Olaf Stapledon and the Shape of Things to Come

Abstract

There is something Sphinx-like about Olaf Stapledon. He was both a professional philosopher and the most inscrutable of science-fiction writers. ‘Read him at your own risk’, his critic Leslie Fiedler advises, and indeed he is not to be taken lightly.² Stapledon’s early childhood was spent in Egypt and in 1912, at the age of 26, he went back there for several months to work for the family firm in Port Said. He made a trip to Cairo and relished the sight of the Sphinx by moonlight. It was, he wrote in his journal, ‘mysterious & awful; far finer than by day. She was alive, & inscrutible [sic], watching the stars go round, ignoring all the rowdy tourists round her’.³ Stapledon’s detachment and farsightedness in his novels often seem to be modelled on the Sphinx. The Eighteenth Men whose outlook dominates Last and First Men (1930) and Last Men in London (1932) are, the narrator tells us, both human and animal in nature, like the ‘old Egyptian deities with animal heads’.⁴ The one female member of the Eighteenth species to be briefly individualised is compared to the ‘Egyptian Sphinx, which looks across the desert and waits, for something unknown and terrible, but the appointed end’ (LML 344).

If I were to describe in detail every world that we explored, this book would develop into a world of libraries.

Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker (1937)¹