Man's World

PRAISE FOR THE RADIUM AGE SERIES

New editions of a host of under-discussed classics of the genre.

—Tor.com

Neglected classics of early 20th-century sci-fi in spiffily designed paperback editions.

—The Financial Times

An entertaining, engrossing glimpse into the profound and innovative literature of the early twentieth century.

—Foreword

Shows that ‘proto-sf’ was being published much more widely, alongside other kinds of fiction, before it emerged as a genre.

—BSFA Review

An excellent start at showcasing the strange wonders offered by the Radium Age.

—Shelf Awareness

Lovingly curated . . . The series’ freedom from genre purism lets us see how a specific set of anxieties—channeled through dystopias, Lovecraftian horror, arch social satire, and adventure tales—spurred literary experimentation and the bending of conventions.

—Los Angeles Review of Books

A huge effort to help define a new era of science fiction.

—Transfer Orbit

Admirable . . . and highly recommended.

—Washington Post

Long live the Radium Age.

—Los Angeles Times

Man’s World

The Radium Age Book Series

Joshua Glenn

Voices from the Radium Age, edited by Joshua Glenn, 2022

A World of Women, J. D. Beresford, 2022

The World Set Free, H. G. Wells, 2022

The Clockwork Man, E. V. Odle, 2022

Nordenholt’s Million, J. J. Connington, 2022

Of One Blood, Pauline Hopkins, 2022

What Not, Rose Macaulay, 2022

The Lost World and The Poison Belt, Arthur Conan Doyle, 2023

Theodore Savage, Cicely Hamilton, 2023

The Napoleon of Notting Hill, G.K. Chesterton, 2023

The Night Land, William Hope Hodgson, 2023

More Voices from the Radium Age, edited by Joshua Glenn, 2023

Man’s World, Charlotte Haldane, 2024

The Inhumans and Other Stories: A Selection of Bengali Science Fiction, edited and translated by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, 2024

Man’s World

Charlotte Haldane

Introduction by Philippa Levine

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2024 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This edition of Man’s World follows the text of the 1927 edition published by George H. Doran Company, which is in the public domain. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used to train artificial intelligence systems or reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Arnhem Pro and PF DIN Text Pro by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Haldane, Charlotte, 1894-1969, author. | Levine, Philippa, writer of introduction.

Title: Man’s world / Charlotte Haldane ; introduction by Philippa Levine.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London, England : The MIT Press, [2024] | Series: Radium Age | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023013584 (print) | LCCN 2023013585 (ebook) | ISBN 9780262547635 (paperback) | ISBN 9780262378116 (epub) | ISBN 9780262378109 (pdf)

Subjects: LCGFT: Dystopian fiction. | Novels.

Classification: LCC PR6015.A247 M36 2024 (print) | LCC PR6015.A247 (ebook) | DDC 823/.912—dc23/eng/20230621

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023013584

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023013585

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Contents

Series Foreword

Introduction

Philippa Levine

Acknowledgment

1 The Vision of Mensch

2 How Humphrey Was Made

3 Women and Children First

4 From the General to the Particular

5 The Voyages of Christopher

6 A People Unbound

7 No New Gods for Old

8 Reconstruction

9 Catalysis

10 Antibodies

11 Usness

12 Unreality

13 Back to the Future

Series Foreword

Joshua Glenn

Do we really know science fiction? There were the scientific romance years that stretched from the mid-nineteenth century to circa 1900. And there was the genre’s so-called golden age, from circa 1935 through the early 1960s. But between those periods, and overshadowed by them, was an era that has bequeathed us such tropes as the robot (berserk or benevolent), the tyrannical superman, the dystopia, the unfathomable extraterrestrial, the sinister telepath, and the eco-catastrophe. A dozen years ago, writing for the sf blog io9.com at the invitation of Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders, I became fascinated with the period during which the sf genre as we know it emerged. Inspired by the exactly contemporaneous career of Marie Curie, who shared a Nobel Prize for her discovery of radium in 1903, only to die of radiation-induced leukemia in 1934, I eventually dubbed this three-decade interregnum the Radium Age.

Curie’s development of the theory of radioactivity, which led to the extraordinary, terrifying, awe-inspiring insight that the atom is, at least in part, a state of energy constantly in movement, is an apt metaphor for the twentieth century’s first three decades. These years were marked by rising sociocultural strife across various fronts: the founding of the women’s suffrage movement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, socialist currents within the labor movement, anticolonial and revolutionary upheaval around the world . . . as well as the associated strengthening of reactionary movements that supported, for example, racial segregation, immigration restriction, eugenics, and sexist policies.

