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A Writer's Writer

Cole, Sam 1995. The Future Belongs to Anthropology. Anthropology News 36(5): 1; 4. DOI: 10.1111/an.1995.36.5.1.3 [wiley.com]

The topic of this year's AN theme, "Whither Our Subjects - And Ourselves?" is set against the backdrop of the next millennium, which portends a new world political and economic order, increasingly rapid technological and social change, and widespread ethnic conflict and cultural chaos. (Cole 1995: 1)

Not wrong. Smartphones and social media, but also a seemingly never-ending string of wars.

Even to predict the future to just beyond the millennium is a challenge for forecasters. But as the time horizon moves further and further away, forecasters lose the comfort of empirical data and the possibilities for extrapolation; they must move to scenario writing and then to inspired "gee whiz here comes the future" guesses. One million years takes us to a horizon that few science fiction authors have even attempted! (Cole 1995: 1)

(1) extrapolation; (2) scenario-building; (3) pure guesswork.

Where the forecasts appear to depend largely on the resurgent trend in anthropology enrollments since the mid-1980s, a tempocentric bias is introduced. (Cole 1995: 4)

Never heard of this term but there are over 1,000 search results, mostly in highfalutin anthropology papers.

Conversely, Bailey interprets current rising nationalism as the rebirth of the non-Western world. With a different view, Vladimic Markotic envisages three great superpowers in the making: a New World led by the US, an Asian block led by China and a Eurasia led by Germany - a tripartite power structure reminiscent of George Orwell's 1984 (November 1994 AN, p 4). (Cole 1995: 4)

Pretty much.

Anthropologists, too, "fantasize" about the future in provocative ways. Ben Finney's "Cosmic Humanities" (November 1994 AN, p 1) invites us to contemplate how we might respond to global resource pressures by returning to our roots as exploring animals; where searching for new planets scattered through space will become a natural way of life, as it was for the ever home-seeking Micronesians and Polynesians. Is this a metaphor for the future of anthropology? Finney's piece rekindles futurist Olaf Stapledon's vision of humans evolving through multifarious forms adapting to air, sea and space. In his Last and First Men (1931), Stapledon speculated on the human past and future over a span of some 40 million years! Although his writings of the 1920s now seem dated, they are still relevant to immediate anthropological concerns with the future of humanity that stretch between views that biotechnology will soon determine human form, and views that evolutionary pressures are offset by technological and social innovation. (Cole 1995: 4)

"40 million years" and "1920s" are miss the mark.

Cole, Sam; Yamaguchi, Kaoru 1990. Paradigms of human development. Futures 22(10): 999-1001. DOI: 10.1016/0016-3287(90)90001-X [sciencedirect.com]

While there is a current tendency for communist and social democracy movements to shift in the direction of capitalism, the latter has manifest problems of inequality, insecurity and alienation. Moreover, the most 'efficient' and 'successful' societies are being poisoned by their own toxic waste. (Cole; Yamaguchi 1990: 999)

Succinct.

Lorne Tepperman and Hilja Laasen's article asks how we might measure the success of human development given that economic growth as a measure of improved well-being becomes an increasingly redundant concept for prosperous societies in an ecologically constrained world. (Cole; Yamaguchi 1990: 1000)

Infinite economic growth is impossible, yet that is still what we're going for, 33 years after this was written.

Part of the inability of futurists and social scientists generally to address the full range of possibilities for the future is that we are constrained by our own intellectual present. (Cole; Yamaguchi 1990: 1000)

Is this tempocentrism?

Finally Jim Dator's article steps beyond this to embrace the possibility of new human physical states. His provocative paper forces us to look beyond the constraints of our human existence and to accept the possibility that the logical conclusions of our technological success are new beings which will benignly relegate humans to zoo-park curiosities. The article is in some ways more challenging that Olaf Stapledon's classic tale of The Last and First Men, since today our electro-mechanical ingenuity has placed us a stone's throw from the non-human future he envisages. (Cole; Yamaguchi 1990: 1001)

Samuelson, David N. 1990. Review of McCarthy, Patrick A.; Elkins, Charles; Greenberg, Martin Harry eds. The Legacy of Olaf Stapledon. Utopian Studies 1(1): 148-149. [JSTOR]

Olaf Stapledon ranks with Verne and Wells as one of the pillars of science fiction. His utopianism resembled Wells' more than Verne's, but its expression was sui generis. No one else ever had his cosmic reach, and his philosophy and fiction both defied generic expectations. So idiosyncratic was his style that his four major fictions are still more honored than read, his other writings largely forgotten. (Samuelson 1990: 148)

High praise. Sui generis meaning "in a class of his own" (that's how Julian Huxley (1951) described Stapledon). A local science fiction researcher has said "It is more interesting to read about Stapledon than to read him." (J. A., personal communication)

Stapledon's obvious "legacy" is to science fiction (e.g., Clarke, Lem, Lessing, Simak, Sturgeon). Measured against the vastness of space and time, even his own utopian ideals he found wanting, yet his ambivalence toward human schemes of perfection is a vital part of utopian thinking today. The past decade's advances of human research into the cosmos, renewed awareness of our fragile planetary environment, and historical challenges to capitalist and socialist ideals all underline his contemporary relevance. (Samuelson 1990: 148)

It may probably be said that the modern attitude towards utopianism is more akin to Stapledon's preface than to Aldous Huxley's epigraph.

Minimal before the 1970s, Stapledon studies more than doubled in the next decade with a bibliography, a volume of correspondence, a special issue of Science-Fiction Studies, and other essays, including three monographs. Not for beginners, this slim volume adds more "contexts" (Patrick McCarthy's term) in which to view Stapledon's achievements. (Samuelson 1990: 148)

This is indeed the picture we get when looking back with the aid of scientific databases. The bibliography is probably Curtis Smith's (1974). The correspondences must be Crossley's Talking Across the World (1987). The three monographs must be Patrick McCarthy's Olaf Stapledon (1982), Leslie Fiedler's Olaf Stapledon: a man divided (1983), and John Kinnaird's Olaf Stapledon (1986). All three are reviewed by Philmus 1984.

In "The Moral Philosophy of Olaf Stapledon," Robert Shelton recovers some of the non-fiction, pointing out the unity of Stapledon's philosophical, political, and religious ideas about morality with his own personal involvement in all three. "His prose and his life offer a complex answer to that quintessential utopian question, 'how then shall we live?'" (Samuelson 1990: 148)

Would not be surprised to meet consistency bordering on tediousness in Stapledon's whole oevre.

In A Modern Theory of Ethics (1929), Waking World (1934), and Saints and Revolutionaries (1939), Stapledon's work became progressively more colloquial, but each book moved from the "present dilemma" (corrosive doubt on cosmological, psychological, and ethical levels) to "speculations." Asserting the need for spiritual experience and socialist ideals, he ultimately proposed transcending individualism via a two-fold dialectic - thesis, complement, symbiosis - seen in saints, revolutionaries, and skeptics. (Samuelson 1990: 148)

First explicit mention I've come across thus far of his "socialist ideals". I have met mention of his self-descriptive "agnostic mysticism".

Herr's "Convention and Spirit in Olaf Stapledon's Fiction" shows his awareness that reaching his spiritual goals required overcoming language and the self, cultural artifacts defining the limitations of the human conditions. (Samuelson 1990: 149)

Both make sense in light of Stapledon's obsession with telepathy and collective consciousness.

Neither titular argument coalesces with an accompanying attempt to trace literary parallels, although Elkins does place Stapledon firmly in a tradition of high seriousness ranging from Hegel, Darwin, Marx, and Arnold to Spengler, Leavis and Bloch. (Samuelson 1990: 149)

Kõrgtõsisuse traditsioon.

Despite his Victorian style, he did share certain attitudes with the great Modernist writers: anti-historicism, faith in aesthetic order, literary reflexiveness (manipulation of perspective, consciousness of language limitations, spatial form), and internationalism. (Samuelson 1990: 149)

All ring true from what little I've read.

Crossley argues cogently that the familiar letter was the most essential form to Stapledon, and claims about as much as can be said for these letters: echoing central issues of his work, they also show his later melancholy and urgency for the future. "Worldliness" is their subject, knowing the world thoroughly in preparation to know a self-conscious universe. (Samuelson 1990: 149)

The so-called Universal Mind.

Shelton, Robert 1995. Review of Olaf Stapledon: Speaking for the Future by Robert Crossley. Utopian Studies 6(1): 138-140. [JSTOR]

Robert Crossley's vital, engaging new biography of the English philosopher, peace activist, and science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950) should reinvigorate the restitution of an important figure in modern utopian thought and practice. (Shelton 1995: 138)

I recall something about him changing his mind on pacifism at the onset of WWII. Also, what is utopian practice?

The Stapledon revival got off to something of a false start a decade ago when the publication of three book-length studies (by Patrick A. McCarthy, John Kinnaird, and Leslie Fiedler) generated surprisingly little furthe rresearch on Stapledon. (Shelton 1995: 138)

Well, "Stapledon studies" have to begin somewhere. That very little research immediately followed is somewhat understandable, given that Stapledon is still underrated. There is something off-putting about his literary output.

Because of its broader considerations of Stapledon's fiction, non-fiction, and political activism, perhaps Crossley's biography will spur more interest in Stapledon's challenging oeuvre. (Shelton 1995: 138)

Perhaps that is it. Stapledon is all too challenging.

Before the biography's first numbered chapter (a flashback set at an international peace congress held in Manhattan in 1949 under the watchful eye of the US State Department), Crossley addresses the basic question lurking behind his project: "Olaf who?" (Shelton 1995: 138)

There is a palpable analogy with Bronisław Malinowski dying of a heart attack immediately "after delivering an address at the inaugural meeting of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in New York" (Symmons-Symonolewicz 1959: 23). What is with these public intellectuals dying of heart attacks soon after lecturing about peace or war on U.S. soil in the 1940s?

Then he makes the stronger case that the life story of Olaf Stapledon is "an index of the modern era [...] the era that embraced the death of God, the birth of a new physics, the shrinking of the planet, and the threat of human extinction" (3). (Shelton 1995: 138)

A pretty good run-down of the religious, scientific, and historical context surrounding Stapledon's life.

