Olaf Stapledon
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Then there were men that had developed from a slug-like ancestor along a line which was not vertebrate, still less mammalian. Men of this type attained the necessary rigidity and flexibility of limb by means of a delicate internal "basket-work" of wiry bones."--Star Maker (1937) by Olaf Stapledon "One of the earliest examples of genre science fiction that involves a challenging amount of unconventional sexual activity is the early science fiction novel Odd John (1935), by Olaf Stapledon. John is a mutant with extraordinary mental abilities who will not allow himself to be bound by many of the rules imposed by the ordinary British society of his time. The novel strongly implies that he has consensual intercourse with his mother and that he seduces an older boy who becomes devoted to him but also suffers from the affront that the relationship creates to his own morals. John eventually concludes that any sexual interaction with 'normal' humans is akin to bestiality."--Sholem Stein |
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William Olaf Stapledon (May 10, 1886 – September 6, 1950) was a British philosopher and author of several influential works of science fiction.
Stapledon's four major works Last and First Men (1930), Odd John (1935), Star Maker (1937), and Sirius (1944) were highly acclaimed by figures as diverse as Jorge Luis Borges, J. B. Priestley, Bertrand Russell, Algernon Blackwood, Hugh Walpole, Arnold Bennett, Virginia Woolf (Stapledon maintained a correspondence with Woolf) and Winston Churchill. In contrast, Stapledon's philosophy repelled C. S. Lewis, whose Cosmic Trilogy was written partly in response to what Lewis saw as amorality, although Lewis admired Stapledon's inventiveness and described him as "a corking good writer". In fact Stapledon was an agnostic who was hostile to religious institutions, but not to religious yearnings, a fact that set him at odds with H. G. Wells in their correspondence.
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Bibliography
Fiction
- Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future (1930) (Template:ISBN)
- Last Men in London (1932) (Template:ISBN)
- Odd John: A Story Between Jest and Earnest (1935) (Template:ISBN)
- Star Maker (1937) (Template:ISBN)
- Darkness and the Light (1942) (Template:ISBN)
- Old Man in New World (short story, 1944)
- Sirius: A Fantasy of Love and Discord (1944) (Template:ISBN)
- Death into Life (1946)
- The Flames: A Fantasy (1947)
- A Man Divided (1950) (Template:ISBN)
- Four Encounters (1976) (Template:ISBN)
- Nebula Maker (drafts of Star Maker, 1976) (Template:ISBN)
- East is West (posthumous, 1979)
Non-fiction
- A Modern Theory of Ethics: A study of the Relations of Ethics and Psychology (1929)
- Waking World (1934)
- Saints and Revolutionaries (1939)
- New Hope for Britain (1939)
- Philosophy and Living, 2 volumes (1939)
- Beyond the "Isms" (1942)
- Seven Pillars of Peace (1944)
- Youth and Tomorrow (1946)
- Interplanetary Man? (1948)
- The Opening of the Eyes (ed. Agnes Z. Stapledon, 1954)
Poetry
- Latter-Day Psalms (1914)
Collections
- Worlds of Wonder: Three Tales of Fantasy (1949)
- To the End of Time: the Best of Olaf Stapledon (ed. Basil Davenport, 1953) (Template:ISBN)
- Far Future Calling: Uncollected Science Fiction and Fantasies of Olaf Stapledon (ed. Sam Moskowitz 1979 Template:ISBN)
- An Olaf Stapledon Reader (ed. Robert Crossley, 1997)
See also
