What Not

by Rose Macaulay

Introduction by Matthew De Abaitua

Paperback

$19.95

Paperback

ISBN: 9780262544306

Pub date: October 4, 2022

Publisher: The MIT Press

248 pp., 5 x 8 in,

Rights: not for sale in Europe or the UK

MIT Press Bookstore Penguin Random House Amazon Barnes and Noble Bookshop.org Indiebound Indigo Books a Million

eBook

$19.99

eBook

ISBN: 9780262371155

Pub date: October 4, 2022

Publisher: The MIT Press

248 pp., 5 x 8 in,

Rights: not for sale in Europe or the UK

Penguin Random House

248 pp., 5 x 8 in,

Paperback
9780262544306
Published: October 2022
Publisher: The MIT Press
Rights: not for sale in Europe or the UK

$19.95

eBook
9780262371155
Published: October 2022
Publisher: The MIT Press
Rights: not for sale in Europe or the UK

$19.99

MIT Press Bookstore
Penguin Random House
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Bookshop.org
Indiebound
Indigo
Books a Million

Other Retailers:

MIT Press Bookstore
Penguin Random House
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Bookshop.org
Indiebound
Indigo
Books a Million
Amazon.co.uk
Blackwells
Bookshop.org
Foyles
Hive
Waterstones

Description
Author(s)
Praise

An early novel by Rose Macaulay about a government program of compulsory selective breeding in a dystopian future England.

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 the author's own ambivalent attitude to life, gets involved in the Ministry's propaganda efforts, which are detailed with an entertaining thoroughness. However, 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, whose alphabetical caste system would directly influence Aldous Huxley's 1932 dystopia Brave New World, was delayed until after the end of World War I.

Rose Macaulay (1881–1958) was an English writer who during the First World War worked in the British Propaganda Department; later, she became a civil servant in the War Office. Several of her satirical novels, including Potterism (1920), Dangerous Ages (1921), and Told by an Idiot (1923) were best-sellers. Macaulay was also a journalist, poet, and essayist, and the author of biographies and travelogues. She is best remembered today for her autobiographical final novel, The Towers of Trebizond (1956).

Matthew De Abaitua is a senior lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Essex. His debut science fiction novel The Red Men (2007) was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and adapted into a short film, Dr. Easy. His science fiction novels IF THEN (2015) and The Destructives (2016) complete the loose trilogy. His book Self & I: A Memoir of Literary Ambition (2018) was shortlisted for the New Angle Prize for Literature.

"A satire of Britain after World War One, where mental improvement has its own powerful government department. A cross between Brave New World and Orwell's 'Ministry of Truth'--all delivered with a sly wit and arch tongue."
Philippa Levine, William Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas, University of Texas at Austin

“Miss Macaulay's 'prophetic comedy' is a joyous rag of Government office routine, flappery, Pelmania, Tribunals, State advertising, the Lower Journalism and 'What Not.' A very shrewd piece of observation, whimsicality and tempered malice.”
Punch (1919)