The list catalogues topics Stapledon devoted his life and art to, from his youthful poetry to his mature [|] cosmic masterpiece on the God-question, Star Maker; from his Wellsian calls for a world state in such books as Walking World and Saints and Revolutionaries to his post-Hiroshima keynote speeches in Wroclaw, New York, and Paris on peace and culture, where he was one of the first activists to warn about Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD, or as Stapledon called it, "irreparable mutual destruction" [325]). (Shelton 1995: 138-139)

Another one of these curious "firsts" that can be appended to his name.

Stapledon corresponded with many of the most famous people of the twentieth century and shared featured speaker platforms with the likes of E.M. Forster, Julian Huxley, J.B. Priestley, W.E.B. DuBois, Thornton Wilder, Norman Mailer, and Dimitri Shostakovich. He is even the model for the villain (Professor Weston) in C.S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet. (Shelton 1995: 139)

Too bad this doesn't specify with whom he corresponded and with whom he merely shared the stage.

Yet for decades, Stapledon was known (if at all) as a writer's writer, the acknowledged resource for ideas developed by Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, Doris Lessing, Freeman Dyson, and many others. As a fiction writer, Stapledon was a creatior of mythic, grand visions of the cosmos. (Shelton 1995: 139)

In one of my own false-starts I've described him as "the science fiction writer's science fiction writer".

Crossley's biography helps us see where many of his strangest notions came from. As a nonfiction writer, Stapledon was a teacher with a strong utopian inclination. Crossley's biography helps us even more to see Stapledon's political efforts within the specific, year-by-year historical contexts of challenges to capitalism and empire. Here I would highlight Crossley's detailed account of Stapledon's active membership in the Common Wealth Party, Richard Acland's "prototype of liberation theology" (278). (Shelton 1995: 139)

I wonder if Crossley addresses Stapledon's attendance in Cecil Reddie's Abbotsholme School (cf. Searby 1989: 12). I will no doubt have to look into the history of the Common Wealth Party and Richard Acland at some point.

Olaf Stapledon was a late-bloomer, a Peter Pan who spent nearly four decades in prolonged adolescence, like (as Crossley observes) the Divine Boy of Last and First Men, Stapledon's breakthrough first novel, published in 1930 when Olaf was forty-four years old. (Shelton 1995: 139)

Nothing to be ashamed of. Juri Lotman didn't discover semiotics until he was 40.

That novel and the eight that followed it are almost exclusively the basis of Stapledon's limited fame today. Stapledon wrote an equal number of nonfiction works, which were, in Stapledon's lifetime, more popular and more influential than the fiction. Crossley stresses the central importance of Stapledon's philosophical, sociological, and psychological works to our full understanding of his science fiction. He shows how we might connect the events of Stapledon's life (indirectly) to his fiction and (most directly) to his nonfiction. (Shelton 1995: 139)

This much I suspected. Seventeen books is a lot to chew on.

Crossley carefully incorporates his textual analyses within the biographical narrative. For example, Stapledon's most disturbing novel, Sirius, is read, in part, as an analogue of Stapledon's late-life love affair with Evelyn Wood Gibson, who becomes, for Crossley, the model for Plaxy, the "sister" and lover of that novel's super-canine. (Shelton 1995: 139)

There's plenty disturbing in L&FM. Can't imagine what could make Sirius more disturbing than Odd John.

Writing from the suburbs of Liverpool, Olaf Stapledon traveled further into our future than probably anyone else in this century. In our troubled present, we should look again at the maps to utopia he left for us. (Shelton 1995: 140)

Did he? Which utopia?

Shelton, Robert 1997. Review of Crossley, Robert ed. An Olaf Stapledon Reader. Utopian Studies 8(2): 132-134. [JSTOR]

Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950) has become modern science fiction's John Milton - an eloquent, deep explorer of great, cosmic themes whom next to no one reads anymore. Nowadays he is more unknown than known and more known than read, but between 1930 and 1944, Stapledon produced at least four masterpieces of the genre - Last and First Men, Odd John, Star Maker, and Sirius. Rich and complex, these four novels place Stapledon second only to H.G. Wells as the most important science fiction and utopian writer of the twentieth century. (Shelton 1997: 132)

The highest praises... For the author whom next to no-one reads anymore.

At the level of sheer inventiveness, Stapledon has no equal, from any era, in any genre. So why is "Olaf Who?" the first question readers are likely to ask when they hear his name? It would take a career to answer that question, and (most of) a career is precisely what Robert Crossley has devoted to resurrecting Olaf Stapledon, Liverpool's saint, revolutionary, and skeptic (to use Stapledon's categories of world views). (Shelton 1997: 132)

These categories sound a bit like some sort of inversions of the classical triad (commoner, guardian, philosopher).

The second dilemma is caused by the gap being so large between the quality of Stapledon's works and their obscurity. As an analogy, consider the situation many of us, particularly literature professors, find ourselves in when we try (or wonder if we dare try) to introduce our students to a favorite author, one we suspect only few of them have heard of and none has read. (Shelton 1997: 132)

What's the "gap" here? I would assume that quality is high and obscurity is high also. The "gap" imagery makes me think that one of these must be low. Obscurity it is not, so is Shelton saying that Stapledon's works are of low quality?

The book is divided into five sections designed to put "on exhibit a generous sampling of Stapledon's prophetic utterances in a variety of genres and voices" (x). (Shelton 1997: 133)

It most definitely sounds like Crossley was a "believer".

Magyar, Miki 1993. Science Fiction for Technical Communicators. Proceedings Professional Communication Conference The New Face of Technical Communication: People, Processes, Products', Philadelphia, PA, USA, 5-8 October 1993. IEEE, 107-111. DOI: 10.1109/IPCC.1993.593787 [ieee.org]

Science fiction (SF) offers a set of experts who can talk to us from very different points of view about language, communication, interpersonal interactions, and the problems of dealing with innovation and change. We know that we learn best by example and experience, and SF provides examples and experiences (vicarious, but valid) that can be obtained in no other way. (Magyar 1993: 107)

A near-perfect epigraph for the second chapter (semiophatic analysis of L&FM).

With Olaf Stapledon (Last and First Men) and Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) in the '30s, Van Vogt (Slan, The World of Null-A), Orwell (1984), and C. S. Lewis (Perelandra trilogy) in the '40s, we can see the beginnings of a more mature literature, dealing with real people, not cardboard cut-outs, and with real problems, and adhering to a more general standard of good writing. This was especially true in Europe, where SF was never so ghettoized as in this country. They set a new standard for American SF, which began to flower in the '50s and has continued in a more international arena ever since. (Magyar 1993: 108)

Wells is not mature?

Orson Scott Card offers "a good, simple, semi-accurate rule of thumb: If the story is set in a universe that follows the same rules as ours, it's science fiction. If it's set in a universe that doesn't follow our rules, it's fantasy. Or in other words, science fiction is about what could be but isn't; fantasy is about what couldn't be." (Card 1990) And, as he correctly points out, the boundaries of SF and fantasy exist as challenges, not as barriers. (Magyar 1993: 108)

Science fiction adheres to a possible "reality", has some connection with it.

Joanna Russ says, "Most serious SF is too intellectual a form for most readers to be able to respond to. It's a highly analytic, critical, intellectual form. Readers approaching SF have to read with a dual vision, a split consciousness of the writing's action and critical stance, and most readers simply [|] don't want or don't know how to do that." (McCaffrey 1990) While there is plenty of light entertainment available in the genre, the best of SF is a real mind-stretcher. (Magyar 1993: 108-109)

Verbs and adjectives.

Another difference is that SF readers tend to expect unusual combinations of words to be taken literally, not figuratively. "She felt the texture of his thoughts" would imply to an SF reader that she is a telepath or empath, not that she is simply sensitive to undertones of communication. "The house invites him in" assumes a technology that has computer-controlled entrances with voice capability, not just an attractive residence. (Magyar 1993: 109)

This is a valid point that I may have to quibble with in my thesis. Some science fiction may be figurative in nature, at least in part.

R., M. 1999. Review of Enduring Love by Ian McEwan. Biology and Philosophy 14(4): 623-628. DOI: 10.1023/A:1017231603833 [springer.com]

And yet! The paradox is that, just when Charles Darwin's contributions to science were most controversial, majesty was being comforted by evolutionism of the most blatant and notorious kind! Tennyson, a student of William Whewell in the 1830s at Trinity College, was ever interested in science. Reading Charles Lyell in the early 1840s, he had absorbed the message of uniformitarianism - nature is caught in an endless process, without reason or hope. (R. 1999: 623)

This was controversial?

Given Nature "red in tooth and claw" - this is the source of this famous phrase - nothing seems to make any sense. Not only individuals are pointless mortals, but so also are groups. We are born, we live, and then we die - usually painfully. Nothing makes sense or has meaning. There are just endless Lyellian cycles. (R. 1999: 624)

Oh, good.

Then towards the end of the decade, the poem stalled perhaps indefinitely, Tennyson read Robert Chambers's evolutionary tract: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. At least, he read a detailed review of Vestiges, learning that the whole of organic nature is progressing upwards, from the blob to the human, from the monad to the man. At once, Tennyson saw the way out of Lyellian-induced depression. Life's history does have meaning. (R. 1999: 624)

Humans becoming fully human, etc.

  • Chambers, Robert 1844. Vestiges of the natural history of creation. London: J. Churchill. [Internet Archive]
Chambers wrote before Charles Darwin. Expectedly, we find that in the years after the Origin writers have returned many times to evolutionary themes. One of the best-known examples was the novella by the Huxley-educated, school teacher, H. G. Wells. The Time Machine, with its story of [|] future human degeneration in the gentle, child-like Eloi, and the monstrous cannibalistic troglodites, the Morlocks, reflects faithfully the fin de siècle obsession with decline and fall. (R. 1999: 624-625)

Thomas Henry Huxley was his academic advisor. (E.R. Clay wrote his book as a response to T. H. Huxley's view of free will in animals.) Wells taught at "Thomas Morley's Commercial Academy, a private school founded in 1849" (Wikikpedia).

Another example in the early 1930s was Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men: a fantasy about the various species into which we will evolve, it was influenced by the thinking of such speculative evolutionists as J.B.S. Haldane, and in turn served as stimulus to the youthful John Maynard Smith. (R. 1999: 625)

Okay. Noted. I've indeed already met Haldane's name in the same breath as Stapledon (cf. Martin 1999: 521).

