Stapledon, Olaf

(British, 1886–1950)

Stapledon was born on the Wirral and educated at Oxford and Liverpool universities, lived on a private income, and worked as a part-time tutor in philosophy. Begin with Last and First Men (1930), a majestically imagined survey of two billion years of human history. Its twentieth-century narrator is a channel for an advanced human intelligence in the remote future, who foretells planetary migration. In Odd John: A Story of Jest and Earnest (1935) an evolutionary leap gives rise to a race of supermen whose superiority to ordinary humans is spiritual and intellectual. They are forced to destroy themselves when invasion threatens their colony. The disembodied narrator of Starmaker (1937) conducts a vast survey of the future and outlines a philosophical system of belief before facing the impassive deity at the powerful conclusion.

Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, H. G. Wells  DH