“IMAGINARY FUTURES: SCIENCE, FANS AND FICTIONS”

Jim Endersby examines how various early-20th-century publics responded enthusiastically to new ideas about biology (genetics, eugenics but particularly the now largely forgotten mutation theory). Science writers and readers, socialists, feminists and utopians are among those who seized on the amazing new possibility of rapid — potentially controllable — evolution. Endersby will explore the ways in which science escapes from the lab and the (often wildly imaginative) uses to which it is then put. Julian Huxley’s work exemplifies the ways in which new biologies provided a range of tools with which to imagine alternative futures.

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