At which point, another of the group, a young man Jed Parry, becomes obsessed with Joe. We learn later that Jed suffered from a psychological disease, de Clérambault's syndrome, which manifests itself as instantaneous erotic attraction to a total stranger - an attraction with religious undertones. ("God intended this love" etc). (R. 1999: 625)

Twin flame? This de Clérambault's syndrome is also known as eratomania.

Dick, Steven J. 1996. Other Worlds: The Cultural Significance of the Extraterrestial Life Debate. Leonardo 29(2): 133-137. DOI: 10.2307/1576349 [JSTOR]

First, the extraterrestial life debate points out, as no other scientific controversy does so sweepingly, how completely the concept of cosmic evolution has triumphed in Western civilization. Indeed, much of the twentieth century debate may be seen as a test of cosmic evolution, or the idea that matter and life are naturally evolving throughout the universe. Percival Lowell understood at the beginning of this century that the solar system was evolving; his vivid picture of a dying Mars whose inhabitants were desperately trying to distribute their water resources epitomized a solar system constantly subject to change. (Dick 1996: 133)

We have come to realize the improbability of intelligent life emerging on only one planet in the whole universe.

Second, a salient characteristic of the extraterrestial life debate in the context of science is that it shows that there is, in fact, no monolithic scientific culture such as the one C.P. Snow defined more than 30 years ago in his writings contrasting science with the humanities. (Dick 1996: 134)

It looks like C. P. Snow, too, will be one of those characters that appear out of nowhere in unexpected places. So:

  • Snow, C. P. 1998. The Two Cultures. With Introduction by Stefan Collini. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [lg]
The idea of extraterrestials clearly fascinated a wide audience as early as 1686, when [|] Bernard le Bovier de Fontanelle's Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds appeared. As Crowe and Guthke have shown, extraterrestials have been the subject of prose and poetry from the seventeeth century onward. (Dick 1996: 134-135)

Also probably one of those frequent mentions.

  • Fontenelle, Bernard de 1803. Conversations on the plurality of worlds. London: J. Cundee. [Internet Archive]
But it was in science fiction that the alien came alive. In 1897, H.G. Wells brought the invading Martian into literature with his War of the Worlds. In the same year, the German Kantian philosopher Kurd Lasswitz ushered in a more benign Martian in Auf Zwei Planeten (On Two Planets). In an enormous number of works since then, the alien has become a standard theme of science fiction, used for a variety of purposes. (Dick 1996: 135)

Two Planets. "The story covers topics like colonization, mutually assured destruction and clash of civilizations many generations before these topics came into politics."

The alien has evolved from the beings found in the predictable but immensely popular space opera adventures of Edgar Rice Burroughts to the philosophical beings of Olaf Stapledon to the subtle and almost ethereal creatures of Bradbury's Martian Chronicles (1950). C.S. Lewis, in his space trilogy beginning with Out of the Silent Planet, used the alien theme in defense of Christianity. (Dick 1996: 135)

Philosophical beings?

In short, during the first half of this century, aliens helped man explore traditional themes from a new and less parochial perspective. One sees in cosmic and theological alien literature a pattern of search for a higher truth and wisdom, whether embodied in Stapledon's Star Maker or in a variety of other superior beings. Throughout it all, one also sees the terrestial theme of good versus evil played out across the universe. (Dick 1996: 135)

Looking forward to reading whether Stapledon's Star Maker contains a universal fight between good versus evil.

Wolk, Anthony 1990. Challenge to Boundaries: An Overview of Science Fiction and Fantasy. The English Journal 79(3): 26-31. DOI: 10.2307/819230 [JSTOR]

Just what is science fiction? And what is fantasy? What delicious questions to play around with! When pressed, I can't resist the temptation to say that when a writer feels called upon to alter the vital fabric of the universe, that's science fiction (not "sci-fi," a term science-fiction writers avoid because it has the hallmark of the heavy-breathing Darth Vader and the BEM, or Bug-Eyed-Monster). For example, adding the person of Frederic Henry to the known world changes its molecular structure. Hence, A Farewell to Arms is science fiction. Enough whimsy. (Wolk 1990: 26)

Sounds exactly contrary to Card's definition concerning "rules", above (cf. Magyar 1993: 108).

Another approach to defining the genre is to separate science fiction from fantasy and both from "realist" literature. (The term "mainstream" really is too arrogant; throw away those brown-paper wrappers and live dangerously.) If you can work out a chronology and construct a map to get from when and where you are to when and where the story is, that's science fiction. But J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle Earth, C. S. Lewis's Narnia, and Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea are fantasy. (Wolk 1990: 27)

Still sticking with the topic of possible reality.

I've already mentioned Arthur C. Clarke's City and the Stars, which unlocks the imagination in its portrayal of a young boy of the distant future whose curiosity sets him aside from every single person in his supposedly utopian community of Diaspar. Impatient with its sameness, he finds a way out, to Lys, a differently oriented community, in harmony wit hnature, not just mind. For his projections of future history, Clarke drew on Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930), a philosophical novel with a time span that reaches 20,000,000 years from the present. (Wolk 1990: 29)

Cool. The City and The Stars is the only one of his works that I'm even remotely familiar with (cf. Konopka 2013).

Gessert, George 2004. Review of Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. Leonardo 37(5): 416-417. DOI: 10.1162/leon.2004.37.5.416 [mit.edu]

The end of the world keeps getting more final. In the past the gods guaranteed a sequel, which is why medieval paintings of Judgment Day are jammed with people, as crowded as subway cars at rush hour. The message is clear: Nobody really dies. Today most of us suspect otherwise: The end of the world may be absolute and irrevocable, with nothing resembling an afterlife, not even in works, ideas or community. (Gessert 2004: 416)

In the cosmology of Stapledon's Eighteenth Men we do meet up at the end in the Universal Mind.

This vision is less than 200 years old. In 1816 Lord Byron expressed it in his poem "Darkness," in which the sun is extinguished. Humanity, at war with itself to the bitter end, dwindles and disappears. Darwin was not particularly concerned about the end of the world, but lent scientific credibility to the idea of human extinction, which for many people is the same thing. H.G. Wells confronted our extinction in The Time Machine (1895), and Olaf Stapledon explored it obsessively in Last and First Men (1930), in which humans go extinct in 18 different ways. (Gessert 2004: 416)

"Obsessively"?

Robinson Jeffers accepted our impermanence as a species, and used it to inform many of his poems. Despite these exceptions, however, few writers had much to say on the subject throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th century. Save for those rare individuals whe were gifted or burdened with a sense of geological time, human extinction was largely ignored until 1945. Hiroshima changed everything, including the future. Since World War II, artists, writers and moviemakers have energetically explored our end. (Gessert 2004: 416)

I guess Stapledon is counted among those rare individuals.

The boys play computer games together, favoring ones that involve extinction lore, historical battles or world conquest. They surf the net and discover sites dedicated to open heart surgeries, executions, animal torture and pornography. On a site called HottTotts, which features child sex in impoverished countries, they first see Oryx, an exquisitely beautiful child prostitute from somewhere in Southeast Asia. Both boys immediately fall for her, but each keeps his secret from the other. (Gessert 2004: 417)

Margaret Atwood, wtf?

Wilczek, Frank 2006. On Absolute Units, III: Absolutely Not? Physics Today 59(5): 10-11. DOI: 10.1063/1.2216941 [aip.org]

Absolute units have their natural home in a program whose roots go back to Pythagoras: to calculate the major properties of the physical world we observe in terms of a few input parameters. (He declared, "All things are number.") Given a system of absolute units, we can express all other physical quantities as pure numbers, which we must aspire to calculate theoretically. (Wilczek 2006: 10)

Of course.

But the most disturbing fact, if you're a believing fundamentalist Pythagorean, is that several of the parameters appear to have values that are fine-tuned to bring forth a universe that contains complex condensed structures, including life as we know it. If the electron or down quark were a bit lighter, or the up quark a bit heavier, then electrons and protons would combine into neutrons (emitting neutrinos). A world of neutrons does not support stellar burning, complex chemistry, or even the collapse of nebular clouds into solid structures. Make those masses slightly lighter, and deuterium becomes unbound, with catastrophic consequences for the workings of stars and production of nuclei more complex than hydrogen. (Wilczek 2006: 10)

Extremely good stuff.

The idea that we find ourselves in one of many possible universes, each with different values of some basic physical parameters, has its positive sides as well. Famously - or notoriously - it could help explain the fine-tunings required for life. Most of the alternative universes would not have those fine-tunings, but there'd be no one around to notice. That sort of anthropic reasoning can be used constructively to make predictions if we tie the conditions necessary for life to other, superficially unrelated phenomena. (Wilczek 2006: 11)

We live in the universe "made" for biological life, not in the one peopled by melodies.

Eastern religions and science fiction writers agree that it is wondrous and awesome - not to mention correct - to contemplate an abundance of universes. I'll close with a quote from Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker
So I, in the supreme moment of my cosmic experience, emerged from the mist of my finitude to be confronted with cosmos upon cosmos, and by the light itself that not only illumines but gives life to all. Then immediately the mist closed in on me again.
(Wilczek 2006: 11)

Don't yet know what to make of this.

Dick, Steven J. 2009. The postbiological universe and our future in space. Futures 41(8): 578-580. DOI: 10.1016/j.futures.2009.04.023 [sciencedirect.com]

In particular, I want to argue that, if extraterrestial intelligence exists, cultural evolution must be taken seriously as a part of cosmic evolution. As we know from Earth, the rate of cultural evolution totally dominates other forms of cosmic evolution. Ten thousand years ago terrestial intelligence was not much different than it is today, still less astronomical objects. But cultural evolution has caused vast changes in human life since that time. If intelligent life exists in the universe, we must take into account the long time span during which that intelligence may have evolved culturally. In the fashion of Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men and Star Maker, we must contemplate the possibilities of cultural evolution over thousands, millions, or billions of years. We cannot, of course, predict what might have happened, but we can pose plausible scenarios, scenarios that may have implications for our search. Here I explore one such scenario. (Dick 2009: 578)

We should consider that these visitors may have a much longer history of cultural evolution?