Science—as a system of knowledge, a mode of experimenting, and a method of reasoning—accelerated the pace of change during these years in ways simultaneously liberating and terrifying. As sf author and historian Brian Stableford points out in his 1989 essay The Plausibility of the Impossible, the universe we discovered by means of the scientific method in the early twentieth century defies common sense: We are haunted by a sense of the impossibility of ultimately making sense of things. By playing host to certain far-out notions—time travel, faster-than-light travel, and ESP, for example—that we have every reason to judge impossible, science fiction serves as an instrument of negotiation, Stableford suggests, with which we strive to accomplish the difficult diplomacy of existence in a scientifically knowable but essentially unimaginable world. This is no less true today than during the Radium Age.

The social, cultural, political, and technological upheavals of the 1900–1935 period are reflected in the proto-sf writings of authors such as Olaf Stapledon, William Hope Hodgson, Muriel Jaeger, Karel Čapek, G. K. Chesterton, Cicely Hamilton, W. E. B. Du Bois, Yevgeny Zamyatin, E. V. Odle, Arthur Conan Doyle, Mikhail Bulgakov, Pauline Hopkins, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Aldous Huxley, Gustave Le Rouge, A. Merritt, Rudyard Kipling, Rose Macaulay, J. D. Beresford, J. J. Connington, S. Fowler Wright, Jack London, Thea von Harbou, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, not to mention the late-period but still incredibly prolific H. G. Wells himself. More cynical than its Victorian precursor yet less hard-boiled than the sf that followed, in the writings of these visionaries we find acerbic social commentary, shock tactics, and also a sense of frustrated idealism—and reactionary cynicism, too—regarding humankind’s trajectory.

The MIT Press’s Radium Age series represents a much-needed evolution of my own efforts to champion the best proto-sf novels and stories from 1900 to 1935 among scholars already engaged in the fields of utopian and speculative fiction studies, as well as general readers interested in science, technology, history, and thrills and chills. By reissuing literary productions from a time period that hasn’t received sufficient attention for its contribution to the emergence of science fiction as a recognizable form—one that exists and has meaning in relation to its own traditions and innovations, as well as within a broader ecosystem of literary genres, each of which, as John Rieder notes in Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System (2017), is itself a product of overlapping communities of practice—we hope not only to draw attention to key overlooked works but perhaps also to influence the way scholars and sf fans alike think about this crucial yet neglected and misunderstood moment in the emergence of the sf genre.

John W. Campbell and other Cold War–era sf editors and propagandists dubbed a select group of writers and story types from the pulp era to be the golden age of science fiction. In doing so, they helped fix in the popular imagination a too-narrow understanding of what the sf genre can offer. (In his introduction to the 1974 collection Before the Golden Age, for example, Isaac Asimov notes that although it may have possessed a certain exuberance, in general sf from before the mid-1930s moment when Campbell assumed editorship of Astounding Stories seems, to anyone who has experienced the Campbell Revolution, to be clumsy, primitive, naive.) By returning to an international tradition of scientific speculation via fiction from after the Poe–Verne–Wells era and before sf’s Golden Age, the Radium Age series will demonstrate—contra Asimov et al.—the breadth, richness, and diversity of the literary works that were responding to a vertiginous historical period, and how they helped innovate a nascent genre (which wouldn’t be named until the mid-1920s, by Hugo Gernsback, founder of Amazing Stories and namesake of the Hugo Awards) as a mode of speculative imagining.

The MIT Press’s Noah J. Springer and I are grateful to the sf writers and scholars who have agreed to serve as this series’ advisory board. Aided by their guidance, we’ll endeavor to surface a rich variety of texts, along with introductions by a diverse group of sf scholars, sf writers, and others that will situate these remarkable, entertaining, forgotten works within their own social, political, and scientific contexts, while drawing out contemporary parallels.

We hope that reading Radium Age writings, published in times as volatile as our own, will serve to remind us that our own era’s seemingly natural, eternal, and inevitable social, economic, and cultural forms and norms are—like Madame Curie’s atom—forever in flux.

Introduction

Philippa Levine

In the decade following World War I, commentaries on and concerns around the devastation it had wrought appeared frequently in newspapers and political commentaries as well as in novels and films. The technologies developed during the war made it possible to think about a science-driven future in more meaningful ways than had previously been possible. Imagining the future was one of the favorite pastimes of science writers and novelists alike. Charlotte Haldane was both of those things. In November 1926, she published her first novel, Man’s World, an exploration of a future world of tightly controlled gender roles and reproduction.

