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

visit them. Most important, Poe maintains that as the universe contracts, all the diverse beings on
billions of worlds will gradually lose their sense of personal consciousness and achieve a
universal consciousness in a cosmic mind. This last is of course the general theme of the later
Star Maker and is repeated in many of Stapledon’s books, both fiction and nonfiction.
Two later novels of possible influence are William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the
Borderland (1908;reprinted 1921) and S. Fowler Wright’s The Amphibians (1924;expanded into
The World Below, 1929). The first postulates an intelligent central sun in a universe made up of
sentient cosmic objects. The latter has a memorable presentation of humanoid creatures who
have evolved as far above man as man has above the apes. An actual connection between Wright
and Stapledon has already been cited.
Possibly more influential than any of these was "The Last Judgement: A Scientist’s Vision of
the Future of Man," included in Possible Worlds and Other Essays (1927) by J.B.S. Haldane, not
included in the American edition. This details a chronological history of the next forty million
years, in a very brief, almost synoptic fashion. There are so many concepts and touches that echo
Last and First Men that a full description of the work seems warranted.
The future history of mankind is being broadcast to children on Venus, forty million years
hence. The story starts with the creation of the planets by the passage of another star very near
our sun. Evolution on the earth produces man. Civilization appears. Man burns up all the fossil
fuels and turns to water, the winds and the sun for energy. Synthetic food is invented. The
average lifespan grows to 3,000 years, and the population multiplies. Tidal power becomes the
primary source of energy. Parts of the planet are artificially heated, continents are remodeled,
and culture reaches a pinnacle of development. As a result of the elimination of natural selection,
human evolution ceases.
Civilization eventually begins to stagnate, so by the year eight million the moon is reached by
multi-staged rockets. Large metallic sails make it possible to navigate in space by the sun’s
radiation pressure. Mars is reached before the year ten million, but its inhabitants annihilate the
expeditions. Half a million years later the first successful landing is made on Venus.
 As the year eighteen million approaches the earth’s rotation has slowed and the days and
nights are a month long. All icecaps had previously melted, but now new glaciers begin to form.
The cold kills most life on the planet other than man. Experiments begin to adapt the human
body for existence on Venus, and eventually a new species capable of subsisting on one-tenth the
oxygen required on earth is developed. All Venusian life is systematically destroyed, and
alterations to make the planet habitable for the new humans are made. These grow greatly in
mental power and evolve two new senses, one of which places each individual in telepathic
communication with every other, creating a communal brain and consciousness which cannot be
blocked by the individual. The other sense permits the individual to receive, selectively,
messages involving art, music, literature, and philosophy.
This evolution is so swift that those in the last expedition from earth to land on Venus cannot
mate successfully with the altered humans. A completely new species has been created. By the
year thirty-six million gravitational shearing forces disintegrate the moon, and its fragments form
a ring around the earth like Saturn’s. The heat generated is so great that mankind has to retreat to
caverns beneath the planet’s surface. After the ring has stabilized earth is recolonized.
Finally it is proposed to settle the planet Jupiter, and breeding begins to create a stumpy,
dwarfed human race of immense physical strength. If this is successful, attempts will then be
made to colonize the outer planets. It is also foreseen that within 250 million years the solar
system will pass into a region of space where stars are far denser, and efforts can be made to
populate inhabitable planets there, even though trips as long as 100,000 years would be needed.
The prognostication ends with the sentence: "And there are other galaxies."
In an epilogue, Haldane states that man must work not only for individual happiness but for
the good of the community and, by extension, the race; he must plan cosmically, millions of