The evolution of the universe from from the Big Bang to the present, and of its constituent parts include galaxies, stars and planets, has been confirmed only during the last 50 years. That evolution, now known from spacecraft to encompass 13.7 billion years, has three components: astronomical, biological and cultural. If cosmic evolution is primarily astronomical, ending in planets, stars and galaxies, we live in a physical universe. If the evolution of matter in the universe typically proceeds to life, mind and intelligence we live in what I term the "biological universe". And if intelligence is common, inevitably resulting in cultural evolution, I would argue that we may live in a "postbiological universe". A postbiological universe is one in which flesh-and-blood intelligence has been largely replaced by artificial intelligence. This possibility has been broached before but not seriously considered or taken to its logical conclusion. Each of the three cosmic evolution components, as yet unconfirmed, has implications for the long-term human future in spcae, and more dramatically, for human destiny. (Dick 2009: 578)

An Estonian lady bites some gray little dudes who came to abduct her and says they taste metallic. There's circumstantial alien lore that claims that the smaller grays are unemotional, biologically engineered worker-drones.

Darwin is justly famous not for proposing biological evolution, but for arguing that the mechanism for biological evolution is natural selection. Unlike natural selection for biology, there is no consensus on mechanisms for cultural evolution, even though it takes place before our eyes. Recent Darwinian models for cultural evolution abound, but remain highly controversial, ranging from Dennett's general application of "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" to E.O. Wilson's sociobiology, Boyd and Richerson's detailed version of gene-culture coevolution, and Richard Dawkins' memes. (Dick 2009: 579)

What does semiotics of culture propose for this mechanism?

Lacking a robust theory of cultural evolution and its mechanisms, we are reduced to an extrapolation of current trends. There are many possibilities, but in sorting priorities I argue that all other possibilities are subservient to intelligence. I therefore adopt what I term the central principle of cultural evolution, which I refer to as the Intelligence Principle: the maintenance, improvement and perpetuation of knowledge and intelligence is the central driving force of cultural evolution, and that to the extent intelligence can be improved, it will be improved. In Darwinian terms, knowledge has survival value, or selective advantage, as does intelligence at the species level, a fact that may someday be elucidated by an evolutionary theory of social behavior, whether group selection, selfish gene theory, evolutionary epistemology, or some other Darwinian model. The Intelligence Principle implies that, given the opportunity to increase intelligence (and thereby knowledge), whether through biotechnology, genetic engineering or artificial intelligence, any society would do so, or fail to do so at its peril. (Dick 2009: 579)

Does a tool like ChatGPT represent a leap forward in our cultural evolution?

Whether or not extraterrestials are postbiological, and whether or not our human successors become postbiological, one thing is certain: they will not be like us. (Dick 2009: 580)

Exceedingly good short paper that I may need to revisit and try to flesh out in my own terms.

Robinson, Andrew 2007. Still looking at the stars. New Scientist, 196(2632): 59-60. DOI: 10.1016/S0262-4079(07)63042-5 [sciencedirect.com]

By then he had fully embarked on his tireless advocacy of space travel in both fiction and non-fiction, through books such as The Sands of Mars, A Fall of Moondust, The Exploration of Space and Profiles of the Future. Nevertheless, he was amazed that the moon landing happened so soon, in 1969. He had not expected to see it in his lifetime. "And then I was also surprised, and disappointed, that it wasn't followed up. We abandoned space for decades." Clarke's screenplay and companion novel for the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, made by Stanley Kubrick in 1968, had imagined the construction of a moon base in the 1990s. (Robinson 2007: 59)

Yeah, why is that? (Cue conspiracy theories about ominous large spacecraft following the Apollo 11 moon-walkers with Neil Armstrong reporting "They're here. They're parked on the side of the crater. They're watching us." over the medical channel. - Youtube)

There is an element of faith in Clarke's attitude to space, though not the religious type. His attitude is more like a boundless optimism in the power of intelligence. Such optimism underlies his best-known novels, Childhood's End, 2001 and Rendezvous with Rama. Kubrick, who tended to be sparing with his praise, once said of his collaborator: "Arthur somehow manages to capture the hopeless but admirable human desire to know things that can really never be known." (Robinson 2007: 59)

Replace "intelligence" here with "mentality" and you have a fully fledget Stapledonian.

Many scientists - and astronauts - go further in their admiration, respecting Clarke for his unique combination of scientific knowledge, intellectual originality and literary flair. J. B. S. Haldane, Wernher von Braun, Luis Alvarez, Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan were all personal friends of Clarke, as well as fans of his writing. (Robinson 2007: 59)

Him again.

Moore considers the greatest science fiction books to be Last and First Men and Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon, but "these were Stapledon's only two great books, which is why on balance I must make him number two to Arthur". (Robinson 2007: 59)

Moore who? "British astronomer Patrick Moore".

Yet as a "failed recluse" addicted to email, he is ambivalent about the benefits of everyone being able to communicate instantaneously. "It's the fractal language," he says. "Although everybody is ultimately connected to everybody else, the branches of the fractal universe are so many orders of magnitude away from each other that really nobody knows anyone else. We will have no common universe of discourse. You and I can talk together because we know when I mention poets and so on who they are. But in another generation this sort of conversation may be impossible because everyone will have an enormously wide but shallow background of experience that overlaps by only a few per cent." (Robinson 2007: 60)

Prophetic. This is presaged by "The Consequences of Literacy" (Goody & Watt 1963).

It may sound like outlandish fantasy, but in 1945 so did communication satellites and landing on the moon. He doesn't always get it right, however: in 1999 he predicted the last coal mine would close in 2006. (Robinson 2007: 60)

And we're still opening new ones!?

Robinson, Kim Stanley 2009. The fiction of now. New Scientist 203(2726): 46; 48-49. DOI: 10.1016/S0262-4079(09)62496-9 [sciencedirect.com]

8th July 37
Dear Mr. Stapledon,
I would have thanked you for your book before, but I have been very busy and have only just had time to read it. I don't suppose that I have understood more than a small part - all the same I have understood enough to be greatly interested, and elated too, since sometimes it seems to me that you are grasping ideas that I have tried to express, much more fumblingly, in fiction. But you have gone much further and I can't help envying you - as one does those who reach what one has aimed at. Many thanks for giving me a copy,
yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf
This was Virginia Woolf's reply to the influential science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon after he had sent her a copy of his recently published novel Star Maker. In an earlier exchange of letters, she made it clear that she had also enjoyed previous works of his, probably including Last and First Men from 1931. These two novels, Stapledon's masterpieces, are enduring monuments of science fiction and of British literature generally. Within a decade of Edwin Hubble's discovery of the red shift, which revealed the universe to be vastly bigger than anyone had imagined, Stapledon's work compressed an entire poetic history of humanity and the cosmos into two slight volumes. (Robinson 2009: 46)

So that's the Woolf connection. She is mentioned on Wikipedia as having been influenced by Stapledon.

These strange novels made a real impact on Woolf. After reading them, her writing changed. She had always been interested in writing historically, but her stream-of-consciousness style made that difficult to accomplish. Her character Orlando's fantastically long life, and the chapter "Time Passes" in To the Lighthouse, were two attempts at solving this problem. The modular structure of The Years was another. But after reading Star Maker, she tried harder stil.l In her last years she planned to write a survey of all British literature that she was going to call Anon; and her final novel, Between the Acts, concerns a dramaturge struggling to tell the history of England in the form of a summer village pageant. The novel ends with Stapledonian imagery, describing our species steeped in the eons. Woolf's last pages were a kind of science fiction. (Robinson 2009: 46)

An instance of Stapledon being transformative.

I tell this story here because it has not been told before (Woolf's letters to Stapledon are in his papers at the University of Liverpool, and were not included in her Collected Letters); and also because it shows so clearly how open Woolf was to science fiction. When it came to literature, she had no prejudices. She read widely and her judgment was superb. And so I am confident that if she were reading today, she would be reading science fiction along with everything else. And she would still be "greatly interested, and elated too" - because British science fiction is now in a golden age. (Robinson 2009: 46)

I wonder what else could be stored away there.

The explanation is multiple and complex. H. G. Wells and Stapledon gave things a tremendous start, of course. Then the weird, alpha-and-omega dichotomy of Arthur C. Clarke and J. G. Ballard - Clarke with his cheery leap to the stars, Ballard with his apocalyptic introversion - created between them an immense artistic space. (Robinson 2009: 46)

Did Wells and Stapledon set British science fiction on a different footing than colleagues in America?

Schneider, Jean 2011. The question "Are we alone?" in different cultures. Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union 5(S260): 213-217. DOI: 10.1017/S1743921311002316 [cambridge.org]

The question of extraterrestial life in the literature since the Greeks has been compiled in the remarkable books "The Extraterrestial Life Debate 1750-1900 - The Idea of a Plurality of Worlds from Kant to Lowell" (Crowe 1986) and "The Extraterrestial life debate, antiquity to 1915" (Crowe 2008). They are a must on this topic. They represent an almost exhaustive compilation of all authors having expressed an opinion on this debate. (Schneider 2011: 213)

The first one is available in parts on Google Books. The second can be read online via ProQuest.

Another curiosity is that, while the debate has increased in intensity among the scientific community at the end of the 19th century, no philosopher after Schopenhauer was interested in this subject. Only C.S. Peirce and W. James did vaguely mention the question of extraterrestial life. This is strange because several philosophers at the beginning of the 20th century, such as Husserl, Cassirer, Wittgenstein, Bergson, were well aware of the scientific developments of their time. To me it remains a mystery. It cannot be explained by ignorance: many novelists like Charles Cros, H.G. Wells, A. Strindberg, Marconi, Stapledon and Tristan Bernard did contribute to an outreach of the extraterrestial life debate in the general culture. Only in the second half of the 20th century Paul Watzlawick, from the Palo Alto school in sociology, addressed seriously the question of communication with extraterrestials (Watzlawick 1976). (Schneider 2011: 214)

Peirce has a weird habit of showing up in unexpected places.

There seems to be an apparent exception in Jewish literature: Moses Maimonides (circa 1135 - c. 1204) in the "Guide for the Perplexed" says:
"The whole mankind at present is existence [...] and every other species of animals, form an infinitesimal portion of the permanent universe [...] it is of great advantage that man should know his station, and not erroneously imagine that the whole universe exists only for him" (Chapter XII p. 268)
But Maimonides was a European Jew living in Córdoba (Spain). He knew well ancient Greeks' work and participated in the cultural atmosphere also represented by Michael Scot (1175-1235) and Albertus Magnus (1193-1280) for instance who were among the Middle Age philosophers supporting the idea of extraterrestial life. (Schneider 2011: 214)

Spinoza was into Maimonides. I wonder if he's included in those compendiums.

Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950), a British psychologist, envisaged communication with extraterrestial in his "Last and First Men" (Stapledon 1930). (Schneider 2011: 213, footnote)

A hwat?

