OLAF STAPLEDON AND THE IDEA OF SCIENCE

FICTION

nfr
Robert Crossley

Unlike his great predecessor H. G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon never wrote

an essay on the genre of the scientific romance or about the influences
on his own imagination. Wells's career endured long enough for him to
see a collected edition of his works and numerous reissues of separate
texts. Sometimes he contributed Forewords to such later editions, but one
of them—a 1933 omnibus of his best-known scientific romances—prompted
a retrospective Preface surveying his entire achievement in what he called
"my fantastic stories" (240). Although there is some self-disparaging revi-
sionism as Wells, approaching seventy, looks back over his shoulder at
books written mostly in his thirties, the Preface to The Scientific Romances
is important as a record of his thoughts about his literary genealogy, as
an account of intentions and aspirations, and as a compact Wells's Rules
of Order designed to help the reader of fantastic fiction "to play the game
properly" (241). '
If Wells downplayed the artistic and social value of the "playful
parables" of his younger days, he was still careful to outfit himself with
a distinguished and selective pedigree. He claimed descent from Apuleius,

'Wells's Preface has recently been reprinted in Parrinder and Philmus' collection of his Literary
Criticism. Their commentary on the Preface (222*229) emphasizes the disillusionment and ambivalence
of the older Wells and cautions against accepting his dismissal of the value of his earlier fictions.
Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 32, Number 1, Spring 1986. Copyright © by Purdue Research Founda-
tion. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

21
LucÃ-an, Swift, and Mary Shelley, but he disavowed kinship with his one
rival for the title of the originator of modern science fiction. Contesting
the reviewers who used to call him "the English Jules Verne," Wells
insisted that "there is no literary resemblance whatever" between their
two kinds of fiction (240).2 Verne, he said, was an ingenious forecaster
interested in "practical" applications of science, but the typical Wellsian
fantasy had a human rather than a mechanical center, and it aspired to
exercise the reader's moral imagination. In addition to locating himself
within a tradition of ethically based fantasy, Wells emphasized three prin-
ciples governing his scientific romancing: the author's need "to domesticate
the impossible hypothesis" by yoking the beautiful lies of fiction to cur-
rent scientific theory, or at least to enough scientific jargon to cover the
tale decently; the critical and satirical function of exotic or extraterrestrial
locales used "in order to look at mankind from a distance"; and Arnold-
ian and antiescapist commitments to be "critical of life" and "to make
the stories reflect upon contemporary political and social discussions"
(241-243). Despite Wells's disinclination to wrap himself in the mantle
of "Art," the Preface to The Scientific Romances offers a strikingly serious
defense of what he called "fantasy" and is one of the first coherent
statements toward a definition of the aesthetic of science fiction.
It would be natural to expect Olaf Stapledon to continue Wells's ef-
fort to define and legitimize the form. Next to Wells, he was the most
original practitioner of the scientific romance in the first half of this cen-
tury. Professionally trained as a philosopher, much more patient with—
and drawn to—abstraction than Wells, he ought to have been better
equipped to formulate a theory of science fiction. Besides, he had a per-
sonal motive for stating a distinctive aesthetic of the literary forms he
was pioneering. From the day Stapledon's first novel, Last and First Men,
appeared in 1930, reviewers noticed, and overstated, his work's resemblance
to Wells's. Just as Wells was irritated by being known as an English Verne,
so Stapledon labored under the burden of having all his most innovative
books tagged as "Wellsian romances" by critics unable to find a more
accommodating pigeonhole for his disturbing visions of far futures and
present oddities.3
But what did Stapledon think he was up to when at the age of forty-
four he started publishing speculative fictions on a scale vaster and more
inhuman than anything of Wells's? Scholars looking for wider frames of
reference for naming Stapledon's literary ambitions and assessing their

2WeIIs was touchy about sharing his laurels. The Wells Archive contains an amusing exchange
of letters between Wells and the very minor fantasist John Russell Fearn. When Fearn boasted that
some American readers called him "H. G. Wells II," Wells replied drily that such a nickname did
them both an injustice, and he urged Fearn to repudiate the title.
'For fuller discussions of Stapledon's Wellsianism see Crossley, "Famous Mythical Beasts," and
Shelton. Fiedler's confident account of all that Stapledon learned from Wells's novels (4.Õ-45) is not
founded on any evidence.

22 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

products have been confounded by his apparent reticence on the whole
subject of the scientific romance. There are scattered clues to his sources
of inspiration to be found in references tucked away in odd pockets of
his books: the acknowledgement to Gerald Heard in the prefatory note
to Last Men in London (vi), or the allusion made by the narrator of Odd
John to J. D. Beresford's 1911 novel The Hampdenshire Wonder (6), or the
homage to Edwin Abbott's Victorian mathematical fantasy Flatland in the
description of dying stellar worlds in Star Maker (405). But even a diligent
collector of such fugitive references would not emerge with a very coherent
picture of Stapledon's reading. It is amusing, for instance, to come upon
the intelligent, self-improving dog in Sirius making his way through Wells's
Outline of History (217) and to have Stapledon tell us in the introductory
note to that novel that he was influenced by a "delightful" book on sheep
dogs (163), but what we really want to know is whether Stapledon was
thinking about Frankenstein when he wrote Sirius. For more substantial
critical perspectives we can go to Stapledon's Scrutiny essay on "Escapism
in Literature," but it focuses almost exclusively on the political content
and conduct of literary texts with little direct reflection on the kind of
fiction he himself wrote.4
Until recently the closest things we have had to an exposition of the
poetics and ideology of Stapledon's fiction have been the short Prefaces
he attached to some of his books, notably Last and First Men and Star Maker.
They are important for understanding his concern to write romances that
are philosophically sound and socially responsible, but focused as they
are on freshly composed single works, they lack the resonance and rich
applicability of Wells's retrospective Preface. In introducing Last and First
Men Stapledon outlines his central fictional principle that future-fiction
is a medium for designing cultural myths. Because "the merely fantastic
has only minor power," he writes, the mythic romance exercises "con-
trolled imagination" in the service of a "serious attempt to envisage the
future of our race" and "to mould our hearts to entertain new values"
(9). The Preface to Star Maker, with the Spanish Civil War in the
foreground and the prospect of a second Great War on the horizon, stresses
the politics of fantasy and defends the exploration of imaginary worlds
and distant times in a period of terrestrial crisis. The "attempt to see
our turbulent world against a background of stars" may heighten
awareness of human politics and "strengthen our charity toward one
another" (250). Eloquent as they are, these two Prefaces remain tantaliz-
ingly vague on larger generic questions about science fiction. On
Stapledon's reading and the processes of his imagination they are silent,
save for brief testimonials to the physicist J. D. Bemal and several

4The relevance of Stapledon's Scrutiny essays to his 1942 novel Darkness and the Light is discussed
in Crossley, "Politics and the Artist."

