BERNAL, John Desmond (1901–1971)

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul

London: Kegan Paul, Trench,

Trubner & Co., Ltd, 1960

16mo hardcover; pp. 96, [24, ads].

A work described by Arthur C. Clarke as ‘the most brilliant attempt at scientific prediction ever made’.

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil is Marxist crystallographer J.D. Bernal’s daring speculation about the transhuman future of mankind.

This is easily the most dramatic of C.K. Ogden’s famous ‘To-Day and To-Morrow’ series, and was a notable influence on Olaf Stapledon, whose Last and First Men and Star Maker are in part a responses to Bernal’s ideas.

‘The world’, for Bernal, will be tamed by physics: we will live in hollowed space bubbles – since termed ‘Bernal Spheres’ – then inside stars, having broken the shackles of earthly existence. ‘The flesh’ will be dominated by biology: we will cease to need bodies, becoming instead distributed intelligences, made immortal through interconnection with other brains. ‘The devil’ of the human mind itself will be tamed by the new Freudian psychology, given a socialist twist by Bernal, who envisages the sublimation of desire through the scientific planning of society itself.

The first edition is now a notably scarce work – even more so in the dust-jacket.

Very good condition: the jacket is in excellent condition, noting only some very light spotting to the front panel, and minor chipping to the head of the spine; covers and paper labels in an exceptional state of preservation; internally very good; spotting to the half-title and (less so) the titl-page and final leaves of ads

References: Max Saunders, Imagined Futures (Oxford, 2019), Chapter 1; Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition