The Preface begins with autobiography, explaining how a scholar of literature became interested in genetics and public policy. It describes how the author’s training in literary and cultural studies proved valuable to analyzing public attitudes toward science, a topic of importance to public policy. The book focuses on time in genetics and narrative, concentrating on three periods when literature’s perspectives on the life sciences were critical: the late-nineteenth-century reaction to Darwin; the period running from the 1920s through the Cold War, when the modern synthesis of evolution with genetics was developed in dialogue with the concept of modernity; and the twenty-first century, the age of “genome time.”

Victorian science fiction, imperial romance, sensation fiction, and utopian fiction helped readers cope with the immensity of the evolutionary time scale by stories that featured the progressive improvement of the species through the inheritance of acquired characteristics or by planned programs of eugenics. Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race, Haggard’s She, Collins’s The Legacy of Cain, and other works of Victorian genre fiction demonstrate some of the consequences of neo-Lamarckian thinking and serve as a warning to commentators on epigenetics who have suggested that it supports Lamarck’s views. In the hands of novelists, neo-Lamarckism buttressed notions of the inherited character of criminality, the progressive nature of evolution, and the tendency to “blame mothers” for degeneration of the species.