Three years after his father died, his mother also died in 1935.
Olaf was their only child and heir and he bequeathed a large area
of woodland near his home on Caldy Hill as a public park, which
is known still as Stapledon Wood in his parents’ memory.
Trying to make a fair and balanced assessment of the man, Dani
Zweig (an expert on the work of the American science fiction
writer, Keith Laumer) says “Olaf Stapledon wrote some of the
most impressive and influential science fiction of the [20th]
century. He was English, which may have been an advantage.
The best English science fiction writers seem to have escaped
the American curse of writing within, and for, the science fiction
ghetto... Writing good fiction means, among other things, that
a novel can’t coast on clever gimmicks and gadgets, as so much
science fiction of the time did. It has to have something extra. In
Olaf Stapledon’s case, that meant tackling ‘big’ subjects”.
And what big – in fact enormous – subjects they were! The ‘Last
and First Men’, the product of Stapledon’s colossal imaginative
scope, takes as its subject the future history of mankind’s two
billion year evolution. The narrative begins after the 20th
century with our own species, ‘the First Men’ and the events
which lead to a ‘Pax Americana’, a worldwide culture based on
the unfettered use of energy – which sound remarkably prescient
in the second decade of the 21st century. When the last coalfields
are exhausted (for which we could just as easily read ‘oil and gas
deposits’) civilization collapses and humankind comes close
to extinction. This is followed by the eventual evolution of the
survivors into ‘the Second Men’, some millions of years later.
They in turn approach extinction but evolve into ‘the Third Men’.
The pattern continues until the Eighteenth – and last – Men.
The scale of Stapledon’s imagination is truly epic. The successor
species are all expressions of the same humanity, but ultimately
the questions raised by the book’s two billion year cycle of
evolution are the same as those raised by our own humanity,
but ultimately the questions raised by the book’s two billion year
cycle of evolution are the same as those raised by our species’ few
millennia timespan and our individual lifespan of a few decades.
Dani Zweig again says: ‘The final question raised by the
impending extinction of the Last Men is – was it all for nothing?
Imagination can capture a reader’s attention, but it takes
storytelling to hold it. It’s an impersonal storytelling. When
every page must cover millions of years there isn’t much room
for individuals”.
It is not quite accurate to call Stapledon’s work ‘science fiction’;
E V Rieu, Editor of the Penguin Classics series from 1944 to
1964, described them as “histories of the future”, while Basil
Davenport, author of ‘Enquiry into Science Fiction’ (1955) called
him “a mythmaker... unique in his chosen field”. Daunting as
his own fiction may be, his influence of more gifted storytellers
was enormous. Arthur C Clarke said of ‘Star Maker’ another of
Stapledon’s books, “It transformed my life,” and admitted that he
had based his own masterpiece ‘Childhood’s End’ on ideas from
it. Brian Aldiss edited and wrote introductions for a number of
Stapledon’s books.
In an article published in the American journal ‘Utopian Studies’
in 2005, V