Abstract
There is something Sphinx-like about Olaf Stapledon. He was both a professional philosopher and the most inscrutable of science-fiction writers. ‘Read him at your own risk’, his critic Leslie Fiedler advises, and indeed he is not to be taken lightly.2 Stapledon’s early childhood was spent in Egypt and in 1912, at the age of 26, he went back there for several months to work for the family firm in Port Said. He made a trip to Cairo and relished the sight of the Sphinx by moonlight. It was, he wrote in his journal, ‘mysterious & awful; far finer than by day. She was alive, & inscrutible [sic], watching the stars go round, ignoring all the rowdy tourists round her’.3 Stapledon’s detachment and farsightedness in his novels often seem to be modelled on the Sphinx. The Eighteenth Men whose outlook dominates Last and First Men (1930) and Last Men in London (1932) are, the narrator tells us, both human and animal in nature, like the ‘old Egyptian deities with animal heads’.4 The one female member of the Eighteenth species to be briefly individualised is compared to the ‘Egyptian Sphinx, which looks across the desert and waits, for something unknown and terrible, but the appointed end’ (LML 344).
If I were to describe in detail every world that we explored, this book would develop into a world of libraries.
Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker (1937)1
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Notes
O. Stapledon (1972) Star Maker (Harmondsworth: Penguin), p. 78–9.Subsequent page references in the text are to this edition.
L.A. Fiedler (1983) Olaf Stapledon: A Man Divided (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press), p. 3.
O. Stapledon (1972) Last and First Men and Last Men in London (Harmondsworth: Penguin), p. 286 [LFM]. Subsequent page references in the text are to this edition, prefixed LFM or LML as appropriate, even though this double Penguin edition has continuous, not separate, pagination.
C. Milburn (2014) ‘Posthumanism’, in R. Latham (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction ( New York: Oxford University Press ), p. 531.
O. Stapledon [ 1948 ] ‘Interplanetary Man?’, in R. Crossley, ed. (1997) An Olaf Stapledon Reader ( Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press ), p. 231.
See O. Stapledon (1945) Old Man in New World (London: Allen & Unwin), p. 20. Subsequent page references in the text are to this edition. Stapledon sets out his ‘agnostic mysticism’ (among much else) in his 1939 two-volume Pelican Philosophy and Living (Harmondsworth: Penguin), where he argues that ‘in some sense mind or spirit is basic to the universe’ (vol. 1, p. 32 ).
R. Crossley (1982) ‘The Letters of Olaf Stapledon and H.G. Wells, 1931–1942’, in G. Wolfe (ed.), Science Fiction Dialogues ( Chicago, IL: Academy Chicago ), p. 41.
R.W. Maslen (2000) ‘Towards an Iconography of the Future: C.S. Lewis and the Scientific Humanists’, Inklings-Jahrbuch für Literatur und Ästhetik 18, 222–49, p. 226.
H.G. Wells (1989) The Discovery of the Future with The Common-Sense of World Peace and The Human Adventure, ed. P. Parrinder (London: PNL Press), p. 36.
O. Stapledon (1954) Odd John (London: Science Fiction Book Club), p. 7. Subsequent page references in the text are to this edition.
O Stapledon (1964) Sirius: A Fantasy of Love and Discord (Harmondsworth: Penguin), pp. 73, 110. Subsequent page references in the text are to this edition.
S. Lem (1986) ‘On Stapledon’s Last and First Men’, trans. I. Csicsery-Ronay, Jr, Science-Fiction Studies 13.3 (November), 272–91, p. 283.
J.B.S. Haldane (1927) Possible Worlds and Other Essays (London: Chatto & Windus), p. 286;
A.C. Clarke (1973) ‘Possible, That’s All!’, in Report on Planet Three and Other Speculations (London: Corgi), p. 120.
M.M. Rodriguez (2014) ‘From Stapledon’s Star Maker to Cicero’s Dream of Scipio: The Visionary Cosmic Voyage as a Speculative Genre’, Foundation 118 (Autumn), 45–58.
A. Sawyer (2010) ‘[William] Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950)’, in M. Bould, A.M. Butler, A. Roberts and S. Vint (eds), Fifty Key Figures in Science Fiction (London and New York: Routledge), p. 207.
W. Reade (1924) The Martyrdom of Man (London: Watts), first published in 1872.
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© 2015 Patrick Parrinder
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Parrinder, P. (2015). Olaf Stapledon and the Shape of Things to Come. In: Utopian Literature and Science. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137456786_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137456786_11
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