OLAF STAPLEDON 23
academic acquaintances at the University of Liverpool. Instead of reveal-
ing how Stapledon saw himself in the tradition of fantastic writing, the
Prefaces reinforce the common perception of him as idiosyncratic.
In the absence of other evidence, recent critics have tended to fall
back on the same expedient used by the early reviewers to explain
Stapledon: the Wells connection. But even the most famous of Stapledon's
comments on Wells's influence is ultimately cryptic and equivocal. It is
now almost de rigueur to cite the closing of his first letter to Wells (16
October 1931) explaining why he didn't footnote Wells in Last and First
Men: "A man does not record his debt to the air he breathes in common
with everyone else." But the same letter specifies that the only scientific
romances by Wells he had read were The War of the Worlds and "The
Star" (Crossley, "Correspondence" 35). Either Stapledon was dis-
ingenuous or the Wellsian atmosphere he inhaled was remarkably thin.
In fact, Wells replied to Stapledon with a good-humored dismissal of his
supposed influence: "Thank you for a very pleasant letter but it is all
balls to suggest First and Last Men [sic] (which I found a very exciting
book) owes anything to my writings. I wish it did" (Crossley, "Wells
to Stapledon" 38). The link with Wells is so attenuated that one is tempted
to conclude that Stapledon worked mostly in ignorance of other ex-
perimenters in the scientific romance. A year before his death, when his
career was in decline except among science fiction enthusiasts, Stapledon
had to say: "I find myself in a hole about Science Fiction. I never was
a fan of it, and I read very little of it. I recognise it as a legitimate medium
of expression, and I think it has a future" ("Fandom" 14).5 Stapledon's
reluctance to associate his work with "science fiction" is not in itself sur-
prising; Wells preferred other terminology as well. But the gingerly distanc-
ing of himself from the whole "medium of expression" makes the defini-
tion of Stapledon's idea of science fiction even more problematic. He does
make himself sound like the great outsider in science fiction, stolidly com-
posing books as aloof and inaccessible as the stars that kindled his
imagination.6
There is now newly available evidence that Stapledon was not nearly
so isolated from the tradition of the scientific romance as has been sur-
mised. If he had no occasion to see into print his mature thoughts on
the nature of the literary forms he worked with, he had another natural
outlet for his accumulating reflections on the interplay of the literary and
scientific imaginations. Long before his writing came to public attention,
Stapledon had been a lecturer in the adult education movement in Bri-
''For this reference, in a letter Stapledon wrote to the editor of a science fiction fan magazine.
I am indebted to Harvey J. Satty.
''This view of Stapledon has become a critical commonplace. McCarthy in Olaf Stapledon calls
him "an anomalous figure within his own field" (30); Priest considers him "probably the most isolated"
of the interwar trio of Stapledon-Huxley-Orwell (192); Fiedler sees his writing as a "lonely enterprise"
(40); and Aldiss suggests that "reading his books is like standing on the top of a high mountain" (202).

24 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

tain, both formally as a tutor in the Workers' Educational Association
and in ad hoc talks given to women's clubs, high schools, political societies,
student organizations, soldiers' study circles, and a variety of philosophical,
educational, and scientific conferences. The Stapledon Archive at the
University of Liverpool contains 240 sets of detailed notes for lectures
he gave between 1913 and 1950. Among them are several that bear on
the ideas and aims of Stapledon's fiction and two that are central to his
own theories and judgments about science fiction. On the basis of these
notes some of Stapledon's silences can be filled in, and we can begin to
learn how widely read and how thoughtful he was about science fiction.
In fall, 1937, a few months after Star Maker appeared and following
critical successes in Last and First Men, Last Men in London, and Odd John,
Stapledon prepared a talk called "Science and Literature."7 Jottings at
the top of the first sheet indicate that he made the presentation at least
three times in 1937 and 1938; as with all his lecture notes there are many
interpolations and revisions as he kept adapting it to successive occasions.
In "Science and Literature" Stapledon takes a historical view of the im-
pact of scientific knowledge on poetry and fiction. Interestingly for critics
who have linked Star Maker to the Divine Comedy,* his analysis begins with
Dante and itemizes a dozen writers from the Renaissance, the Enlighten-
ment, and the nineteenth century whose works are shaped by incorporating
or resisting scientific inquiry and experiment. Thus Dante's effort to en-
visage Ptolemaic astronomy and adjust it to Christian cosmography leads
the way to Milton's struggle to reconcile mythology and Copernican
astronomy, to Shelley's Prometheanism with its "medley of science and
Greece," to Hardy's testing of humanist individualism against the cold
and inhuman realities disclosed by modern astrophysics. "Immensity—
fear—fascination," reads a telegraphic note on Hardy's Two on a Tower,
not incidentally, this verbal configuration also contours the emotional situa-
tion of the narrator in the first chapter of Star Maker.
The roll call of scientifically venturesome poets and novelists in
"Science and Literature" is the framework for Stapledon's construction
of an iconoclastic tradition of writers who respond imaginatively both to
words and numbers, to books and machines, and who try to unify the
perspectives of the two cultures. The artists he names all seek, as he says
of Dante, scientific "verisimilitude" according to the lights of their age.
Even two writers whom Stapledon says display "no direct influence of
science" are treated as examples not of pure fantasy but of scientific
method applied to fictional procedure: Rabelais' Gargantua is not just
7The manuscript notes for "Science and Literature" are in the Stapledon Archive at the Sydney
Jones Library, University of Liverpool, as are all the other lecture notes and unpublished letters to
Stapledon cited in this essay. I am grateful for permission from the Librarian and the Estate of Olaf
Stapledon to quote from these materials. Unless otherwise noted, words in italics represent Stapledon's
own underscorings.
"See, for instance, McCarthy, Olaf Stapledon (76-77) and Scholes (64-65).