As such, it opened the possibility of extra-polation, the possibility of transfering to distant objects characteristics of objects within our reach, like harboring life for "other worlds". (Schneider 2011: 215)

I've met this term so much recently but I guess I didn't have a straightforward definition at hand.

Gunn, James 2005. Tales From Tomorrow. Science & Spirit 16(4): 66-69. [gale.com]

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the themes sounded by Shelley and her contemporaries were echoed in Jules Verne's tales of exploration and in H. G. Wells' warnings of the cultural hubris preceding sudden downfall. Electronics entrepreneur Hugo Gernsbeck saw the new literature, which he termed "scientification," as a way of sparking an interest in science and technology among young readers. In 1926, he launched Amazing Stories, the first magazine devoted to science fiction. In it (and [|] in the magazine Wonder Stories, which appeared five years later), he published, as he explained in the inaugural issue, "the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story - a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision." The future, in Gernback's works, belonged to those who could understand science and put it to use - although villains also could twist science to their own nefarious ends. (Gunn 2005: 66-67)

Science fiction was meant to be "prophetic" almost from the beginning.

While there were few science fiction books to speak of until 1946, what evolved through magazines like Gernsback's was a literature of ideas and, more important, a literature of change and anticipation. As a Darwinian fiction that has at its heart a belief in the adaptability of the human species, science fiction itself naturally evolves - and, indeed, science fiction is at its best when it is most innovative. At least for a time, a belief in the power of rationality and the survival - even the dominance - of the human species underpinned most works of science fiction. (Gunn 2005: 67)

It doesn't look to me like there were so very few science fiction books in that era. Perhaps I should start keeping track of the earliest ones.

In some science fiction works, human beings transcend their limitations, often with the help of special powers and new abilities. Stanley Waterloo's The Story of Ab and Jack London's Before Adam, both of which were published around the turn of the twentieth century and tell of humanity's first evolutionary steps, are early examples of stories of transcendence. W. Olaf Stapledone expanded on the theme with Last and First Men, a 1930 work that traces the future history of humanity through 2 billion years and seventeen evolutionary races. Humanity emigrates to Venus and finally to Neptune, where it faces its final doom with dignity and the hope of casting human spores upon the solar wind. (Gunn 2005: 69)
  • Waterloo, Stanley 1897. The Story of Ab; A Tale Of The Time of The Cave Men. Chicago: Way & Williams. [Internet Archive]
  • London, Jack 1907. Before Adam. New York: The Macmillan Company. [Internet Archive]

Cirkovic, Milan M. 2007. Review of Natural History by Justina Robson. Journal of Evolution and Technology 16(1): 167-170. [jetpress.org]

But as the millions of years go by, so too, if we may judge the future by the past, will humanity as we know it ultimately yield place to some other animal form? What form? Whence evolved? We cannot say. But some Casmic Intellect, watching the mature capacities of this unknown form, will almost certainly judge it to be more highly evolved, of greater value in the scheme of things, than ourselves. On Earth man has no permanent home; and if, as I believe, absolute values are never destroyed, those which humanity carries must be preserved elsewhere than on this globe. (Ernest W. Barnes, 1933: 503)
Rare are the books where an excerpt from a philosophical or scientific tract, like the one quoted above, can be regarded as almost a spoiler of the intricate and densely woven literary plot. (Cirkovic 2007: 167)

Hot damn. Sadly inaccessible:

  • Barnes, Ernest William 1933. Scientific Theory and Religion, Gifford Lectures 1927-1929. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Barnes, the Bishop of Birmingham, was a distinguished mathematician, theologian and an early futurist, whose prescient ideas about cosmic evolution are closely related to the similar ideas of his more famous contemporaries, such as H. G. Wells, O. Stapledon, J. B. S. Haldane or K. E. Tsiolkovsky. (Cirkovic 2007: 170)

The others are already familiar names. The last one is Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.

  • Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin Eduardovich 1960. The Call of the Cosmos. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. [Internet Archive]
The Forged are still human, at least legally, but they are also unequivocally Other. Many are animal based: arachnids, hive-minded insectoids or avians (like one of the three main characters, an unconventional Forged engineer named Roc [|] Handslicer Corvax). Others are vast spaceships. Between these are hybrids, like the shuttle Ironhorse AnimaMekTek Aurora, "a smooth blue oval with a long, graceful tail like a gigantic airborne manta ray" (p. 64), and beyond all of them are the Gaiaforms. These are, vast creatures designed to carry out the megaengineering terraforming tasks that have rendered the Moon and Mars habitable. (Cirkovic 2007: 167-168)

Almost like Stapledon's Eighteenth Men.

The title of the book is itself a delightful, multilayered provocation: Robson takes a half-forgotten term that encompassed much of what we now call the earth and life sciences, together with some aspects of astrobiology and planetary science, and makes it a symbol of the unity between cosmological, biological and cultural evolution. (Cirkovic 2007: 168)

These categories again. (cf. Dick 2009: 579)

Natural History belongs to a sub-genre of science fiction that might be called "the transcendence novel". For classic prototypes, think of Clarke's Childhood's End and the Strugatsky brothers' The Ugly Swans. Egan's Distress and Schild's Ladder, Vinge's A Fire upon the Deep, Baxter's Destiny's Children trilogy, and Schroeder's brilliant Lady of Mazes are more recent work with the same theme. (By contrast, Wright's Golden Transcendence fails to join to this select club; it is more of an anti-transcendence novel, since it shows the reemergence of some all-too-human weaknesses and demerits in a "golden age".) Overarching all of these is the mighty cathedral of their great forebear, Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930). (Cirkovic 2007: 168)

Noted.

All in all, Robson's book is a worthy addition to the small library of novels that give serious and careful consideration to the ramifications of a Stapledonian vision of humanity's cosmic evolution. Natural History is not perfect, but it provides an enjoyable and colorful journey. If you are interested in the fate of humankind and what Georges Lemaitre called the "searching of souls as well as of spectra", you'll feel welcome on this lyrical voyage. (Cirkovic 2007: 170)

Not bad.

Baxter, Stephen 2003. Baby Boomers: Writers and Their Origins. Science Fiction Studies 30(3): 477-482. [JSTOR]

I wrote down my first real science fiction story in 1973, at the age of sixteen. Called "Barrier," it is a Fermi paradox story, with vague hints at Clarke-Stapledon uplift. Everybody dies in the end - I was just sixteen. This first story was thoroughly soaked with the concern about which I'm still writing now. (Baxter 2003: 477)

What's that?

While before I had simply been engrossed by Mike Noble's marvelously drawn Fireball XL5, now I started to see how the TV21 editors had tried to join up their raw material into a coherent, interconnected future history. It was a bit rickety, but it worked. I think this was my first introduction to the central rhetorical power of science fiction: these aren't just fantastic dreams; the future may not be like this, but it could be. I suspect it's no surprise that I would go on to develop my own future history. (Baxter 2003: 478)

The Possible Reality Principle, again.

The stuff you discover at about that age, as you take conscious control of your interests, seems crucial. At twelve - having had his mind expanded by a book on Atlantis, and by Verne, and by a copy of Wells's War of the Worlds (1898) which he read surreptitiously at his local W.H. Smith's - Clarke himself discovered Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930) in the Minehead Public Library. When he was thirteen he found in W.H. Smith's window David Lasser's non-fiction book The Conquest of Space (1931), which he badgered his Aunt Nellie to buy. These books would, of course, set the pattern of Clarke's career. (Baxter 2003: 480)

So specific. Too specific?

Cocks, Doug 2004. Quo vadis Homo sapiens? Futures 36(10): 1139-1145. DOI: 0.1016/j.futures.2004.03.012 [sciencedirect.com]

Supposing we survive the next thousand years, will we eventually go extinct as most species do or will we evolve into a new species with which one might empathise? Or into a whole lineage of species as in Olaf Stapledon's gerat sci-fi novel, Last Men, First Men? And, supposingwe continue to evolve, will that new species or its descendants survive the death of the sun as an energy and light source in five billion or so years? Not to mention a clutch of other cosmic challenges, from asteroids to 55 hour days. Beyond that, there is the ultimate question as to if, when and how the universe will end and whether, in some sense, life might best that challenge. (Cocks 2004: 1139)

How would we best that challenge? By hopping to a younger universe?

Even the hardest of sciences is wary of making sharp predictions nowadays and multiple scenarios of plausible possible futures are the future-gazer's primary tool. Scenarios are no more and no less than thoughtful hypotheses which time will test. Knowing what has happened in the deep to near past, and perhaps why, informs the scenariographer's choice of what to ask about the long future and to suggest both optimistic and pessimistic answers. (Cocks 2004: 1140)

"Scenariographer" gives about 87 results. Did you mean scenographer?

Politically, it looks as though we will have to live through another century of power politics, one in which America's struggle to strengthen its economic, cultural and political dominance will be increasingly challenged. (Cocks 2004: 1140)

Not wrong.

Shrugging and moving on, the good news for the third millenium, the next thousand years, is that it would be surprising to see the extinction of Homo sapiens. However, the millennium does contain the seeds of two 'worst case scenarios'. One is runaway global warming and climate disruption. The other is a rapid start to the next ice age, even as we exhaust the world's supplies of fossil energy, including uranium. Already, the 12 000 year inter-glacial we are enjoying is the longest of the last million years. (Cocks 2004: 1141)

So it might become either too hot or too cold.

Perhaps what elites really fear is that making social goals explicit invites dissection of both their inherent worthiness and the speed at which they are being approached. There is also a fear of naïve utopianism with its 3000 years of visions of societies pursuing ideal end-states which are foreseen to remain unchanged once achieved. (Cocks 2004: 1142)

Human nature is too fluid for a stagnant social state, etc.

Yet, there is something lacking. Making big plans and implementing demanding programs requires more time and knowledge than we will ever hvae. If people are to jump the cracks that will appear in the best laid plans, they will ned to be buoyed by passion and enthusiasm. And for that they will need to know what story they are part of. History and the historical sciences offer Darwin's children a 'creation myth', but where is the 'destiny myth' in modern secular societies? What is the role of the lineage in the unfolding evolutionary play? (Cocks 2004: 1144)

I know of one such myth-maker.

