Sugar in the Air

Back in print after an absence of nearly 70 years, the facsimile edition of E. C. Large's novel Sugar in the Air is what we now call a "mash-up," made up of scientific research, social satire, and fictional flights of fancy. Sugar in the Air (1937) is a "scientific romance" in which the idea of extracting sugar from the air is held, for the duration of the book, in suspended disbelief by characters desperate for work in a period of economic recession. A description of the product development and manufacturing process doubles as a critique of capitalism's stewardship of technological progress that suggests alternative production models for today's designers.