In 1924, the British biologist J.B.S. Haldane acknowledged that anyone who tried to predict where science was taking us was obliged to mention H.G. Wells, since ‘[t]he very mention of the future suggests him’. Nevertheless, Haldane complained that Wells was ‘a generation behind the time’, having been raised when flying and radiotelegraphy were genuinely scientific questions, but they were now mere ‘commercial problems’, Haldane asserted, and ‘I believe that the centre of scientific interest lies in biology’. Haldane's conviction that biology was the key to the future was widely shared, and lies in the background of both these books. Helen Curry examines the early history of the dream of engineering new kinds of plants, using first X-rays, then colchicine (a chemical mutagen), and then the new sources of intense radioactivity that were created by the early nuclear reactors. By contrast, Ewa Luczak is interested in the influence of eugenics on American literature, focusing particularly on Jack London, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and George Schuyler. What unites these books (and the diverse topics they address) is new ways of imagining the future, specifically a future based in biology.

In early nineteenth-century London audiences flocked to a variety of lectures and shows on astronomical topics. While the religious and social positions of the lecturers and showmen varied significantly, the vast majority adopted a Newtonian cosmology incorporating a belief in the plurality of worlds. This paper focuses on Isaac Frost's 1846 book Two Systems of Astronomy in an attempt to gain a fuller understanding of how some thinkers in plebeian London responded to and resisted this emergent astronomical orthodoxy. Central to this analysis is research that reveals how changes in the intellectual world of Frost and his Muggletonian co-religionists prompted this formerly non-proselytizing Protestant sect to become increasingly vocal during the nineteenth century. This research is based upon a thorough examination of the Muggletonian archive in the British Library together with a collection of approximately thirty Muggletonian letters deposited in the Oxfordshire Records Office in 1993 and not examined by previous historians. It is concluded that the unorthodox or anti-Newtonian cosmologies advanced by several early nineteenth-century thinkers were often intellectually coherent and embodied in receptive social contexts.

In his Telluris Theoria Sacra and its English translation The Theory of the Earth (1681–90), the English clergyman and schoolmaster Thomas Burnet (c.1635–1715) constructed a geological history from the Creation to the Final Consummation, positing predominantly natural causes to explain biblical events and their effects on the Earth and life on it. Burnet's insistence on appealing primarily to natural rather than miraculous causes has been interpreted both by his contemporaries and by some historians as an essentially Cartesian principle. On this reading, Burnet adhered to a Cartesian style of explanation in which there was no place for miracles. In this paper, I propose a different interpretation. Burnet's commitment to natural over miraculous causes, I argue, was grounded in an anti-voluntarist theology which he inherited from the Cambridge Platonists and Latitudinarians. This anti-voluntarism, moreover, also dictated the kind of miracles to which he did appeal. This reading of Burnet contrasts with the view that he was simply following Cartesian principles. First, Descartes had espoused a radical form of theological voluntarism. Second, Burnet's and Descartes's views of providence were based on distinct attributes of God, and these attributes had quite different implications regarding the place of miracles in the providential order.