Star Maker: Olaf Stapledon (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

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Stapledon is considered one of the forerunners of the contemporary transhumanist movement. [31] Film rights [ edit ] The BIS and Stapledon already have a long history together. On the 9th of October 1948 Stapledon gave a wonderful lecture to members of the society at the invitation of Arthur C.Clarke. It took place at St.Martin’s School, 107 Charing Cross Road, London. The BIS advert read: “In his opening lecture Dr.Stapledon will discuss the profound ethical, philosophical and religious questions which will undoubtedly arise from interplanetary exploration, the possibility of finding intelligent life on other worlds, colonization of planets, interstellar communication, and the possibility of telepathic communication”. Stapledon wrote many books in his life, including Odd John, Sirius, Worlds of Wonder, Darkness and Light. But it is for Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937) that he is most famous. From these incredible books sprang a range of ideas such as planetary terraforming, genetic engineering, human evolution, transcendence, Dyson Spheres, interplanetary genocide, and the cosmic mind, to name just a few. Arguably the daring works of Stapledon are as important an influence on our culture as the works of William Shakespeare, and yet Stapledon is not very well known throughout the world. The complexity of the problem will be analyzed and we will show that some philosophical prejudice is unavoidable. There are two types of philosophy: “Natural Philosophy”, seeking for some essence of things, and “Critical (or analytical) Philosophy”, devoted to the analysis of the procedures by which we claim to construct a reality. An extension of Critical Philosophy, Epistemo-Analysis (i.e. the Psycho-Analysis of concepts) is presented and applied to the definition of Life and to Astrobiology. Some commentators have called Stapledon a Marxist, although Stapledon distanced himself from the label stating that - "I am not a Marxist, but I have learned much from Marxists, and I am not anti-Marxist". [11] Although he did refer to himself as a socialist. [12]

When I started to read SF at the end of 1952 , Olaf Stapledon had been out of print a long time. I think it took about 10 years before I noticed the Dover reprint of Last and First Men. Odd John had maybe gone into the public domain because in the early 60’s there was an odd lurid cover reprint. For the duration of the Second World War Stapledon abandoned his pacifism and supported the war effort. [5] In 1940 the Stapledon family built and moved into a new house on Simon's Field, in Caldy, in Wirral. During the war Stapledon became a public advocate of J.B. Priestley and Richard Acland's left-wing Common Wealth Party, [5] as well as the British internationalist group Federal Union. [8] He supported implementing the recommendations of the Beveridge Report [9] and spoke at the first public meeting of the Left Book Club's "Readers' and Writers' Group". [10] To expand upon my galaxies as living beings idea (well, I did not originate such an idea but I do have ideas on the idea, and yes I now wish I had written a paper on this for the conference). The novel is one of the most highly acclaimed novels in science fiction. Its admirers at the time of first publication saw it as one of the most brilliant, inventive, and daring science fiction books. Among its more famous admirers were H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, Brian Aldiss, Doris Lessing, and Stanisław Lem. Borges wrote a prologue for a 1965 edition and called it "a prodigious novel". Lessing wrote an afterword for a UK edition. Freeman Dyson was also a fan, admitting to basing his concept of Dyson spheres on a section of the book, even calling "Stapledon sphere" a better name for the idea. [2] Among science fiction writers, Arthur C. Clarke has been most strongly influenced by Stapledon. Chapter 15, subchapter 1: "[W]henever a human being has chosen to die, his body is ceremoniously eaten by his friends".