Herrick, James A. 2009. Sci-Fi's Brave New World. Christianity Today, February 6: 20-25. [christianitytoday.com]

Despite these far-out scenarios, viewers don't leave movies such as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Hancock, X-Men, and Contact - or television programs such as The X-Files or Heroes - scratching their heads in confusion. We are intrigued, but not surprised. Why? Because stories of advanced extraterrestials, ancient human-alien contact, superior intelligences roaming the universe, and emerging super-races have grown familiar through repeated exposure. Thanks to the longstanding efforts of a wide range of artists, popular writers, and even scientists, we immediately recognize intelligent aliens and advanced humans. We now see space and the future as sources of hope. (Herrick 2009: 21)

"Repeated exposure" another aspect to consider. How exposed were the contemporary readers of O.S. to the ideas he put forth?

The culture-shaping force of science fiction storytellers may be more significant and more widespread than we imagin. That's because they trade in myth. By myth, I mean a transcendent story that helps us make sense of our place in the cosmos. This common definition makes the Christian gospel, as C.S. Lewis suggested, "God's myth" - not because it is fiction, but because it is a story that gives ultimate meaning. We live in an age in which new myths, born mostly of science-fueled imaginations, are crafted and propagated at an unprecedented rate. (Herrick 2009: 21)

Quotable. O.S. set out to intentionally craft a new myth.

Recently deceased scientists and science fiction authors Sir Arthur C. Clarke captured a generation of readers with his spellbinding visions of the future. The English myth-maker built on the foundation of elder countrymen such as H. G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon. Clarke's early short story "The Sentinel" (1948) and novel Childhood's End (1953) set humanity in a cosmos controlled by evolution and advanced aliens. But his mesmerizing 1968 collaboration with Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey, revealed Clarke's force as a religious visionary. In that story, the new humanity arrives as an embryonic god floating in space, contemplating the planet of its origin. (Herrick 2009: 22)

I guess this mere mention of the Clarke-Stapledon connection will become a pattern.

Science fiction is important to scientists interested in transcendent themes such as the design and purpose of the cosmos and the future of humanity. Dyson, a devoted reader of Stapledon, writes, "Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams." Ironically, the universe that science stripped of the supernatural is being resupplied with deities and redemptive purposes by science fiction writers and moviemakers. Apparently, we cannot do without myths. (Herrick 2009: 23)

The design and purpose of the cosmos in SM and the future of humanity in L&FM. What are "redemptive purposes"?

Recent polls indicate that a majority of American expect human contact with extraterrestials during this millennium. Moreover, we anticipate that the aliens will be "friendly" and "superior." Major scientific figures, including Nikola Tesla, Stephen Hawking, Francis Crick, and Carl Sagan, among others, have popularized their ideas. (Herrick 2009: 23)

Disclosure incoming sometime in the next 976 years...

Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950), a philosopher by training, wrote science fiction in the 1930s and 1940s that some consider the most masterful even penned. In Star Maker (1937), this Englishman placed humanity on a cosmic evolutionary journey that ends in near divinity. In Last and First Men (1930), he portrayed the possibility of genetic engineering. Odd John (1935) told the story of a post-human vanguard of highly evolved, inordinately intelligent children. Stapledon believed we needed a new mythology for the dawning technological age. At times, he even cast himself as a mystic with an urgent spiritual message. His influence on science fiction writers such as Sir Arthur C. Clarke, as well as scientists such as Freeman Dyson, was profound. (Herrick 2009: 23)

A decent summary.

Kurzweil's vision squares with that of earlier transhumanists such as biologist Sir Julian Sorell Huxley. Freeing our thinking from present biological limitations is "an essentially spiritual undertaking." (Herrick 2009: 24)

Julian Huxley was a transhumanist?

Respected physicist Freeman Dyson (b. 1923) acknowledges Stapledon's impact on his thinking. Indeed, Dyson's imagined future of humans' limitless evolutionary advancement and technological development is much like Stapledon's. Dyson's speculative proposals - most notably, creating a vast sphere to capture a star's energy to fuel our future - have sometimes shown up in science fiction narratives. In Imagined Worlds (1997), Dyson speculates that humanity will continue to evolve, perhaps into separate groups, including ones that are part machine. Disagreements may arise, but space is vast enough to accommodate us all. (Herrick 2009: 24)
  • Dyson, Freeman J. 1998. Imagined Worlds. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. [Internet Archive]
Controversial Princeton biologist Lee M. Silver (b. 1952) imagines a human future in which present biology is not destiny. What we are now is not what we shall become. Boundaries separating species are largely linguistic and moral constructions. Restrictions on human enhancement research - including cloning - reflect the lingering effects of ancient religious taboos. The word eugenics may scare people, but he believes it points to a hopeful use of science: human enhancement. Perhaps a new term is needed: reprogenetics, the blending of reproductive and genetic technologies. We already alter our bodies technologically in a variety of ways, and there is no good reason to obstruct the arrival of new enhancement technologies. So his argument goes. In Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will Transform the American Family (1998) and Challenging Nature: The Clash of Science and Spirituality at the New Frontiers of Life (2006), Silver argues for radical openness to a new humanity. We must take charge of our own evolution. His scientific projections complement Stapledon's mythic vision of an ever-changing, ever-progressing human race. (Herrick 2009: 25)

Ah, one of the Third Men already living among us!

The biblical account of human origins and purpose, of our predicament as well as our redemption, and of the nature and purpose of the cosmos we inhabit, is emotionalyl, spiritually, and rationally more satisfying than modern myths featuring aliens, starships, divine evolution, hidden knowledge, and biomechanical post-humanity. (Herrick 2009: 25)

[Citation needed]

Concerned about the growing influence of writers like Stapledon and the popular scientist J. B. S. Haldane, Lewis crafted his trilogy for readers whose spiritual hope was being turned to contemplate the grandeur of a fresh Creation and the terrible potential of a catastrophic rejection of divine protection. (Herrick 2009: 25)

More evidence that Haldane might have been cool.

Fogg, Martyn J. 2000. The ethicas dimensions of space settlement. Space Policy 16(3): 205-211. DOI: 10.1016/S0265-9646(00)00024-2 [sciencedirect.com]

Mars raises the questions of the rights and wrongs of the enterprise more forcefully because: (a) Mars may possess a primitive biota; and (b) it may be possible to terraform Mars and transform the entire planet into a living world. (Fogg 2000: 205)

Dubious but not impossible.

One of the unique features of the human species is the ability of its individuals both to imagine and articulate future possibilities. The age-old dream of space travel, for example, is now a reality. The natural extension of this dream has it that where humans can travel and explore, they might also settle and so the idea of space settlement has never been far behind that of travel. Living somewhere else but Earth has been a theme in the space literature as far back as the writings of Tsiolkovskii and, if the space program can be said to have a purpose beyond that of exploration, this purpose is occasionally articulated in terms of settlement, such as in 1986 when the US National Commission on Space stated its conclusion that the proper long-lange ambition of the US civilian space program should be to establish free societies on new worlds "from the highlands of the Moon, to the plains of Mars". (Fogg 2000: 205)

Grand opener. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky has already passed through here (cf. Cirkovic 2007: 170, above).

This concept of engineering habitable worlds out of barren ones is known as terraforming. The concept first appeared in Olaf Stapledon's fictional tour de force Last and First Men in 1930, and was given its name by Jack Williamson in a short story Collision Orbit in 1942. Sagan, in 1961, was the first scientist to speculate about terraforming in the pages of a technical journal, nad by 1976 NASA had published the proceedings of a workshop examining the feasibility of terraforming Mars. (Fogg 2000: 206)

Another first for Olaf.

The mining of asteroids when there are so many, or quarries on the Moon when it is already so bleak, or settlement in empty space provoke few moral reflections; but the biological transformation of an entire world makes people sit up and think - to confront similar questions to those we are saking of our relationship with the Earth. We are increasingly seeing the need for an ethical relationship with our planet: should we be thinking similarly with respect to the extraterrestial environment? (Fogg 2000: 206)

No, lets destroy our planetary biosphere and go extinct with it. That's what good "gardeners" do. They poison the area and then die of the fumes.

An early attempt to remedy this conceptual deficiency occurred at a multidisciplinary conference 'Environmental Ethics and the Solar System', held at the University of Georgia in 1985. The proceedings, with the varying views of space technologists, astronomers, philosophers, ecologists, lawyers and theologians were later published, but represented purely initial explorations in the subject rather than a consensus prescription for the future. This would be premature, but the approach is correct - since a cosmocentric environmental ethic aims to be proactive rather than reactive, it must proceed by thought experiment. (Fogg 2000: 206)
  • Hargrove, Eugene C. (ed.) 1986. Beyond Spaceship Earth: Environmental Ethics and the Solar System. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.
Rolston, an exponent of Preservationism, has therefore defined the uniqueness set as containing any object - alive or not - of "formed integrity", or "worthy of a proper name", generated by the "spontaneous construction" that arises from the playing out of the laws of nature. His prescription is that, "humans ought to preserve projects of formed integrity wherever found". Mars, and all its features - large and small - would be entitled protection within Rolston's ethic. Rocks would have rights on Mars.
To those who are bemused by this idea, Marshall (another cosmic preservationist) ripostes with the belief that intrinsic value is not imposed by human beings, but merely involve human recognition of value. To him, rocks also have a viewpoint that commands respect: existing in, "a blissful state of satory only afforded to non-living entities". With respect to Mars especially, Marshall advocates strict enforcement policies to preserve the planet in its existing, or 'natural' state. (Fogg 2000: 209)

Made me think of how in L&FM many millions of years of human activity have eroded the largest mountains down to mere hills. Should mountains have a right to exist?

To the zoocentrist, humans are unnecessary cruel to our fellow creatures; to the ecocentrist, we are seen on the one hand as nothing special, and on the other, uniquely arrogant and destructive. To the cosmic preservationist, the idea of letting loose such a wicked and cancerous species on the Universe at large is nothing short of an abomination. (Fogg 2000: 209)

Enter: the zoo hypothesis (cf. McLaughlin 1983: 313).