Earlier that year she had married J. B. S. Haldane, a renowned biologist at the University of Cambridge. Then in her early 30s, the former Charlotte Franken had been married to Jack Burghes for eight years, during which time she was the family’s principal breadwinner, first as a press agent for a music publisher and subsequently as a journalist with particular interests in science. Her son Ronald was born some six months into a marriage which had rapidly deteriorated. Jack refused to grant her a divorce so she and Haldane had resorted to a common ruse of the time, sharing a hotel room after having tipped off a detective to witness this proof of adultery. Adultery was at the time required for a divorce and Charlotte was well aware that it had been only three years since women could even file for divorce on the same grounds as men. Charlotte was also the right age to enjoy the newly won voting rights of women. Before 1928, only women over thirty had that right, and she had turned thirty in 1924. She was, in many respects, what the press at the time dubbed a new woman.

Charlotte and JBS, as he was generally known, had met when she approached the eminent scientist for advice as she began work on what would become Man’s World. She had read his provocative essay Daedalus, or Science and the Future, the first book in a new series launched by the London publisher Kegan Paul at the end of 1923. This slender volume predicted changes in how reproduction would be handled in the future and envisaged a world in thrall to science. This hugely successful work established Haldane as a skilled popularizer of science at a time when the scientific future was a topic of broad interest, not least among novelists experimenting with the genre of science fiction.

Futuristic as the control of human reproduction sounded at the time, the interwar years were nonetheless par excellence the age of eugenics, a science directly interested in managing and regulating birth and reproduction. The term eugenics, coined by British scientist Francis Galton in 1883 from the Greek for good and origin, quite literally meant well born. Galton dreamed of improving humans by encouraging the fittest to procreate and by ensuring the unfit could not. Eugenicists around the globe—from China to Russia, from the Americas to South Asia, and across Europe, east and west—championed a slew of practices designed in some cases to better birth outcomes and in many cases to prevent births. Unsurprisingly, science fiction writers of the day took up these themes with gusto and, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, science fiction stories in which states and governments intervened to control reproduction proved immensely popular. Some of the best-known are Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), Owen Gregory’s Meccania (1918), Rose Macaulay’s What Not (1919), and short stories by Efim Zozulya (The Dictator: The Story of Ak and Humanity (1919)) and Julian Huxley (The Tissue-Culture King (1926)).

In reality, eugenics often did shape reproductive and other social policies in a variety of places, though seldom in the ways these novels predicted. Eugenic policies in the interwar years ranged from tax credits and other incentives designed to help families with the cost of raising children to coercive measures including institutionalization and forced sterilization to ensure that others—those with heritable illnesses or certain kinds of disability, mental or physical—were prevented from ever parenting. Although Britain was the birthplace of eugenics, other nations including the Scandinavian countries, North America, and Germany outstripped it in implementing these strong-arm practices. Britain’s 1913 Mental Deficiency Act did allow for the compulsory institutionalization of those deemed feeble-minded, but the country stopped short of approving involuntary sterilization. Not so elsewhere, as the thousands of forced sterilizations in the United States and across Scandinavia, and the hundreds of thousands of them in Nazi Germany, attest. Nonetheless, though coerced sterilization failed to find a formal footing in interwar Britain, eugenics was not a marginal but a mainstream idea; J. B. S. Haldane and many other prominent scientists of his generation were active in eugenic organizations and by 1911 a professorial post in the field had been established at University College London. This was the milieu that nurtured Charlotte’s ideas about sex determination before birth and it was JBS, already well known in eugenic circles, to whom she turned for advice.

Man’s World came out a year before her widely reviewed nonfiction book Motherhood and Its Enemies. Where Man’s World separated those who were encouraged to bear and raise children and sterilized the remainder to prevent pregnancy, Motherhood damned unmarried and childless women as useless and argued that those with disease or disability should be prevented from having children, a directly eugenic principle. There was something of a contradiction both between the messages of the two books—despite the closeness of their publication dates—and between what both books preached and the manner in which Haldane conducted her own personal life. Charlotte’s career was seldom interrupted by motherhood, and though she claimed in her autobiography that she and JBS hoped to start a family together, her son from her first marriage was the only child she ever had.

