The early decades of the twentieth century were marked by widespread optimism about biology’s ability to improve the world, catalysed by promising new theories about inheritance and evolution (particularly Hugo de Vries’ mutation theory and Mendel’s newly rediscovered ideas). In Britain and the USA particularly, an astonishingly diverse variety of writers took up the task of interpreting these new biological ideas using a wide range of genres. They produced a new kind of utopianism – the biotopia – that embodied a confidence in humanity’s ability to reshape living things to meet our desires. Biotopias offered the dream of a perfect, post-natural world, or the nightmare of violated nature (often in the same text), but above all they conveyed a sense that biology was offering humanity unprecedented control over life.
Biotopias often visualised the world as a garden perfected for human use, but their vision often entailed dispossessing, or even killing, “Mother Nature”. Influential examples include Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), H.G. Wells’ Men Like Gods (1923), and J.B.S. Haldane’s Daedalus (1924). These writings allowed biology to function as public culture, creating talking and thinking about biology continue to characterise today’s debates over the impact of new biological breakthroughs.
