A short life of the author
William Olaf Stapledon (10 May 1886 – 6 September 1950) was a British philosopher and science fiction writer whose visionary novels — conceived on a scale that dwarfs anything else in the genre — survey the entire sweep of cosmic time, from the near future to the death of the universe, and explore questions of consciousness, community, and meaning that are as much philosophical as fictional. Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937) are the most ambitious works of speculative fiction ever written, and their influence on the development of science fiction — and on writers from Arthur C. Clarke to Stanisław Lem to Jorge Luis Borges — is incalculable.
Life
Stapledon was born in Seacombe, Cheshire, near Liverpool. He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and the University of Liverpool, where he took a PhD in philosophy. He served as a conscientious objector in World War I, working with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit in France. He taught for the Workers’ Educational Association and the University of Liverpool.
He was not a genre writer: he came to science fiction from philosophy and was only loosely aware of the pulp science fiction being published in American magazines. His influences were Plato, Spinoza, Wells, and the British Idealist philosophers. He was a committed socialist and pacifist.
Last and First Men (1930)
The novel is presented as a history of humanity written by one of the Last Men — the eighteenth human species — two billion years in the future. It traces the rise and fall of eighteen distinct human species, each adapted to different conditions, each developing its own civilisation, its own philosophy, and its own mode of consciousness. The scale is staggering: individual human lives are irrelevant; entire civilisations rise and fall in a few pages.
The book has no plot in the conventional sense — no characters, no dialogue, no dramatic scenes. It is speculative history written from the far future, and its power lies in the relentless, calm accumulation of possibility. Wells praised it as “a work of brilliant imagination.”
Star Maker (1937)
Stapledon’s masterpiece — and one of the most extraordinary books in the English language — begins with a man sitting on a hill in suburban England and expands outward until it encompasses the entire history of the cosmos. The narrator is projected into space, visits alien civilisations (symbiotic plant-animal intelligences, composite group-minds, intelligent stars), witnesses the formation and dissolution of a galactic community of minds, and ultimately encounters the Star Maker itself — the creator of the cosmos, an entity of incomprehensible intelligence that creates universe after universe in an endless series of aesthetic experiments.
The book is philosophy in the form of fiction — a meditation on consciousness, purpose, suffering, and the relationship between creator and creation that draws on Platonic idealism, Spinoza’s pantheism, and mystical experience. Its vision of the cosmos as a work of art created by an indifferent deity is one of the most powerful religious ideas in modern literature — and one of the bleakest.
Arthur C. Clarke called it “probably the most powerful work of imagination ever written.” Borges admired it. Lem was deeply influenced by it.
Other Works
Odd John (1935) is a novel about a superhuman mutant who founds a community of his own kind — an early exploration of the “next stage of evolution” theme. Sirius (1944) — about a dog given human-level intelligence by a neuroscientist — is Stapledon’s most conventional novel and his most emotionally affecting, exploring the tragedy of a consciousness trapped between species.
Critical Standing
Stapledon occupies a peculiar position: revered by science fiction writers and readers, almost unknown to the literary establishment, and largely ignored by the philosophical community despite his genuine philosophical sophistication. His novels are not novels in the conventional sense — they lack characters, plot, and human drama — and this has prevented them from reaching a wider readership. But for those who encounter them, they are transformative: they expand the reader’s sense of temporal and spatial scale in ways that no other fiction achieves.
Collecting Stapledon
Last and First Men (1930, Methuen) in first edition brings £300–£1,000. Star Maker (1937, Methuen) in first edition brings £500–£2,000. Both are scarce in good condition.