Snow, C P
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1905-1980) UK scientific administrator or boffin and author, best known for the long Strangers and Brothers sequence of novels, several of which deal intimately with science and the scientific establishment, though even The Search (1958) stays demurely within the bounds of the possible. In Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), nonfiction, he famously suggested that science and the humanities had indeed become "two cultures", a phrase which has become part of the language. His Scientific Romance, New Lives for Old (1933) anonymous, depicts a successful search for Immortality; but the successful Invention of a hormone-based Technology, which takes off from the experiments of Serge Voronoff, also has the effect of markedly increasing human libido (see Sex). In the last part of the novel, set decades further into the Near Future, the rejuvenated protagonist – whose name is Billy Pilgrim, like the protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) – eventually sacrifices himself to save others, during a revolution fomented on behalf of those too poor to be given the treatment. Snow was created Baron Snow of Leicester in 1964. [JC]
Charles Percy Snow, Baron Snow of Leicester
born Leicester, Leicestershire: 15 October 1905
died London: 1 July 1980
works
- New Lives for Old (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933) anonymous [hb/nonpictorial]
nonfiction
- Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution: The Rede Lecture, 1959 (Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, 1959) [nonfiction: hb/photo of author]
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