CHAPTER XIV - THE MYTH OF CREATION

Benford,Gregory, "Foreword" in Last and First Men. London, Millennium, 1999. ISBN 1-85798-806-X pp. ix–xi. Tenth to Thirteenth Men. (Chapter 14) "Nowhere did the typical human form survive." About three hundred million years after the colonization of Neptune, a rabbit-like species evolves into the Tenth Men. The Tenth Men are sapient but primitive. After a plague wipes out the Tenth Men, several other primitive human species rise and fall. When we try to search for extraterrestrial life and intelligence, we have to follow some guidelines. The first step is to clarify what is to be meant by “Life” and “intelligence”, i.e. an attempt to define these words. The word “definition”refers to two different situations. First, it means an arbitrary convention. On the other hand it also often designates an attempt to clarify the content of a preexisting word for which we have some spontaneous preconceptions, whatever their grounds, and to catch an (illusory) “essence” of what is defined. It is then made use of pre-existing plain language words which carry an a priori prescientific content likely to introduce some confusion in the reader’s mind. Eighteenth Men. (Chapters 15–16) The most advanced humans of all, essentially a perfected version of the 17th species. A race of philosophers and artists with a very liberal sexual morality. "Superficially we seem to be not one species but many." (One interesting aspect of the Eighteenth Men is that they have a number of different "sub-genders," variants on the basic male and female pattern, with distinctive temperaments. The Eighteenth Men's equivalent of the family unit includes one of each of these sub-genders and is the basis of their society. The units have the ability to act as a group mind, which eventually leads to the establishment of a single group mind uniting the entire species.) This species no longer died naturally, but only by accident, suicide or being killed. Despite their hyper-advanced civilisation, they practice ritual cannibalism. [2] They are eventually extinguished on Neptune after a supernova infects the sun, causing it to grow so hot that it consumes the remains of the Solar System, faster than any means of escape they can devise. Unable to escape, this last species of man devises a virus to spread life to other worlds and cause the evolution of new sentient species throughout the galaxy. Together with his philosophy lectureship at the University of Liverpool, which now houses the Olaf Stapledon archive, Stapledon lectured in English literature, industrial history and psychology. He wrote many non-fiction books on political and ethical subjects, in which he advocated the growth of "spiritual values", which he defined as those values expressive of a yearning for greater awareness of the self in a larger context ("personality-in-community"). [2] Stapledon himself named his spiritual values as intelligence, love and creative action. [29] His philosophy was strongly influenced by Spinoza. [30]

Crawford also said that Stapledon appeared to downplay the economic and scientific motivations for space exploration, yet the former is important for maximizing human well-being and the latter is a key component of human intellectual development. He spoke about the race we appear to be in now, between cosmic fulfillment and cosmic death. A situation echoed by our current dilemma, to become a spacefaring civilization or face stagnation and decay. Crawford made the important point that in thinking about space exploration we had to justify why we want another planet and what we are going to do with it, given that we already have a planet and have not treated the Earth very well. He asked whether before we consider this question, we should consider what man ought to do first with himself. Crawford ended by pointing towards the September 2011 publication of “The Global Exploration Roadmap” by the International Space Exploration Coordination Group and said that if Stapledon were here today he would have approved of this as a sign of positive progress that humanity is starting to work together as a global community in the exploration of space. C. S. Lewis in his own preface to That Hideous Strength, notes: "I believe that one of the central ideas of this tale came into my head from conversations I had with a scientific colleague, some time before I met a rather similar suggestion in the works of Mr. Olaf Stapledon. If I am mistaken in this, Mr. Stapledon is so rich in invention that he can afford to lend, and I admire his invention (though not his philosophy) so much that I should feel no shame to borrow". One thing that surprised me is how specific some of the answers to these big questions get toward the end. It's not just some vague notion of the "unified spirit," it's much more detailed than that. I suspect that not all readers will like these answers, but I found them to be compelling and fascinating possibilities.Stapledon’s speculations about the next step in human evolution, the homo superior idea, has taken a bit of a beating in recent evolutionary biology. However speculation on the evolution of human derived technology remains a burning topic and we don’t know where that is going.

Ninth Men. (Chapter 14) "Inevitably it was a dwarf type, limited in size by the necessity of resisting an excessive gravitation... too delicately organized to withstand the ferocity of natural forces on Neptune... civilization crumbled into savagery." After the Ninth Men's civilization collapses, the Ninth Men themselves devolve into various animal species. Film producer and director George Pal bought the rights to Odd John and in 1966 Castle of Frankenstein magazine reported that David McCallum would play the title role. [32]

Star Maker

a b c d e Vincent Geoghegan,"Olaf Stapledon:Religious but not a Christian" in Socialism and religion: roads to common wealth .London: Routledge, 2011. ISBN 9780415668286 (pp. 85–108). This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sourcesin this section. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. ( November 2023) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)

From a letter to Fritz Leiber on 19 December 1936. Published in Selected Letters V edited by August Derleth and James Turner, p. 375.Baboon-like Submen. (Chapter 7) "Bent so that as often as not they used their arms as aids to locomotion, flat-headed and curiously long-snouted, these creatures were by now more baboon-like than human". MIF 2017 - Last and First Men, Reviewed". Confidentials Manchester. 7 July 2017 . Retrieved 25 March 2018. The communal spirit of our galaxy now joined the little company of the most awakened beings of the cosmos, the scattered band of advanced galactic spirits, whose aim it was to create a real cosmical community, with a single mind, the communal spirit of its myriad and diverse worlds and individual intelligences. This it was hoped to acquire powers of insight and of creativity impossible on the merely galactic plane. I should say that my interest in big ideas, such as the make up of the universe, has never been too strong. If you are more interested in this subject I can see you finding a lot of enjoyment in this book but for me I lost grasp of the world he was trying to convey and loss interest after that.