The Lectures, Readable

From the boy who refused arithmetic to loyalty to Man: obligation to the future argued from first feelings, in the early 1930s.

Worm — monkey — man — superman: the solar system surveyed for school audiences, and the great adventure that must go on.

For the 1918 Club, the Soroptimists and their neighbours: four possible futures, and the far-future superman as an open biological question.

The talk itself, re-set as an essay — the argument follows the notes sheet by sheet; the prose is editorial. The easiest way in.

Three questions for a literary audience — science's effect on literature, good and bad, and literature's function in a scientific culture. Delivered three times, 1937–1938.

Herd-mentality, individualism and the will for community — the 1934 material re-keyed for a political audience, ending on what comes after the trouble.

Britain's rise and decline, and the two policies — imperialism, or face the facts and build the New Jerusalem — breaking off mid-line on the unfinished choice.

The post-Munich sibling: “This Island — not British Imperialism”, a layman's synopsis for discussion, revised again in 1946.

Against the “end of the world” feeling: power without wisdom, the case for federation, and responsibility to posterity argued on the eve of the war.

Wartime: “I missed Hitler”, a flatly humanist definition of the good, and the plan for the world beyond him — the sharpest exhibit of the platform bifurcation.

Post-Hiroshima: war revolutionized, the case for organized control, and the cosmic-littleness close — cheap power, and the turn back to the Spirit.

Twelve years after the 1934 lecture, the sequel: agnostic piety, spirit as a Way of life, and “My view is Humanism Plus”.

What fiction is for, what science fiction can do, and the canal to Mars as bad science fiction — the craft lecture of a practitioner.

The one lecture surviving in Stapledon's own published prose: interplanetary travel as a question about what man is for — adapted from the JBIS text, with the discussion.

The latest-dated set in the archive: personality, the paranormal evidence, no faith founded on it — and the salute extended past the slaying of the cosmos.

What a forgotten 1934 lecture says to the age of AI — the project's public-facing essay, with manuscript figures.

One word's strange career: the ethical movement's enemy-word made a creed on its own platform, five rival supermen, and the movement that kept the futurist and lost the worshipper — the short version of the Superhumanisms monograph.