Stapledon, who we can call the greatest British science fiction writer after H. G. Wells and Arthur C. Clarke, is one of the forward-thinking ancestors of science fiction.
Some argue that without him, science fiction classics such as Childhood's End, Dune, Foundation, Methuselah's Children, More Than Human, Titan's Sirens, Solaris, and 2001: A Space Odyssey might never have existed. No one in science fiction has worked on such a broad canvas as the remaining two billion years of humanity (Last and First Men), the birth and death of the universe (Star Maker). Or he didn't delve into mystical, mysterious subjects like the psychology and aesthetics of the stars in their dancing orbits, or the plant people who function as vegetables by day and animals by night. His writing was more ambitious, more wide-ranging, and more confusing than that of other science fiction veterans.
William Olaf Stapledon (10 May 1886 – 6 September 1950) – known as Olaf Stapledon – was a British philosopher and author of science fiction. In 2014, he was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
Olaf Stapledon was born on 10 May 1886, on the Wirral Peninsula near Liverpool - then part of the Metropolitan County of Merseyside. The author, whose first name was William like his father, was addressed by his middle name, Olaf, to avoid confusion with his father. Although the name Olaf might mislead the author about Scandinavian origins, the Stapledon family was English. At the time of Stapledon's birth, his parents were reading Scottish historian and writer Thomas Carlyle's book The Early Kings of Norway, and at least one of the different Olafs that appeared in it must have impressed them enough to give this name to their newborn son.
His father's job was in maritime. This meant that Olaf would not have to worry about looking for a job. Stapledon spent the first five years of his life in Port Said, Egypt, where his father worked on the Suez Canal. In 1891, his mother brought Olaf back to England. He completed his primary education in Liverpool and at Abbotsholme School, a progressive school in Derbyshire. He started studying History at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1905. He taught at Manchester Grammar School for a year and then went to work for his father. He switched to social work in 1912 and left the Marines for good a year later. He began writing and publishing poetry. “Latter-Day Psalms” was published in 1914. He met his future wife, whom he would marry in 1919, in 1913. The outbreak of war brought Stapledon's pacifist side to the fore.
As a conscientious objector, he worked as an ambulance driver during the war. Experiences such as carrying wounded and dead soldiers and driving an ambulance under fire prepared the groundwork for his second novel, Last Men in London, which he would write in 1932. The moral and soul-searching of the novel's hero, Paul, who thinks, "In a world that has lost its mind because of nationalism, fighting against other nations for one's own nation is a crime against the soul," undoubtedly overlapped with those of the author. Paul's experiences in the war were driving him to the brink of mental collapse; This must have been a reflection of Stapledon's own reaction. After the war, he called for disarmament, influenced by the ideas of H. G. Wells. He participated in the social service project carried out by the University of Liverpool and taught philosophy, history, and poetry for the Workers' Education Association.
In 1925, he received his doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Liverpool with his thesis on "Meaning". He later taught philosophy for many years in part-time university courses outside school and at the Workers' Education Association in Merseyside. Although he never held a full-time academic position, he wrote articles on philosophy. After the publication of Last and First Men in 1930, he became friends and began meeting and corresponding with many people, including Naomi Mitchison, J. B. Priestley, and H. G. Wells. In the 1930s and early 1940s, he wrote mostly fiction, but he also wrote philosophical books such as Saints and Revolutionaries (1939), Philosophy and Living (1939), and Beyond the 'Isms (1942). Although he took an active role in pacifist campaigns in the 1930s, World War II. This attitude changed with World War II. He spent some of the war years teaching soldiers under the auspices of the War Office. After the war, most of his fiction books were out of print, but science fiction enthusiasts had not forgotten him. In 1948 he was invited by Arthur C. Clarke to speak at the British Interplanetary Society. In his final years, he worked for world peace and campaigned against the "apartheid" system of racial segregation in South Africa. He was the only European delegate granted a visa to attend a World Peace Congress held in New York in 1949. This was seen as a communist propaganda exercise, and the FBI kept him under surveillance throughout his time in the United States.
Stapledon died of a heart attack on September 6, 1950. He had just published his last novel, A Man Divided. His unfinished autobiographical work, The Opening of the Eyes, was published in 1954.
In his first major and important book, "Last and First Men: The Story of the Near and Far Future", published in 1930, the history of humanity starting from today to two billion years later and eighteen different human species, the first of which is ours, is introduced. The story is told by one of the last, eighteen people. The book is an ambitious future history of the human race, whose eighteenth and last species of humanity ends up on Neptune, seeking to spread their spores across the universe in the hope of surviving on a hospitable world as the sun's eruption looms. At the beginning of the novel, brilliantly written by one of the "Last Men" who telepathically influence the mind of an unknown British academic, Stapledon makes it clear that the aim of his work is not to construct a traditional utopia, but to "create myth". It offers an exploration of the spiritual and pragmatic poles of human thought and the conflict between materialistic science and transcendental religion.
Stapledon wrote Star Maker, which is considered his masterpiece, in 1937. The novel, which received praise from many writers, especially Virginia Woolf, also influenced writers such as Doris Lessing and Brian Aldiss.