[6] Many of the contributors to the To-day and To-morrow series had either written science fiction before (Winifred Holtby, Muriel Jaeger) or would write it after contributing pamphlets to the series (Gerald Heard, J. Leslie Mitchell, John Gloag).[5]
References
[edit]- ^ Max Saunders, Imagined Futures: Writing, Science, and Modernity in the To-Day and To-Morrow Book Series, 1923-31. Oxford University Press, 2019 .ISBN 9780198886440 Appendix provides complete listing of the series.
- ^ Fredric Warburg, An Occupation for Gentlemen, Houghton Mifflin, 1959, p. 114.
- ^ Brian Stableford, Biotechnology and Speculative Fiction
- ^ David Wykes, Evelyn Waugh: a literary life, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999, p. 38
- ^ a b Brian Stableford, Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction Literature. Scarecrow Press, 2004. ISBN 0810849380, (p. 358).
- ^ Neil Barron, Anatomy Of Wonder: a Critical Guide to Science Fiction. Libraries Unlimited, Incorporated, 2004 .ISBN 1591581710 (p. 29)
External links
[edit]- Brett Holman, bibliography and discussion, 19 January 2010
- Max Saunders, Imagined Futures OUP, 23 February 2023
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