THE FANTASY OF ECTOGENESIS IN INTERWAR BRITAIN: TEXTS AND CONTEXTS ALINE FERREIRA UNIVERSIDADE DE AVEIRO This essay considers the fantasy of ectogenesis in some of its earliest fictional manifestations. Ectogenesis, as its name indicates, means creation outside the body and has come to be mainly associated with the concept of an artificial womb. When the fantasy of an artificial uterus is mentioned the first example that immediately comes to mind is Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World (1932), whose description of the Central London Hatchery where the cloned embryos are mass-produced and grown in glass jars moving in conveyer belts probably remains the most memorable. Huxley was responding to a cultural and scientific environment where such biotechnological fantasies had started to circulate and indeed had already been articulated by his friend J. B. S. Haldane in a small book called Daedalus, or, Science and the future (1924), which, amongst many other forecasts, envisaged a future society where ectogenesis and human cloning would become the norm. Indeed, the concept of ectogenesis first came into public awareness when Haldane, a British geneticist, a pioneer of population genetics and a prolific science populariser, mentioned it in a paper read to the Heretics Society in Cambridge on 4 February 1923. This paper, widely discussed and extremely influential, was later published as Daedalus, or Science and the Future (1924). Crucially, the growing interest in new reproductive technologies and the resulting new family configurations at the end of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century was fuelled not only by First Wave Feminism, scientific advances in genetics and tissue culture, as well as by debates around eugenics and genetics often promoted by the British and American Eugenics Societies, but also by a series of short books published in the 1920s and 1930s by Kegan Paul in London as part of the “To-day and To-morrow” series. The main aim of the series, whose small volumes were written by eminent scientists and other specialists in their