What Not

What Not Synopsis

In a near-future England, a new government entity-the Ministry of Brains-attempts to stave off idiocracy through a program of compulsory selective breeding. Kitty Grammont, who shares author Rose Macaulay's own ambivalent attitude, gets involved in the Ministry's propaganda efforts, which the novel details with an entertaining thoroughness. (The alphabetical caste system dreamed up by Macaulay for her nightmare world would directly influence Aldous Huxley's 1932 dystopia Brave New World.) But when Kitty falls in love with the Minister for Brains, a man whose genetic shortcomings make a union with her impossible, their illicit affair threatens to topple the government.

Because it ridiculed wartime bureaucracy, the planned 1918 publication of What Not was delayed until after the end of World War I. Series Overview: Under the direction of Joshua Glenn, the MIT Press's Radium Age is reissuing notable proto-science fiction stories from the underappreciated era between 1900 and 1935. In these forgotten classics, science fiction readers will discover the origins of enduring tropes like robots (berserk or benevolent), tyrannical supermen, dystopian wastelands, sinister telepaths, and eco-catastrophes.

With new contributions by historians, science journalists, and science fiction authors, the Radium Age book series will recontextualise the breakthroughs and biases of these proto-science fiction classics, and chart the emergence of a burgeoning genre.