Stapledon

"Lou, authors like Olaf Stapledon, who was a historian, knew that history has its ups and downs." "Steve, you know a return to Dark Ages is not impossible."

Olaf Stapledon wrote sci-fi about humanity being still essentially an ape, as evolution would unfold as a two-billion-year rollercoaster ride. It was written in 1930, before major pollution and thermonuclear weapons. Will humankind really have time to still evolve?

Historians, as Olaf Stapledon, acknowledge the ups and downs of history, and he, as other sci-fi writers, expounds on that very theme.

Olaf Stapledon takes his reader of the book Star Maker on a long astral journey through the universe with visits in strange farflung worlds.

In his book Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon speculated that some advanced civilizations elsewhere in this universe do not survive their experimentations with technology of advanced physics.

It is now the 26th of November of 2013. I am undecided if I am more like Arthur C. Clarke, Samuel R. Delany, Olaf Stapledon, Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet, or Larry Niven, but I prefer these scenarios depicted as futurology. Somewhere amongst them is the near truth.

In London, my hotel was near the Barbican Centre. A memorable event was eating delicious fish and chips wrapped in newspaper, which back home, North Americans could not replicate. My favourite Brits are Olaf Stapledon and J.R.R. Tolkien, respectively a sci-fi writer and a fantasy writer. I have surveyed the British Isles via satellite imagery, and a really interesting area is southwestern England, where there are quaint towns and hamlets.

Everybody has his or her own idiolect of each language that he or she knows. My own English idiolect is weird for some. In speaking, I choose a variety of accents, depending on the listener. When I speak English to Filipinos, I try to use a more Filipino-accented English, because it is easier for them to understand. When I speak to a Canadian or American, I shift to a more North American accent. In writing, I learned the American way until age 10 in the Philippines. From age 10 and above in Canada, I learned Canadian English writing, up to university level. My appetite for science fiction and fantasy books from both American and British authors has affected my writing style. Some Cantonese opine that my writing is British, and it reminds them of England. My philosophy is that English is an international language and its origin can be divorced from its essence, as the case, I think, also of Spanish and French. Ergo, I urge Cantonese to divorce the essence of English from its land of origin. My favourite English writers are the British sci-fi author Olaf Stapledon and the American inventor-philosopher Buckminster Fuller.

The idea of travelling through the universe astrally has intrigued me, as well as others, for some time. The Cluster series of novels by Piers Anthony and Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon are examples of astral travelling. Do Tibetan monks travel astrally? At least for a decade or more, I have been pondering about the fragility of the human body for deep space travel. Would transhumanism at least be necessary, the technological augmentation of the human body and mind? Or, would wholly mechanical entities with artificial general intelligence, or even uploaded human minds, do the job?

Reading books, specifically Last and First Men, as well as Star Maker, by Olaf Stapledon is really mind-blowing. Written in the 1930s, the books are really edutaining. I have never read other books coming close to Stapledon's. They are still relevant today. People underestimate the things that he wrote. His books are very revealing about society, civilization, the cosmos, and the possible future.