OLAF STAPLEDON 25
a fantastic creature but an instance of "gigantism realistically worked out,"
and the worlds oÃ- Gulliver reveal how Swift "works out consequences of
novel ideas—realism." Only the name of Wordsworth on the list represents
literature's retreat from the scientific ethos. Citing a famous instance from
"A Poet's Epitaph"—a scientist "botanizing on his mother's grave" —
Stapledon characterizes Wordsworth's hostility to science: "alarmed, flies
to perceived nature."
Stapledon's lecture finds ancestors for the modern scientific romancer
in writers who combine fantasy with realism by logical extension and
amplification of innovative ideas or imaginary hypotheses. They create
not unreal worlds but imagined worlds "realistically worked out." In ad-
dition to the writers already mentioned Stapledon sees Bacon, Butler,
Meredith, Rosny, Abbott, and Verne forming a line of prophet-critics
who offer visions, fancies, and warnings in fictional speculations that are
rooted in scientific discoveries and laboratory methods. The impact of
all these writers on their audiences is what Stapledon, with a large X
in his notes, attributes specifically to Swift: "Puts man in his place."
Again, this note could serve to gloss Stapledon's own major fictions that,
from premises different from those of the mostly Christian writers he cites,
mount assaults on the limitations and pretensions of anthropocentrism.
The second part of "Science and Literature" moves from prototypes
to "contemporary examples" of a dozen writers situated at the junction
of the literary and scientific cultures. In addition to expected names such
as Wells (identified as "the master") and Aldous Huxley, we find the
then-little-known novelists M. P. Shiel and David Lindsay, the geneticist
J. B. S. Haldane, the physicist Bemal, the pseudonymous Murray Con-
stantine (Katharine Burdekin), and Régis Messac, whose futuristic fic-
tion was at that time available only in French. Stapledon is more judgmen-
tal of his contemporaries than of his forebears, finding Shaw "hostile to
science, medicine"; noting the antifascist myth developed in Joseph
O'Neill's Land under England but regretting the narrative's "implausible
mechanism"; approving James Hilton's combination of psychology,
mysticism, and science in Lost Horizon; and condemning J. C. Powys's
Morwyn for equating scientists with sadists and for its "faulty mechanism."9
At the high end of Stapleton's critical scale Wells's work is admired for
its narrative powers of "scientific melodrama," for the "sheer mind-
stretching" it requires of readers, and for the prophecies of "scientific
utopia" to be found "in all his work." At the bottom end Stapledon
is characteristically standoffish about the "crude human factor" in what
he labels "Scientifiction: Wonder Stories, Amazing Stories, etc."10 There

■•Stapledon had just published his London Mercury review of Morwyn under the title "Descent into
Hell."
'"Stapledon reported his dislike of pulp magazine science fiction in a 1937 interview with Walter
Gillings (9). Twelve years later he remained disappointed with the standard of magazine fiction and

26 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

may be a few surprising absences from Stapledon's lists—notably Franken-
stein from the earlier one and Zamyatin's We from the contemporary one—
but the notion that Stapledon was insulated from other work in the fan-
tastic mode should now be obsolete.
Perhaps most interestingly, "Science and Literature" ponders the
cultural significance of the new hybrid of scientific literature. (Stapledon
had not yet learned to call this hybrid "science fiction.") In 1937 the
body of literature that was genuinely scientific seemed to him "v. small,"
but he was ready to name its distinctive virtues. He describes the new
form functionally in terms now taken for granted in science fiction criticism
but still fresh in the mid-1930s as "critical" and "speculative." Scientific
literature provides a corrective to "the specialist's fallacy," a target he sub-
divides to include "abstraction, materialism, determinism, magnitude,
myopic detail." He distinguishes it from the literature of escape and from
literature that responds narrowly to the current moment and finds a place
for it within what he calls "creative literature."" As science infiltrates
the literary imagination, fiction's prophetic powers are enhanced, and
Stapledon indicates the two extrapolative directions such fiction can take:
toward the visionary splendor of utopianism and the celebration of human
potentiality or toward the literature of disaster and "revulsion against
science."
Stapledon's climactic arguments concern the epistemological and
spiritual effects of science's influence on literature. The new fiction, he
says, encourages a "natural piety toward the universe for its aloofness, for
its potentiality," and it contributes to the "atrophy" of Alexander Pope's
dictum that "the proper study of mankind is man." Because scientific
literature tends philosophically to the "weakening of human interest,"
its "literary style" shifts in the direction of the "unemotional, unrhetorical,
dry, concise, abstract." In this litany of stylistic markers that concludes
the lecture notes we find a distinctively Stapledonian approach to the
language of science fiction. The stylistic terms Stapledon uses do not at
all fit either Wells's lively, colloquial storytelling or the unsophisticated
purple prosiness of the fiction in American pulp magazines. But these
terms describe accurately one side of Stapledon's style. His own fictions
typically alternate between dispassionate and evocative language, between
the clinical record and the startling metaphor, between the conceptual
and the lyrical, between the numerical austerity of an astronomer's star
catalogue and the sonorous grandeur of a Homeric catalogue. Stylisti-
cally his works behave in exactly the way one would expect of that sym-

argued that science fiction must be "much more than scientifically plausible. It must be humanly plausi-
ble also, and it must have some significant reference to the contemporary world" ("Fandom" 14).
"The terms here reflect the critical lexicon Stapledon developed, not wholly successfully, in his
Scrutiny essay on "Escapism"; creative literature, propaganda iherature, literature of release, and literature
of escape.

