Satanism and Genetics: Haldane’s Daedalus and Its Begetters

Abstract

Genetic engineering, as Carey indicates in the above quotation, is a highly controversial late twentieth-century innovation, yet the modification and improvement of the human species that it seems to promise have long been both a major theme of scientific romance and a persistent, not always explicit, presence in literary utopias. The connections between eugenics and utopia will be considered in Chapters 5 and 6. It is, however, in science fiction and scientific romance that we find the earliest expressions of the mixture of wonder and fear — of, as it were, natural magic and moral panic — that has come to define public attitudes to the artificial production and modification of human life. Commentators on these issues almost invariably refer to the fictional genres with which this book is concerned, and to two texts in particular: Brave New World and Frankenstein. Huxley’s title remains infinitely quotable, but Frankenstein has a still stronger claim to be regarded (in Jon Turney’s phrase) as ‘the governing myth of modern biology’.³

Procreation’s sheer nonsense, we declare! …

By animals, no doubt, it’s still enjoyed

But man henceforth, being so highly gifted

Must have an origin much more uplifted.

Goethe, Faust: Part Two (1832)¹

The promise that genetic engineering holds out for improving the human race represents the most significant scientific advance since nuclear fission. It at last brings into the sphere of the possible the production of real live utopians, disease-free, super-brainy, superfit, of the sort that the more imaginative utopian writers have been dreaming about for centuries.

John Carey, Introduction to The Faber Book of Utopias (1999)²