Man’s World chronicles the lives of brother and sister, Christopher and Nicolette, as they grow up in a fictionalized postwar state where reproduction is tightly controlled and social roles highly circumscribed. This is a man’s world because women are either mothers or neuters, and those who embrace motherhood are required to engage in prenatal exercises designed to ensure the sex of the infant. The overarching plan is to produce more men than women. Men are divided into three basic categories: scientists, administrators, and the proletarian masses. Men are ordered by their intellect while women are reduced to their biology. Christopher and Nicolette both yearn to break out of the roles allotted to them. Christopher, something of an antihero figure in the story, is resistant to what’s expected of him as a man, and the gender fluidity he demonstrates is explained in the book quite literally as an error caused by his mother’s failure to pursue the regimen developed to ensure the birth of baby boys. Nicolette, meanwhile, wants to keep her options open rather than committing to one of the prescribed female roles. With the help of some rebel friends, the two siblings find a way to sterilize her temporarily, a process known in this dystopian world as immunization. It is when she succumbs to conformist expectations, falls in love with a scientist, and chooses motherhood that the plot turns tragic. Christopher, now alienated not only from the world in which he lives but also from his beloved sister, literally flies too close to the sun, in a strange echo of JBS’s Daedalus.

Reading Man’s World from a contemporary perspective can be troubling. The disparagement of Jews pops up over and over. Nicolette’s ambivalent response to the Jewish painter Arcous Weil includes fleeting sensations of disgust. We hear of the Jewish habit of self-depreciation and Charlotte alludes to what she calls a Jewish quality of mind. The entire architecture of the world the book describes is the creation of Mensch, a Jew described as physically grotesque yet of tremendous intellectual power and vision.

What makes these seemingly anti-Semitic remarks puzzling is that Charlotte was from a middle-class German-Jewish family who, she claimed, never fully assimilated into the Anglo world. In her autobiography, published in 1949, she notes that I knew about anti-semitism long before I learned the facts of life. The righteous moral indignation it aroused in my father transmitted itself to me, and left a lasting impression on my youthful mind.¹ Yet her adult life suggests that she consciously distanced herself from Jewish circles; both her marriages were to gentile men and she moved in social circles where Jews would have been thin on the ground. Never fully accepted by Haldane’s friends—indeed, sometimes shunned by them—she may well have experienced these slights as anti-Semitic. The Jews in Man’s World are portrayed as brilliant but ruthless, exceptional in their talents, but always outsiders. It’s hard to know what to make of this and it certainly makes for uncomfortable reading today. This handling of anti-Semitism may well have been her attempt to minimize her own Jewishness and merge into the world of the Anglo intelligentsia. It might equally represent a recognition of the difficult tightrope that Anglo-Jewry walked in interwar Britain.

In a similar vein, the novel is also imbued with a race consciousness that draws a stark line between what Haldane calls the white race and adjoining races. The Slav is described as retrogressive and we are left in no doubt that the duties of motherhood at the heart of the book lie with reproducing the white race. In a terrifyingly prescient passage, Haldane speaks of a poison derived from, and deadly to, black people. Haldane was writing at a time when such vocabulary was commonplace and the greater population growth in some non-Western countries was cause for alarm. Books that foretold the swamping of whites circulated widely. Australian novelist William Lane’s 1887 White or Yellow? imagined the social breakdown that would ensue from mass Chinese migration to Australia. In the United States, Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World-Supremacy (1920) warned of the collapse of white authority. Madison Grant, author of The Passing of the Great Race (1916), provided an approving preface to Stoddard’s book echoing this alarm at the higher reproductive rates of nonwhite populations. By the time Man’s World appeared, immigration laws in many white-dominated nations had become increasingly exclusionary. The Johnson–Reed Act of 1924 radically altered immigration requirements in the United States, excluding Asians completely and severely restricting entrants from southern and eastern Europe. The notorious White Australia policy was among the very first laws passed in newly independent Australia in 1901, and in Britain early twentieth-century immigration laws sought to limit Jews and undesirables. Managing race was a central concern in many developed countries in the early and mid-twentieth century.

In a conversation between Nicolette and her aunt Emmeline, Haldane vocalizes some of the most dominant beliefs of the eugenics movement of the period. Emmeline insists that without safeguards as to who might be permitted to bear children, the future of the race would be imperiled. Without regulation, children would be born haphazard everywhere, would be bred by the pure and the impure. The dirty bestial breeding of the past would doom the race. Eugenicists were prominent advocates of controlling population, either to reduce the unwanted or to increase the right kinds of people. In the aftermath of the First World War, which had seen unprecedented mortality rates among young men, population quantity and quality were heavily debated issues. Scientists and science fiction writers explored a range of corrections to the perceived damage done by the loss of so many young men. Asexual reproduction (parthenogenesis), artificial insemination, and ectogenesis (developing the fetus outside the uterus) were all themes explored by writers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Katharine Burdekin and, most famously, Aldous Huxley.

Charlotte’s work, like that of many who lived through the Great War and witnessed its devastation, reveals a preoccupation with the fragility of civilization and what might be needed to shore it up. It was a concern she shared with her husband. In Daedalus, JBS had used the literary device of a future undergraduate paper to make his points, and among the opinions