OLAF STAPLEDON 27
biotic kind of text called science fiction.
Stapledon wrote his fictions and developed his ideas about science
fiction at a time when the possibilities of interchange between the scien-
tific and literary minds were especially fruitful. Researchers of the caliber
of James Jeans and A. S. Eddington believed in writing plainly and vividly
about difficult scientific topics for a general audience. Jeans illustrated
The Stars in Their Courses with Tintoretto as well as star charts, and he
used his own hybrid style to translate a technical problem into the language
of the kitchen. The stellar components of a galaxy, he assured his readers,
"proved to be rather like the arrangement of currants in an ordinary
currant-bun; in other words they are fairly uniformly distributed through
a space shaped like a bun, a space of circular cross-section whose thickness
is less than its length and breadth" (105). J. B. S. Haldane once proudly
noted: "In my last book on genetics, there are seven quotations from
Dante's Divine Comedy" ("How to Write" 158). C. H. Waddington moved
comfortably back and forth between embryology and twentieth-century
art history, writing landmark books in both fields. In a 1941 Penguin
for the general reader he described the scientific ethos in relation to the
larger culture using terms much like those of Stapledon in 1937:
The scientific attitude to the world does not in the slightest deny the emotional effects
produced on men by their experience; what it tries to do is to classify the mechanisms by
which these effects were produced. . . . This attitude which I have called the scientific might
be described in other ways. It is the matter-of-fact as against the romantic, the objective
as against the subjective, the empirical, the unprejudiced, the ad hoc as against the a prion.
The emotional tone which goes with it is quite definite and quite complex, although at first
sight, and to those brought up in a different mode of thought, it may seem emotionless
and banal. (46-47)
The striking combination of technically precise language with the ar-
ticulate rendering of feeling and perception is a hallmark of Stapledon's
fiction. Often the most moving episodes in his books are those in which
the narration seems, to use a favorite Stapledon word, "disembodied."
Haldane's sister Naomi Mitchison, who read several of Stapledon's novels
in draft, regularly commented on the descriptive surprises and innovative
rhythms of his fiction. About Star Maker she wrote to him: "The thing
that I believe you are so immensely good at is convincing detail—almost
mechanical detail—about something one knows nothing about and hasn't
even imagined, but which yet you can make absolutely clear." When
she read Sirius she told him: "It was like you always are, sometimes jog-
ging along like a nice reasonable scientific paper, and sometimes sudden-
ly becoming very moving."
Some readers with more narrowly "literary" expectations were
disconcerted by Stapledon's peculiar style; L. P. Hartley's complaint about
Odd John may be typical: "Mr. Stapledon's plain, straightforward style
suggests the laboratory (or the lab., as he calls it) rather than the library."
28 MODERN FICTION STUDIES
But the effort to bridge the two cultures won admiration from scientists
such as Haldane and Freeman Dyson and from philosophers such as Ber-
trand Russell and C. E. M. Joad. And there were enthusiastic readers
in some literary quarters. The Shakespearean scholar John Dover Wilson
spent three exhilarating days reading Last and First Men straight through
and then wrote Stapledon: "You have invented a new kind of book, &
the world of Einstein & Jeans is ready for it." When Virginia Woolf read
Star Maker she found its philosophical framework difficult but had no trouble
with its imaginative aims: "I have understood enough to be greatly in-
terested, & excited too, since sometimes it seems to me that you are grasp-
ing ideas that I have tried to express, much more fumblingly, in fiction.
But you have gone much further, & I can't help envying you—as one
does those who reach what one has aimed at."12 The responses of his
contemporaries in many fields suggest that Stapledon the lecturer was
defining the intellectual groundwork on which Stapledon the romancer
consciously built his most accomplished fictions.
"Science and Literature" is the only one of Stapledon's lectures from
the 1930s to explore so extensively the literary history and scientific in-
quiry that facilitated his own contributions to science fiction. But several
other talks from that period have at least a tangential bearing on his fic-
tion. In "Living on Other Planets" (1933) he proposes an "exercise of
imagination" for his audience: how would they react to a headline an-
nouncing the end oÃ- the world in 300 years? He then summarizes some
conventional responses: the suicidal thrill in the idea of global annihila-
tion; indifference bred of the assurance that the end will be deferred until
after one is dead; the carpe diem impulse to self-indulgence and a last
fling for the human race. But Stapledon fastens on the question that had
preoccupied his first two romances: could the species preserve itself by
seeking a new home for a remnant of homo sapiens on another world?
The lecture considers the scientific, technological, political, and spiritual
problems of building a vehicle, managing the "first ether voyage," and
terraforming and colonizing a planet. The only specific attention to science
fiction comes in a section on Mars as a possible human habitat. Stapledon
observes that a resident Martian would need a physiology very different
from ours, and he has penciled in a note to prompt himself to an illustrative
digression: "Wells. WOS." The examples are the swollen-headed, ten-
tacular Martians of The War of the Worlds and the submicroscopic Mar-
tians in his own (H^illiam Olaf Stapledon's) Last and First Men. Near the
end of the lecture, asking his listeners whether they could imagine life
on stars, Stapledon may have wanted to try out the idea of the stellar

12In the final volume of Virginia Woolfs Diary (99, n. 21). Anne Olivier Bell quotes from Stapledon's
reply to Woolf but believes Woolfs letter did not survive. In fact it was at Stapledon's house but did
not come to public light until August, 1983, when the Stapledon papers were assembled for the Archive.

OLAF STAPLEDON 29
and nebular beings he would invent for Star Maker. Essentially, though,
"Living on Other Planets" is a digest of his ideas about space explora-
tion, and it foreshadows the subject of what would be his most famous
lecture and one that did achieve a life in print: "Interplanetary Man,"
delivered at the invitation of Arthur C. Clarke to the annual meeting
of the British Interplanetary Society in 1948.13
In a 1934 lecture, "Man's Prospects," Stapledon considers the uses
of forecasting. Speculation about the future, he says, "stretches the mind,"
helps us "distinguish the ephemeral & the permanent in human aims [and]
problems," "brings out the essentials of the human drama," "makes for
clear orientation of world policy," assists social evolution by preparing "the
way for long-range planning," and "teaches detachment from humanity."
As a critical exercise, forecasting helps us "realize the future" so that
the next century becomes as vital to us as the next day or next year.
In fact, Stapledon is more interested in forecasting as a discipline of the
mind than as a tool for predicting particular technological or social events.
His analysis of the value of speculation bears on his own fictions about
the future that aim to be prophetic in the widest sense: educative, cau-
tionary, eye-opening, stirring.14
The notes for "Man's Prospects" are unusually full in analyzing seven
"rules of the game of speculation." These principles offer some insight
into the way Stapledon's mind works and into the kind of rigor he ap-
plies to his futuristic fiction. The game demands:
1) up-to-date knowledge from a wide variety of disciplines (sociology,
astronomy, biochemistry, philosophy, and so forth);
2) imaginative freedom from the limitations of contemporary
knowledge and the audacity to "peer beyond" those limits;
3) a comprehensive and balanced vision that avoids the one-
dimensionality of a forecast that is merely economic, merely physical,
merely psychological, and so on;
4) a "radical skepticism" on the part of the prophet who should
acknowledge the unlikelihood of all specific anticipations of the future,
including his own;
5) an ability to define the main questions about the future: questions
of work, class, leisure, human interests, political organization, etc. (the
usual Utopian agenda);

