Olaf Stapledon

It's going to do from the deep past into the far future.

It has a similarity there to the sweep of things like Olaf Stapleton or HG Wells.

It's going to tell a story that is the whole of time.

And that is classic science fiction.

Obviously, the comic character Superman is indirectly inspired by the idea, as in a more highbrow sense is George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman.

and somewhere in the middle are things like the work of Olaf Stapledon, the socialist philosopher and science fiction author who influenced the transhumanist movement, and whose creation of Homo Superior, our next stage of human evolution clearly inspired by Nietzsche, in his novel Odd John, influenced everything from the X-Men to Arthur C. Clarke.

The other main idea in Thus Spake Zarathustra is the doctrine of eternal recurrence, an idea which is to my mind best dramatised by, of all things, the Monkees film Head, and the song from it, long title, Do I Have To Do This All Over Again.

While the idea of the Superman points to a belief in progress of a sort, not a kind of progress I personally find very appealing, but one that definitely sees a future that's distinct from the past, the eternal recurrence is the opposite.

So how does a writer in 1937 even conceptualize the mechanics of cosmic evolution without the modern astrophysical framework we just take for granted today?

Well, the thing is, Stapledon wasn't relying on modern astrophysics.

He was relying on philosophical extrapolation.

Oh, interesting.

If you strip away the retro futuristic aesthetics of the 1960s, Ubik is asking a deeply modern question.

What is the rendering engine of your reality and how do you know if it's malfunctioning?

So we have Stapledon establishing the macro scale of the cosmos, Lem proving our psychology is inadequate, Delaney weaponizing our language, Le Guin dismantling our sociology, and Dick completely shattering our trust in reality itself.

That is the foundation.

also considered the idea in the 1920s.

Olaf Stapleton and Don Wilcox wrote stories about the idea in the 1940s, and Robert Heinlein originated the notion that inhabitants might forget that they were on a ship in his book Orphans of the Sky, a concept later reused by Harlan Ellison in his story Phoenix Without Ashes, which was adapted into the 1973 television series The Star Lost.

Starring Keira D'Elia and Walter Koenig in a recurring role.

So, old, old concept.

The Star Tree was technically a Dyson Spear.

The concept of the Dyson Spear was first described by Olaf Stapledon in the book Star Maker, but it was popularized and named for Freeman Dyson, who wrote in his paper Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation, published in 1960, that such a megastructure would be a necessity to a sufficiently advanced enough civilization.

A Dyson Spear would be the only way that such a civilization could hope to possess enough power to supply its energy needs.

A Dyson Spear could harness the power of a star by completely encompassing it.

It will vary individual to individual.

So for example, when I interviewed Martin Rees, I asked him about what, if any, science fiction he read, and the first person he mentioned was Olaf Stapledon.

Grew up reading that kind of thing.

But I think for most of the people we might think about today, the Bezos', the Musks, and then the younger generation still, the Altmans, the Amadis, the Demis Hassabis', they're all thoroughly steeped in science fictional universes.

... like books, they'll like these books.

Um, I suppose the book I recommend to absolutely everyone is Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon, which is not a horror book.

It's a, it's, it's not really even a science fiction book, but it, it's a history of the universe from beginning to end.

Yes.

Thank you

... a cool, offbeat recommendation.

So Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker.

Excellent.

But even amongst that latter group, there's still a sort of subdivision between those who think that the thing that should replace humans that are better should nevertheless or ideally should have something of the human in them.

The interwar philosopher and novelist Olaf Stapleton, who's another epic cosmic thinker about transhumanism, he referred to this as the spark of humanity that would be passed down between different species over time.

And so you could imagine something replacing humanity that nevertheless has some human-like characteristics, whether it's some kind of cognition or sentience or consciousness that is ultimately rootable in that human prehistory, or those who just want to escape humanity entirely, or agnostic on the question.

It doesn't matter whether there's any connection to humans, by the point that these machine intelligences or whatever they might be, have replaced humanity.

They thought that state bureaucracy was sclerotic, that NASA was a massive bureaucracy, that the dreams of space conquest and colonization had been sort of undermined by states ultimately and that the ants had to lie elsewhere so there's a very interesting story about what happens to the relationship between the state and capital i think in in this story similar argument could be made about ai although it's also different in other respects too But it would be a mistake to think that the sort of imaginative impetus disappears during the 70s, 80s, 90s.

It may be that the resources shifted, and this is certainly where AI researchers felt it very heavily.

But there was still plenty of speculative imagining amongst scientists, amongst philosophers, amongst writers, amongst futurologists, about how technologies, either real or imagined, were going to transform things.

They might just have had a slightly different view on whether the state was going to do it or how long in the future this was going to be.