Consider two scenarios where life is brought to a barren Mars and the differing reactions environmental philosophers might have to each. For the purposes of the first, let us propose that we discover that microbial life from Earth has already reached Mars, having arrived there at some time in the distant past by some sort of panspermia process. The possibility that bacteria could make such a journey across space was first proposed by Arrhenius a century ago, and has been revived in a different guise recently when it was realised that planets exchange pieces of themselves following impacts energetic enough to propel debris into space. Bacteria living in the middle of an ejecta fragment might be sufficiently shielded from heat shock and radiation to survive many years in transit and the final trauma of touchdown onto the new world. (Fogg 2000: 210)
  • Arrhenius, Svante 1908. Worlds in the Making: The Evolution of the Universe. Translated by H. Borns. New York; London: Harper & Brothers Publishers. [Internet Archive]

Porter, Roy 2001. Medical futures. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 26(1): 35-42. DOI: 10.1179/030801801679377 [tandfonline.com]

More hopefully, back in 1936, Sir Crisp English informed readers of the British Medical journal that within twenty years 'it will be common practice for you to visit patients by aeroplane'. 'Telephones with television will be in regular practical use', he predicted: 'the doctor will see on the television screen the tongues and tonsils of his patients; [...] he will also see his guineas, but will be unable to reach them.' (Porter 2001: 35)

Noted for O.S. obsession with flying. In his vision of the future, the Second Men would indeed have flown everywhere - including doctors visiting their patients in another skyscraper.

Raise the question of scientific utopias, and the historical tale is, by and large, clear cut. From the Bible and Plato through t othe Renaissance, dreams of ideal societies were neither futuristic - they were rooted in nostalgic fantasies of a lost golden age - nor were they high science and high tech. For Sir Thomas More, what made for utopia - meaning, literally, 'nowhere' - was peace, equality, and justice, and these were the fruits of reason. (Porter 2001: 35)

Perhaps why the premodern utopia is no longer in fashion. Very few today would prefer a life without modern technology.

Optimism as to science's power to transform the world - in Bacon's words, for the 'glory of God and the relief of man's estate' - shines forth bright and clear in the writings of John Wilkins, Bishop of Chester and founder member of the Royal Society. Wilkins was sure great discoveries lay ahead, thanks in particular to the potential of mathematics and mechanics. His 'Essay towards a real character, and a philosophical language' (1668) looked to a universal language to 'repair the ruins of Babel', reunify speech, and ensure the speedy progress of knowledge. Pinning high hopes upon mechanical inventions for benefiting humankind, not least 'flying chariots' which would speed men to the moon, Wilkins radiated a noble optimism: 'there is an earnestness and hungering after [|] novelty, which dots still adhere unto all our natures; and it is part of that primitive image, that wide extent and infinite capacity at first created in the heart of man.' (Porter 2001: 35-36)

I've come across sufficiently many mentions of this work that I should add it to the list.

  • Wilkins, John 1668. An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language. London: S. A. Gellibrand. [Internet Archive | Google Books]
Faith in science's capacity to forge a better future became the lifeblood, of course, of the visions of progress typical of the Enlightenment. 'All knowledge will be subdivided and extended', declared that Dissenting polymath, Joseph Priestley, aware of the pedigree,
and knowledge, as Lord Bacon observes, being power, the human powers will, in fact, be increased; nature, including both its materials, and its laws, will be more at our command; men will make their situation in this world abundantly more easy and comfortable; they will probably prolong their existence in it, and will grow daily more happy, each in himself, and more able (and, I believe, more disposed) to communicate happiness to others. Thus, whatever was the beginning of this world, the end will be glorious and parasidiacal, beyond what our imaginations can now conceive.
Scientific and technological utopianism in this vein has continued, mediated through H. G. Wells and much of science fiction, right up to the present. (Porter 2001: 36)

Joseph Phlogiston Priestley wrote a political treatise?

  • Priestley, Joseph 1771. An Essay on the First Principles of Government: And on the Nature of Political, Civil, and Religious Liberty. London: J. Johnson. [Internet Archive]
Within a generation, however, the sanitarian receded from the utopian dream to be replaced by the eugenist. Harnessing evolutionism to eugenics, Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel 'The coming race' fantasised a society dominated by an elite possessed by 'vril-power' - the term was clearl a hybrid of 'will-power' and 'virile-power'. For his part, Francis Galton saw in eugenics the only way to head off national degradation. The state, Darwin's cousin suggested in his utopian fragment 'Kantsaywhere', should issue PG ('passed for genetics') certificates to those qualified to breed, while those who failed might be shunted off into celibate labour colonies. (Porter 2001: 37)

I have read of one but not the other. This "Kantsaywhere" was not finished. Excerpts can be read here (pp. 414-424).

Eugenics was also high on the agenda of J. B. S. Haldane's 'Daedalus: or science and the future' (1923), which proposed controlled breeding, facilitated by ectogenetic reproduction. Without eugenics, he warned, civilisation would collapse 'owing to the greater fertility of the less desirable members of the population in almost all countries'. 'Man's world' (1926), a novel by J. B. S.'s wife, Charlotte, looked to a Wellsian future in which politicians and philosophers had been superseded by an elite of scientists and eugenists. (Porter 2001: 38)

Okay, so Haldane might not have been that cool. This makes it sound like the original author of Idiocracy (2006).

Swift aside a long and honest tradition of thinking has cast the doctor as part of the problem not the solution, from the biblican 'physician, heal thyself', through to Shaw's dictum that the medical profession, like all others, is a conspiracy against the laity. Death and doctors have long been represented as being in partnership - or, in the jargon of the 1970s guru Ivan Illich, much illness is 'iatrogenic', that is, actually caused by doctors. In the light of such radical doubts, rather than dream of a society in which the physician is kind, visionaries have tended to imagine perfect health reigning in a society entirely free of them. (Porter 2001: 38)

This has been proven amply in recent years. Elderly overweight patients go to the hospital with mere shortness of breath or innocent lung infection and there the evil doctors give them the coronavirus and suffocate them to death with various masks, as they are wont to do.

A comparable conquest of the body, albeit by other means, was mooted in the twentieth century by another rationalist, the Communist crystallographer J. D. Bernal, who looked forward to a time when 'Bodies [...] would be left far behind.' The godless Bernal's utopia was predicated upon an antipathy to the body. The limbs were essentially parasites, consuming nine-tenths of the worker's energy, and there was 'blackmail' in the maintenance and exercise the body needed to prevent disease, with the higher and nobler organs wearing themselves out meeting the physiological needs of those essentially wasteful appendages. Much as for Godwin, man's true destiny lay in loftier and ever more exacting thought, and the body was holding him back. All that must change.
Published in 1929, Bernal's 'The World, the Flesh, and the devil' confronted 'the three enemies of the Rational Soul' and showed how science would vanquish them. Biology would correct bodily defects, psychology would manage man's 'desires and fears, his imagination and stupidities', while physics would tame 'the massive, unintelligent forces of nature', thereby conferring Promethean powers upon man. Gratefully drawing on the ideas advanced by Haldane in his 'Daedalus', Bernal predicted for the man of the future the casting off of the redundant and obselescent body so as to ensure a secular immortality for the intellect. First, he was willing to accept, man would enjoy (Ref. 27, p. 45)
anything from sixty to a hundred and twenty years of larval, unspecialized existence - surely enough to satisfy the advocates of the natural life. In this stage he [...] can occupy his time (without the conscience of wasting it) in dancing, poetry and love-making, and perhaps incidentally take part in the reproductive capacity. Then he will leave the body whose potentialities he should have sufficiently explored.
Thanks to a sequence of daring surgical operations, the unreconstituted physical body would then be abandoned, to be replaced by an artificial, purely intellectual, existence, with the brain encased in a mechanical shell immersed in a constantly circulating fluid - Bernal's idea of Heaven (Ref. 27, pp. 47-48):
Instead of the present body structure we should have the whole framework of some very rigid material, probably not metal but one of the new fibrous substnaces. In shape it might well be rather a short cylinder. Inside the cylinder, and supported very carefully to prevent shock, is the brain with its nerve connections, immersed in a liquid of the nature of cerebro-spinal fluid, kept circulating over it at a uniform temperature. The brain and nerve cells are kept supplied with fresh oxygenated blood and drained of de-oxygenated blood through their arteries and veins which connect outside the cylinder to the artificial heart-lung digestive system. [...] The brain, thus guaranteed continues awareness, is connected in the anterior of the case with its immediate sense organs, the eye and the ear - which will probably retain this connection for a long time.
And so forth. 'The new man must appear to those who have not contemplated him before as a strange, monstrous and inhuman creature', he cheerfully admitted, 'but he is only the logical outcome of the type of humanity that exists at present. [...] Normal man is an evolutionary dead end; mechanical man, apparently a break in organic evolution, is actually more in the true tradition of a further evolution.' ('Man will become merely a detached headpiece', commented a newspaper, reporting on Bernal's book: 'No More Sex!') (Porter 2001: 40)

Oh wow. Brain in a vat or head in a jar. Like in Futurama. I had no idea someone had taken Socrates' complaints about the body (in Apology) to such an extent.

  • Bernal, John Desmond 1929. The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd. [Internet Archive]
Such a vision of brain triumphant over bodies proved popular in the utopian thinking of the scientists of the first half of the twentieth century; it also dominates the science fiction of Bernal's contemporary Olaf Stapledon, whose novels were childhood favorites of John Maynard Smith. In 'Last and first men' (1930) and other futuristic fiction, Stapledon pictured great brains served by self-regulating pumps functioning in place of the heart, chemical factories serving as digestive organs, electric fans as lungs, optic nerves growing out along five foot long probosces with ears on stalks, and housed in forty foot diameter turrets, operating as the factories of mind. As any bookshop reveals, the genre continues today, notably in the concept of the cyborg. (Porter 2001: 41)

Exactly why Bernal caught me off goard. Evidently this idea was in the air. There's also H. P. Lovecraft's "The Fungi From Yuggoth" (written 1929-1930) and "The Jameson Satellite" by Neil R. Jones from 1931. The claim about Stapledon possibly originating the "cyborg" with his giant brains comes from here (p. 151 - "IV. The Long Vision of Olaf Stapledon"):

  • Armytage, W. H. G. 1968. Yesterday's Tomorrows: A Historical Survey of Future Societies. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. [Internet Archive | ESTER]

Eliot, Christopher 2009. Review of Darwinism and Its Discontents by Michael Ruse. Metaphilosophy 40(5): 702-710. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9973.2009.01596.x [wiley.com]

Yet, Ruse's plan for this book hardly resembles a mystery. Its twelve chapters have similar structures, and each arrives at essentially the same conclusion. Each opens with several gripes raised against Darwinism in various periods from its origin to the present, usefully citing and quoting their authors and proponents. Expressions of discontent are both historically contextualized and then treated with a philosophical eye to the strength of their conceptual challenges. Then, each gripe is systematically dispatched, and each chapter closes with cheerful assurance - no problem here! (Eliot 2009: 702)

This sounds quite appealing.