l3"Interplanetary Man" was first published in {he Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (Nov.
1948) and is reprinted in Moskowitz (209-252). It addresses the ethical and spiritual challenges the human
species must face when it leaves the home planet to explore other worlds. Stapledon's speculations in-
clude rehearsals of ideas he had already tried out in fiction: the "wildest" possibility of discovering
intelligent solar beings (The Flames 217); genetic engineering to enable people to adapt to alien en-
vironments (Last and First Man 224); and automatically powered planets leaving their orbits to make in-
terstellar voyages (Star Maker 246). His only allusions to fiction other than his own are two nods toward
Huxley's Braue New World, which he sees as a persuasive forecast of one likely future if human beings,
motivated by lust for power, choose to use science to dominate the environment and each other (226, 229).
l4See Huntington for the most thoughtful study of Stapledon as a writer about the future.

30 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

 6) a commitment to pursue "the fundamental question": "Will man
be more developed mentally? or fallen into barbarism?";
7) working distinctions among the near future (measured in centuries),
the middle future (thousands and hundreds of thousands of years), and
the remote future (millions and billions of years).
Stapledon's rules are more comprehensive and even more intimidating
than Wells's genial instructions to his readers on "how to play the game"
of the scientific romance (though the first six of Stapledon's rules certain-
ly fit Wells's practice in his Utopian books). Where Wells emphasizes the
tricks of the storytelling trade, Stapledon enumerates the philosophical
requirements for a valid attempt at prophecy. Wells does not neglect the
social and political issues of prophetic fiction—he was, after all, often
pilloried for being too tendentious15—but his rules give greatest weight
to the pleasures of imagination. Stapledon's principles stress the obliga-
tions of the speculative imagination—at least in this instance, where he
is thinking less of fiction than of epistemology.
The last of Stapledon's talks I want to consider, "Science and Fic-
tion," comes a full decade after "Science and Literature" and is his last
formal presentation on his chosen literary genre. The circumstances of
this talk were unusual for Stapledon. He delivered it in 1947 at a Book
Exhibition in Manchester at the urging of his editor at Seeker and War-
burg. Because sales of his most recent fantasy, The Flames, were disap-
pointing, the hope was that Stapledon might help himself by giving a
public lecture on the genre to which it belonged (Sennhouse). The result
is the unique case among his talks in which he offers an overview of his
own fiction in relation to the history of the scientific romance. For the
first time in his career we hear him using, a little awkwardly, the term
"science fiction" to describe his work and that of other writers from Wells
forward in whose fiction there are "scientific ideas in the focus." Unlike
the 1937 talk, however, "Science and Fiction" emphasizes the art of
science fiction rather than the science in scientific literature. His discus-
sion here is often judicial, discriminating the "imaginative doodling" and
"sheer marvels" found in "the science fiction mags" from what he calls
"serious science fiction" that aims at "mind stretching" and giving "con-
crete life to abstract possibilities." Although careful to insist that "or-
thodox novel standards [are] not applicable" to science fiction, he does not
hesitate to reject the standards of magazines that print stories "often scien-
tifically poor & humanly atrocious."
Once more in "Science and Fiction" Stapledon sets up as legislator
of the speculative imagination. The seven rules in "Man's Prospects"

l5There is a convenient and wideranging summary of the attack on Wells as ideologue in Par-
rinder's Introduction to H. G. ¡Veils: The Critical Heritage (15-23). For similar complaints about Stapledon
see, for example, Toynbee's review of Sirius and the concluding section of Fiedler's analysis of Last
and First Men (64-72).

OLAF STAPLEDON 31
are replaced by three crisply stated "rules of the game of science fiction,"
all of which are directed especially to the demands of fictionmaking.
Stapledon requires: 1) plausibility, achieved by the fiction's conformity
to the best current scientific knowledge; 2) the imaginative creation of
further possibilities developed by logical extension from current ideas; and
3) psychological and spiritual relevance to human readers in the present
through the construction of "Myths for a scientific age." The first of
Stapledon's rules is what separates science fiction decisively from tales
of magic and the preternatural and other forms of fantasy. His second
rule states what is now generally accepted as the extrapolative principle
for writing science fiction. The last rule obviously addresses the particular
aims of his own kind of fiction, though it works as a thumbnail descrip-
tion of the ambitions of a wide range of later authors from J. G. Ballard
to John Brunner, from Ursula LeGuin to Octavia Butler, from Brian Aldiss
to Doris Lessing, all of whom write what may be thought of as an-
thropological (if not anthropocentric) science fiction.
Stapledon divides his discussion of individual writers in "Science and
Fiction" into four sections, concluding with himself. In Part One he takes
up "science in early fiction." He avoids saying "early science fiction,"
and his careful choice of words anticipates much later critical debate over
when science fiction became a recognizably distinct literary form.16 In
this first section Stapledon's preeminent examples are Dante and Milton,
each of whom, he says, accepted current science and shaped religious
vision to it. He contrasts them with fairy tale authors whose magic may
enchant readers but who cannot achieve the plausibility of the scientific
imagination: Sinbad in the Arabian Nights is "lifted by a big bird (too
big to fly!)" and stories with angels in them were "plausible to Middle
Ages but not to us" because of their "mechanically bad centre of grav-
ity." Stapledon finds an ambiguous relationship to scientific knowledge
in Swift's Lilliputians, a case he discusses as parallel to Orwell's recently
published Animal Farm. Neither Swift nor Orwell ignores science; each
suspends a scientific law purposefully.
The second part, "notes on masters," discusses the scientific romances
of Wells, Verne's Voyage to the Moon and 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, Karel
Capek's War with the Newts and Insect Play, Shiel's The Purple Cloud, and
Messac's La Cité des Asphyxiés and Quinzinzinzili. Unfortunately, the outline
does not indicate what Stapledon planned to say about these texts. He
also pays attention to two writers not generally thought of as "masters"
of scientific fantasy. One is Haldane, praised for his "stories for children"
in My Friend Mr. Leakey and for his apocalyptic prophecy "The Last Judg-
"1My italics. In withholding the name "science fiction" from works by writers betöre Wells.
Stapledon takes a position similar to Mark Rose's that science fiction as a discrete genre was delermined
by historical, intellectual, and literary pressures that did not coalesce until lhe last third of the nine-
teenth century (1-23).

