Daedalus; or, Science and the Future
First American edition, 1924
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane’s Daedalus; or, Science and the Future helped frame the debate over scientific progress that would find one of its most influential fictional expressions in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Expanded from a lecture delivered to the Heretics Society at Cambridge on February 4, 1923, the essay anticipates developments in energy, food production, and biology, asking how scientific discoveries might transform society and its moral conventions.
Its most consequential speculation concerns “ectogenesis,” the development of children outside the human body. Through an imagined student’s account written in 2073, Haldane describes a future in which artificial gestation and the selection of parents have reshaped reproduction and family life. These possibilities became central to the hatcheries of Brave New World, where reproductive technology serves a rigidly controlled social order.
Haldane’s qualified optimism prompted Bertrand Russell’s Icarus; or, The Future of Science (1924), which warned that scientific advances could strengthen dominant groups and their capacity for oppression. Charlotte Haldane, whom he married in 1926, drew on both essays in her dystopian novel Man’s World, published that same year, which explores a society organized around eugenics and the scientific control of reproduction.
The founding work of the influential To-Day and To-Morrow series, Daedalus contributed to the scientific and ethical arguments that helped shape modern dystopian literature.
Hardcover. First American Edition. Small octavo bound in original blue cloth with printed paper labels to front board and spine. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1924. #11512.
Very good in original dust jacket. Light rubbing to spine ends and corners, with toning to paper labels, text leaves, and edges. Jacket toned and foxed, with small edge tears, a small puncture to the spine, and chipping at the spine ends and upper rear panel.
Its most consequential speculation concerns “ectogenesis,” the development of children outside the human body. Through an imagined student’s account written in 2073, Haldane describes a future in which artificial gestation and the selection of parents have reshaped reproduction and family life. These possibilities became central to the hatcheries of Brave New World, where reproductive technology serves a rigidly controlled social order.
Haldane’s qualified optimism prompted Bertrand Russell’s Icarus; or, The Future of Science (1924), which warned that scientific advances could strengthen dominant groups and their capacity for oppression. Charlotte Haldane, whom he married in 1926, drew on both essays in her dystopian novel Man’s World, published that same year, which explores a society organized around eugenics and the scientific control of reproduction.
The founding work of the influential To-Day and To-Morrow series, Daedalus contributed to the scientific and ethical arguments that helped shape modern dystopian literature.
Hardcover. First American Edition. Small octavo bound in original blue cloth with printed paper labels to front board and spine. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1924. #11512.
Very good in original dust jacket. Light rubbing to spine ends and corners, with toning to paper labels, text leaves, and edges. Jacket toned and foxed, with small edge tears, a small puncture to the spine, and chipping at the spine ends and upper rear panel.