Trained as a philosopher, Ruse has rich and varied experience with Darwinism beyond philosophy. He has written an authoritative historical work on the Darwinian revolution (The Darwinian Revolution, 1979) and a comprehensive historical analysis of the concept of progress in evolutionary biology (Monad to Man, 1997), [...] (Eliot 2009: 702)
  • Ruse, Michael 1996. Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Internet Archive]
What the novels and plays discussed have in common is painting Darwinism as ugly or frightening as it applies to human beings and our well-being. Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872) warries that machines might evolve to take over the world; Ruse argues that this particular dystopia is predicated on a false Lamarckism. (Eliot 2009: 703)

I didn't know Erewhon was about that (haven't read it yet, but the things are heading I very well might).

George Bernard Shaw's play Back to Methuselah (1921) presents a disconcerting fantasy of a perfected state of humanity, prefaced by remarks aligning Darwin with the endorsement of odious capitalism and militarism. Shaw implicitly contrasts his own utopian fantasy with what he takes to be Darwin's. Ruse replies shrewdly: "Those who reject Darwinism because it does not support their vision of the future might [|] first stop and ask themselves what kind of future they really want" (266). (Eliot 2009: 703-704)

That was argued pretty convincingly on the basis of Darwin's Malthusian influences here. I now notice that one of Ruse's papers is the first one we were given to read in that course.

Images of human progress that flirt with social Darwinism (both enthusiastically and not so) appear in H. G. Well's Time Machine (1895), Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930), Frank Norris's Octopus (1901), and Ian McEwan's Enduring Love (1997). These novelists invoke the intertwined and sometimes conflicting ideas of progress, collectivity, determinism, and freedom that emerge from understanding ourselves as evolved and evolving as a group, and thus subject to alarming biological forces. Ruse's response to the various fears they advance is mainly to reject the close connection each forges between Darwinism and determinism. (Eliot 2009: 704)

Oh, nice. Ruse mentions Stapledon briefly here, in a chapter literally titled "Literature".

Hughes, James J. 2008. Back to the future: Contemporary biopolitics in 1920s' British futurism. Science & Society 9(S1): 59-63. DOI: 10.1038/embor.2008.68 [embopress.org]

However, it was in the English-speaking world of the early twentieth century when more far-reaching speculations - largely the science fiction of Herbert George Wells (1866-1946), Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950) and Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) - triggered an earnest debate about the use of science to shape human evolution. These fictional works were, in turn, inspired and motivated by the essays of John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (1894-1964), John Desmond Bernal (1901-1971), and the radical, political and scientific milieu in 1920s' England. (Hughes 2008: 59)

By now all of these names are familiar to me.

His military experiences left Haldane profoundly disillusioned, and he became convinced that human beings must use science and reason to improve every aspect of human life. He later commented that, "the scientific point of view must come out of the laboratory and be applied to the events of daily life. It is foolish to think that the outlook which has already revolutionized industry, agriculture, war and medicine will prove useless when applied to the family, the nation, or the human race" (Haldane, 1933). (Hughes 2008: 59)

Using science to improve society somewhat? The 1920s were a crazy time.

In 1923, Haldane gave a talk to the 'Heretics Club' at Cambridge University titled, Daedalus or Science and the Future, which was subsequently published, and triggeled an intense debate of his ideas. The title of his speech and the essay actually hinted at the importance of biology: according to Greek mythology, Daedalus was the king of Crete who bred a bull and a woman to make the Minotaur. (Hughes 2008: 59)

Some context.

Although science and technology do increase human powers for both good and evil, Haldane remained optimistic that such powers can be turned to the good to "bring mankind more and more together, to render life more and more complex, artificial and rich in possibilities." In his essay, he projected a prosperous future world society with clean and abundant energy, which would eventually be united under one government. (Hughes 2008: 59)

No, let's open more coal plants and wage national wars effectively over gas fields. Yeah!

He imagined a future democracy in which candidates for office would compete over who could make the next generation taller, healthier or smarter, or even over whether children should have prehensile tails. (Hughes 2008: 60)

The influence on Stapledon is palpable. Replace the prehensile tail with an astronomical eye and you have the Eighteenth Men.

As mentioned above, the speech by Haldane triggered an intense debate on posthumanity and the role of science and technology and the role of science and technology in improving mankind. Within a year, the British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) delivered a direct response to Daedalus titled, Icarus, or the Future of Science (Russell 1924; Rubin 2005), as part of a series of speeches sponsored by the Fabian Society under the title 'Is Civilization Decaying?' The arguments made by Russell reflected the tension within the Enlightenment tradition between optimism and pessimism about technology. For techno-optimists, such as Haldane, science, reason and technological progress were complements to social equality and individual liberty. For secular, left-wing pessimists, including Russell, science and technology would always add to the power of dominant classes and military machines. (Hughes 2008: 60)

More context. The title of Russell's Icarus is not unfamiliar.

Aldous Huxley was the brother of the biologist Julian Huxley, and both were friends of Haldane. Yet, where Julian enthusiastically endorsed the biofuturism of Haldane and went on to coin the term 'transhumanism' (Huxley 1957), Aldous was repelled by it. In his Brave New World - a direct response to the ideas of Daedalus - Aldous depicted a future of controlled reproduction, genetic engineering, neurotechnology and a world socialist state as an alienated hell (Huxley 1932). (Hughes 2008: 60)

Oh. Question answered!

Haldane wrote two more essays that can be regarded as sequels to Daedalus. The first was published in Harpers Magazine in 1927 as, The Last Judgment, a Scientist's Vision of the Future of Man (Haldane 1927; Adams 2000). Deeply influenced by the novels of Wells, Haldane argued that the further evolution of humanity will take place over millions of years, just as our evolution to this point took millions of years. He projected the creation of a united Utopian world, reshaped to satisfy human desires, over the next couple of million years. Disease is eliminated and average life expectancy is 3,000 years. Life is focused on friendships, music, art, eating, drinking and being merry. (Hughes 2008: 61)

Perhaps the source of Stapledon's lax casting of millions upon millions of years and increasingly extending the lifetimes of his subjects.

Similarly to the lunar insectile Selenite society in the Wells' novel, First Men in the Moon (Wells 1901), Haldane suggested that this Utopia would become stagnant. Our 'Lotus Eater' descendents would stop pursuing scientific discovery or space exploration. After 25 million years, people would even be indifferent to the impending destruction of all life on Earth owing to human exploitation of the rotation of the moon for energy. (Hughes 2008: 61)

See the many long languid absent-minded periods in L&FM.

The Christian fantasist Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) commented that the "brilliant, though to my mind depraved" vision of human enhancement and defeating death in the Last Judgment was a threat to Christianity (Lewis 1966; Adams 2000; [|] Green & Hopper 1974). Lewis responded with the Perelandra Trilogy, which comprises three science fiction novels set on Mars, Venus and Earth, and caricatured Haldane as the physicist Weston, who was possessed by Satan. (Hughes 2008: 61-62)

So, professor Weston was supposed to be Haldane, not Stapledon? (cf. Shelton 1995: 139, above)

At the other end of the spectrum was the philosopher Stapledon, who was immediately taken with the futurism in the Last Judgment, and wrote his own influential history of the next billions of years of human evolution: Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future (Stapledon 1930). His work described 17 distinct posthuman species succeeding 'Homo sapiens 1.0', who drive themselves to near extinction in apocalyptic warfare over a 100,000-year span. Some of the posthuman varieties include winged species, dwarves, giants and brains without bodies. (Hughes 2008: 62)

Yup, yup, yup.

After receiving his bachelor's degree in mathematics and science from Cambridge University in 1922, the 21-year-old Bernal began to work at the Davy-Faraday laboratory in London, UK, where he determined the structure of graphite in 1924. In the 1930s, he pioneered the use of X-rays to determine the structure of matter, thereby launching the field of microbiology. Rosalind Franklin, who first visualized the double-helix structure of DNA, studied the technique in the Bernal laboratory. When Bernal died in 1971, many Nobel laureates had been taught by him or influenced by his scientific work. (Hughes 2008: 62)

You crazy, brilliant bastard.

The 1939 essay Social Function of Science by Bernal is considered The first text on the sociology of science (Bernal 1939). (Hughes 2008: 62)
  • Bernal, John Desmond 1939. The Social Function of Science. London: George Routledge & Sons Ltd. [Internet Archive]
However, the essay by Bernal is best known for being the first explicit proposal of brain-computer interfaces and cyborgs. In the future, he wrote, humans would spend their first 120 years of life enjoying their organic bodies, until they reached sufficient maturity to transfer their brains to non-organic, cyborg bodies. Cyborg minds would be connected to each other through the 'ether' to form collectives capable of much more than isolated individuals. "Barriers would be down: feeling would truly communicate itself, memories would be held in common, and yet in all this, identity and continuity of individual development would not be lost." Eventually, he suggested, these cyborg 'hive' minds would evolve beyond bodies altogether. (Hughes 2008: 62)

So, a possible candidate for Stapledon's obsession with collective minds?

Shortly before his death, Haldane wrote a final essay, Biological Possibilities for the Human Species in the Next Ten Thousand Years, in which he expressed deep concerns about the threat of nuclear war and whether humanity has any future (Haldane 1963). Having lived to see Stalinism and fascism, Haldane was no longer as convinced of the desirability of world government as a solution to conflict, noting that the prospect of "a tyrant world state is equally sinister". However, he noted that, "a few centuries of Stalinism or technocracy might be a cheap price to pay for the unification of mankind". (Hughes 2008: 62)

Yeah... At least he was not blindly optimistic up till the end.

Haldane coined the term 'clone' and suggested that people with extraordinary abilities should be cloned. He also suggested that humans could acquire desirable animal traits through transgenic engineering. (Hughes 2008: 63)

The surprises just keep on coming.

Yet, as we see in this British episode of the 1920s, the biofuturists - Wells, Haldane, Stapledon and Bernal - surely recognize the dystopian possibilities; indeed, they are often the first ones to give warnings about them. Yet they also recognize the risks if humanity stays the way it is, and the unlikelihood that human evolution has halted or will stop. (Hughes 2008: 63)

I desperately needed this term. Excellent paper. J.B.S. Haldane's father, John Scott Haldane, too, deserves some looking into.

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