32 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

ment."17 The second is the novelist and architectural historian John Gloag,
who is cited for five works. The fairly lavish homage given Gloag may
be explained by the fact that Gloag had quoted from a letter of Stapledon's
in the Preface to his 1946 omnibus volume The First One and Twenty. There
Stapledon makes a provocative comment on science fiction as a distinc-
tively modern phenomenon and stresses its continuity with earlier non-
scientific forms of fantasy:
All this modish playing about with time and space, which you and I have so often indulged
in, is of course symptomatic of our period. It opens up new worlds for the writer of fantastic
fiction, or at any rate it gives him a new and exciting game to play. The rules of the game
are imposed on him by the new attitude to time and space, but he can go beyond the ac-
cepted conditions as much as he likes so long as he does not actually or flagrantly violate
them, and so become implausible or even positively incredible. (Gloag viii)
A third section of notes on writers works out the contrast between
"science fiction & other fantasies, or fantasies not primarily scientific."
Alongside fiction by Balzac, Anatole France, Morland Bishop, Samuel
Butler, and Murray Constantine, Stapledon looks at several important
modern works of fantasy: Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus has "high aesthetic
value & spiritual significance" despite its scientific absurdity; C. S. Lewis'
interplanetary novels are "anti-science," and his Screwtape Letters is "witty"
but its "fundamental assumptions [are] false"; and T. H. White's The
Sword in the Stone, although "antimodern," makes "fine play with time."
These notes suggest Stapledon's effort to judge scrupulously, often balan-
cing his philosophical disagreements (particularly with doctrinaire Chris-
tians such as Lewis18) against admiration for narrative invention and risk-
taking. Here, as in others of his talks, the Stapledon so often represented
as cold and magisterial, "the great classical example" in science fiction
(Aldiss 208), in fact celebrates the ludic imagination, fantasy as game
and play rather than as a strictly cognitive vehicle. But the most unex-
pected feature of this part of "Science and Fiction" is the determination
to draw a line between science fiction and other fantastic fictions—a distinc-

l7"The Last Judgment" is not mentioned by name in the notes, but Stapledon alludes to it when
he mentions one speculation of Haldane's that impressed him: "the abolition of pain, & reversal." He-
recalls Haldane's imagined future in which by a "striking piece of artificial evolution" an advanced
humanity eradicates its pain-sense, only to restore it still further in the future when adverse environmen-
tal conditions make pain useful for the species' survival ("Last Judgment" 52, 60). These passages
bear directly on the kinds of eugenical alterations depicted in Last and First Men. In his biographical
sketch of Stapledon, Moskowitz gives extended attention to the crucial influence of "The Last Judg-
ment" on Stapledon's first novel (35-37).
l8Lewis intended his series of fantasies—Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength—as
in part a counterblast to ideas he attributed to Stapledon and Haldane. Lewis was fair enough to
acknowledge in his Preface to That Hideous Strength an imaginative debt to Stapledon (presumably to
the Fourth Men or "Great Brains" of Last and First Men): "I admire his invention (though not his
philosophy) so much that I should feel no shame to borrow" (7). Nevertheless, Stapledon resented Lewis'
fictional attacks on him; when J. B. Coates published a book in 1949 with sections on both Stapledon
and Lewis, Stapledon immediately drafted a response. The letter may never have been sent, but it is
eloquent testimony of his anti-Lewisite feelings: "Why waste your time on Lewis? He is sometimes
brilliant but always superficial, his arguing is revoltingly insincere, and he seems to have no genuine
religious experience at all."

OLAF STAPLEDON 33
tion largely blurred in the 1940s and one that continues to attract and
frustrate critics. The only lecture from this era that rivals Stapledon's
for sophisticated subgeneric distinctions is one delivered eight years later
at Oxford by his old antagonist C. S. Lewis, "On Science Fiction" (Of
Other Worlds 59-73).19
For students of Stapledon's career the most teasing part of this lec-
ture must be the concluding fragmentary notes intended to prompt the
speaker to assess "my own aims" as writer (see illustration). Because
the lecture was composed after publication of The Flames, which turned
out to be his last science fiction, this self-study is interesting as a summing-
up of Stapledon's entire eighteen-year production of scientific romances.
He frames his review with two large critical observations on his fiction—
one by "L. H. Myers on Last and First Men," the other by Rebecca West
comparing his work with Milton's. Myers corresponded frequently with
Stapledon for thirteen years, and it is hard to be sure which comment
Stapledon intended to cite. But because he kept a special file of letters
about Last and First Men in his study—including Myers' first letter to
him—and because the Rebecca West review with which Myers is paired
concerns style, it is likely that Stapledon paraphrased this portion from
Myers' letter of 6 June 1931:
Lastly I must say something about your style & method. It is very difficult to make a strictly
intellectualistic approach to beauty & grandeur with any effect, or rather without a poor
effect. They have to be illustrated through Art with lyric or tragic fire rather than just talked
about. Well, you have succeeded better than I shd have thought possible on intellectual
lines as such, and this is a great achievement. What you have borrowed from Art, what
recourse you have made to the emotions, has been strictly subordinated to the thinking
mind and made a part of it, so that there is no violation of the mind's purity and austerity.
Myers extolled precisely the aspect of Last and First Men's style that
Stapledon would claim in his 1937 lecture as characteristic of scientifical-
ly inspired literature ("unemotional, unrhetorical, dry, concise, abstract").
Stapledon in 1947 epitomizes the alternative viewpoint with the note,
"What Rebecca West said of Star Maker." Remembering clearly enough
what she said, he forgot that her target was not Star Maker but the less
successful novel Darkness and the Light. In her review of that book West
applauded the splendor of its conception and the "apocalyptic power"
of its closing vision, but she was devastating on its style:
This book should be read, though it is unlikely to be read with any exhilaration, owing
to a self-denying ordinance of the author. Mr. Stapledon has a Miltonic imagination. . . .

