"Olaf Stapledon - Bio" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stapledon Olaf)

Aside from the difficulty of following the thread of Stapledon ‘s own argument, it is sometimes
nearly impossible to determine what he is attributing to Whitehead and what to himself, or even
to be certain which parts of Whitehead’s position he is for and which against. What Stapledon
appears to be saying is that nothing is what it seems to be, that even the most definite objects
may be subject to illusion. An object may not be hard, for instance, simply because it offers
resistance to pressure. It may not be round because we perceive it to be circular. It is not in a
definite place because physical "evidence" appears to locate it there. He concludes:
An event, if you mean by an event a mere position or volume in a space-time system, obviously is
simply located. But such a mere locality is highly abstract. If you mean a factor in the substantial activity
which is nature, having passage, contributing character to the universe and prehending it, the event is not
simply located. Its location and shape is an abstract from it.

The Journal of Philosophical Studies was a good forum, for among its contributors were
names as internationally renowned as Julian Huxley, Bertrand Russell and Harold Laski.
However, Olaf Stapledon was not destined to spend much more time tilting with other
philosophers. Following the publication of his next book, A Modern Theory of Ethics (Methuen,
1929), which had only a very small circulation and made little impact, he found a new avenue of
expression. This was fiction. The result was Last and First Men, published by Methuen of
London on October 23, 1930. Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, Inc., probably anticipating
their own early publication of an American edition, took out an ad interim copyright on the book
in 1930. The American edition was published March 23, 1931; it contains a brief foreword by the
author not found in the British edition. Here Stapledon admits: "I have imagined the triumph of
the cruder sort of Americanism over all that is best and most promising in American culture.
May this not occur in the real world!" The firm of Cape and Smith was noted for the quality of
its authors, having been one of the first publishers of William Faulkner and having on their lists
such names as D.H. Lawrence, Robert Graves, Sigmund Freud and Evelyn Waugh, and their
books commanded careful attention.
The book sold better in England than in the United States (going into four printings), but the
reviews by some of the most important literary critics in the United States were nothing short of
superlative. There seems little question that the reviews of Last and First Men determined the
future direction of Stapledon’s life. He would become a full-time writer and a lecturer part-time.
He was fortunate inasmuch as he did not have to depend on his writing for a livelihood.
 How did he conceive Last and First Men? In a later interview he said: "The general plan of the
book came to me in a flash as I was watching seals from the cliffs of Anglesea. Afterwards, I
simply pumped my scientific friends for all the information I needed and settled down to write
the story from the viewpoint of a man living in the distant future." These friends were, of course,
professors at the University of Liverpool.
While there is no reason to doubt that the idea of writing the book was born as Stapledon said,
the format of the narrative was probably influenced by other sources. I should like to suggest
several titles that by subject matter and availability may well fall into this category.
The earliest of these is Edgar Allan Poe’s Eureka (1848). This scientific, philosophical and
mystical work is frequently ignored as an insane aberration of Poe’s final descent into
drunkenness, near madness, and death. Reading it requires intense concentration and is anything
but good entertainment. Stapledon, accustomed to the numbing boredom of many philosophical
works, would have had the patience to read it carefully.
Poe presents the concept that the entire universe is God and every living thing part of Him. If
there is not a great central body around which our universe revolves, there eventually will be one
because contraction into a series of central bodies will take place. Poe believes that the universe
had a central origin, and that there were many "big bangs" and many universes. He suggests that
life exists on many worlds, the presence of which we might not recognize even if we were to