"'At the time of Stapledon's lecture the first two scholarly books on science fiction were appearing.
J. O. Bailey's Pilgrims through Space and Time offers rough-and-ready definitions of science fiction in its
first chapter, but the book is essentially a feat of prodigious reading rather than subtle discriminations.
Marjorie Hope Nicolson's Voyages to the Moon is a learned, shrewd, and entertaining study, but generic
classification of the kind Stapledon and Lewis were attempting was not relevant to her narrow focus
on cosmic voyages and fantasies of human flight.

34 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

OLAF STAPLEDON 35
But Mr. Stapledon has evidently a conscious abhorrence of the Miltonic phrase, and the
effect is as if Milton had sent the completed manuscript of "Paradise Lost" to be rewritten
by the author of Bradshaw's Railway Guide.20
Having offered competing perspectives on his art, Stapledon turns
to his own evaluation. Predictably, he puts greatest emphasis on his desire
"to write modern myths," though he believes that to a more sophisticated
age his fictions "will seem very crude." In a running gloss on his works
he notes his recurretn concern "to relate science to religion," and he lists
the thematic centers of each of his romances: "man's vicissitudes" in
Last and First Men, "glimpse of a super human" in Odd John, "spirit &
the other" in Death into Life, "wild biology" and "spirit again" in The
Flames, and so forth. The thematic tags are self-evident, and there needs
no ghost come from the grave to tell us this. But there is one intriguing
question in the margin, addressed either to himself or to his audience,
about Sirius: "My best sc. fictn?" The question may have been prompted
by a letter from Haldane shortly after Sirius was published, saying: "I
regard it as a far more plausible futuristic book than 1st and last men,
last men in London, etc."21 Whatever lies behind the question, it signals
the kind of critical scrutiny of his work that he seems to have been ready
to make.
One page of notes has been added to these minimal thematic com-
ments, perhaps for a future expansion of the lecture. Here Stapledon limits
himself to commentary on only four of his books—and they are the quartet
that later critics almost unanimously agree are his essential body of work:
Last and First Men, Odd John, Star Maker, and Sirius. The jottings on the
first are fairly cryptic, but it is possible to reconstruct the substance of
what he talked about. One note reads: "Anglesey vision; stout Cortes."
He alludes to the moment when the idea for Last and First Men burst on
him during a holiday with his wife on the Welsh coast when they observed
seals sunning on the rocks.22 The sight must have started a train of
associations—life emerging from the ocean, the long pageant of evolu-
tion, the huge spectacle of time imprinted on rocks creased and polished
by the ceaselessly moving waters, wonderment about the biological forms
that intelligence might inhabit in future ages. From the cliffs of Anglesey
he looked down on the ocean and forward into time, and the sestet from
Keats's sonnet on Chapman's Homer came into his head:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men

-"For turlher consideration of Stapledon's Miltonism see McCarthy, "Last and First Men as Millonic
Fpit . "
''The judgment that Sirius is Stapledon's besl "conventional" novel and most "human" book
is increasingly made. See Aldiss 107, Fiedler 184, Rabkin 238.
"Slapledon spoke oflen of lhis visionary moment. For one brief version o/ it, see his posthumous
book The Opening of the Eyes (29).

36 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien. (11. 9-14)
It is like Stapledon, however, not ot stop with the glamour of a Pisgah
view that would wrap in mystery the "wild surmise" that became Last
and First Men. His notes move directly to the more mundane stage of com-
posing fictions. After the flash of vision, he tells his audience, " 'the ar-
tificer' gets to work." He consults "scientific friends" for technical ad-
vice and referees his imagination by the "rules of the game" so that his
"successive species" of the human race from man to "super-man" to
the "extravagances" of Great Brains, flying Venusians, and other evolu-
tionary marvels in the next 2,000,000,000 years of history will have scien-
tific and narrative credibility. Stapledon reflects on the paradox of creating
fiction about, as the subtitle oÃ- Last and First Men reads, "the near and
far future." Plausibility about events millions of years ahead is won
through scientific homework and carefully plotted extrapolation, but the
reader's assent to the narrative illusion can be jeopardized by failures
of forecasting in the near future. By 1947 the early chapters oÃ- Last and
First Men had become obsolete as prediction, and Stapledon was in the
position of having sheepishly to submit a scorecard to his audience. If
in the aftermath of the death camps and a global war against fascism
he had to confess that he had "missed Hitler," he could at least claim
that he got "atomic power."23 The desire for "transcendence of time"
is, as the lecturer points out, basic to the structure of Last and First Men,
but time and history have a way of sabotaging the merely human and
transient narrative artist.
With Star Maker Stapledon worked on a "larger canvas" and adopted
a "more philosophical perspective." His most interesting note here reads:
"fiction of the Maker—artist." This is the climactic entry in a short list
of topics for discussion on Star Maker, and it suggests that the author wanted
to look at his masterpiece not primarily as a theological romance but as
a self-reflective parable about the nature of creativity in which the vi-
sionary spectacle of the star maker's drafting and redrafting of the universe
becomes a macrocosmic emblem of the human artist's repeated struggle
to achieve satisfying forms.
Like later critics of his work, Stapledon evidently viewed Odd John
and Sirius as a pair of exercises in plausible speculation on a deliberately
narrower and more intimate scale than his large cosmic histories. In the
case of Odd John the "aim" was to depict a superman whose powers are
rendered credibly by a direct "extrapolation" (Stapledon uses the term

"As early as 1942 Stapledon was feeling rueful about his inability to foresee the rise of fascism;
in the Preface to Darkness and the Light he admitted, "Historical prediction is doomed always to fail"
(v). When Last and First Men was reprinted in Davenport's 1953 American selection of his works To
the End of Time, the editor severely abridged the book's topical first fifty pages—a clear illustration of
the price of unsuccessful forecasting.

OLAF STAPLEDON 37
here himself) from existing human capabilities and by a more delicate
"hinting" at powers that are "qualitatively new."
Sirius, Stapledon reveals, originated in "Waddington's story of ex-
periments on rats"24 and is like Odd John in being problem-centered. The
conceptual challenge, for which the novelist must "work out the conse-
quences," is the hormonal inducement of brain growth in a nonhuman
mammal. The lecture emphasizes the sequence of steps in the making
of Sirius. Only after the problem in its abstract form ("the conflict of
natures") has occurred to Stapledon does he turn to the specific "choice
of beast & of environment." For the reader the unforgettable images of
the macrocephalic sheepdog, oscillating sometimes comically, often pain-
fully between his canine instincts and his human education, are in the
foreground of the reading experience; for the author the question of what
sort of mammal Sirius would be was secondary. Waddington's rats pro-
duce Stapledon's dog; the idea generates the fiction. On precisely this
point Arthur Koestler registered a reservation about Sirius. In a letter
to Stapledon he questioned an episode in which the dog sings sacred music
of his own devising in a medley of canine sounds with "echoes of Bach
and Beethoven, of Hoist, Vaughan Williams, Stravinsky, and Bliss" (Sirius
260-261). Koestler thought the narrative credibility had been sacrificed
to intellectual coherence: "I believe it is almost a great book, the 'almost'
referring to those passages which I feel you wrote prompted by
philosophical integrity against your own artistic taste—e.g. the dog sing-
ing Bach in the East End church."
However one judges the particular moment Koestler objects to in
Sirius, the larger issue in his critique persists. Stapledon's lectures only
confirm what many readers besides Koestler have intuited about his books:
that it is the idea of science fiction that commands his imagination, and
all the narrative apparatus exists in support of that idea. C. S. Lewis,
a much more polemical fantasist than Stapledon, and Ursula LeGuin,
who owns as rich an anthropological imagination as Stapledon's, have
described the origins of their stories in mental pictures. Lewis envisioned
the floating islands and then created the locale for Perelandra (Of Other Worlds
87); LeGuin saw the face of Shevek in her mind's eye, and the construc-
tion of The Dispossessed framed that face (100-103). But for Stapledon the
idea antedates the image. Even the "vision" he claims as inspiration for
his first novel did not beget an episode or a picture; he saw seals on the
Welsh coast, but there is not a seal to be found in Last and First Men.
In Stapledon's fiction the idea also determines the voice. The sheer number

"Presumably Stapledon refers to an article Waddington wrote for Nature, reporting on recent ex-
periments in which pregnant rats were injected with hormones that stimulated brain growth in the Ictuses.
It is an unproven "speculative possibility," says Waddington, that artificially enlarged craniums and
brains could result in dramatically higher levels of intelligence in later generations of rats ("Some Biological
Discoveries" 260). This is precisely the speculative premise, applied to sheepdogs, on which Sinus is based.

38 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

of narrators who are explicitly mediums for messages is telling: the ama-
nuenses who record the telepathically dictated texts of Last and First Men
and Last Men in London; the Boswellian anonym who is induced to tell
Odd John's "biography" under the guise of fiction; the doubting Thomas
who transmits the epistolary prophecy of a mad, male Cassandra possessed
by solar creatures in The Flames. That such taletellers should be instrumen-
tal to some other being who manipulates them to serve a higher purpose
suggests the degree to which Stapledon was inclined to fabricate and
manipulate fictions in order to make a point or to explore a hypothesis
or to unfold the layers of a problem.
To say all this, however, is not to imply that Stapledon neglected
the art of his science fiction. Neither the sequence in which he assembled
his artifice nor the demonstrable prominence of ideas in his narratives
argues against his status as a scientific and philosophical romancer. Cer-
tainly he did not shun Art as Wells pretended to, nor did he share Wells's
habit of polemical disjunction: either it is Literature or Journalism. The
force of Stapledon's lectures is to consolidate rather than polarize, to argue
for the uniting of literary and scientific perspectives, of moral designs and
narrative play, of the inspiration of the visionary and the mechanisms
of the artificer. The practice matches the theory. In his four most famous
works, as well as the smaller triumphs of Last Men in London, Death into
Life, and The Flames, Stapledon houses his ideas in powerful, innovative,
and beautiful forms.25
Stapledon was a teacher long before he became a novelist, and he
remained a teacher after his fiction declined in popularity in the late 1940s.
The commitment to teaching shows in his fiction and points to his place
in the line of English didactic romancers—the line of Thomas More, Bun-
yan, Swift, Godwin, Carlyle, Butler, and, of course, Wells. Stapledon
is always a writer with a purpose, fitting words to ideas and images to
intellectual strategies, outfitting his readers for citizenship in the world,
in the universe, in the days and eons to come. Because people at the
present stage of human civilization are provincials in space and time, the
task Stapledon marked out for himself as a writer required all the resources
of art along with philosophical acuity and a breadth of scientific knowledge.
In an undated lecture called "Ourselves and the Future" he speaks of
the difficulty of teaching people to care about and prepare for the future.

25An interpoialed note on the last sheet oÃ- "Science and Fiction" to "the vital an" may suggest
that chapter 10:4 of Last and First Men (titled "The Vital Art") is relevant to Stapledon's own fictional
practice. One hundred million years from now the Third Men create new life forms through a combina-
tion of biochemical and surgical advances that exemplify, according to the narrator, one of the "original
and precarious" triumphs of the human mind aspiring to divinity. Each time a new form is achieved
the "vital art" contributes "a new type to fi}} a niche in the world, which had not yet been occupied"
(153). Stapledon's linking of this chapter to his own methods as "artificer" is revealing; as his literary
reputation began to dim he seems to have remained convinced of the originality of his formal experiments,
his effort to invent "a new type" of fiction "to fill a niche in the world."

OLAF STAPLEDON 39
In the outline for that talk he jotted down what amounts to his artistic
credo, the vital motivation of his writing career, the idea behind all the
ideas in his science fiction: "The improvident are to be got at by appeal
to imagination."

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