A talk Olaf Stapledon gave, apparently several times over, to Liverpool clubs and societies in the early 1930s — the title sheet lists the 1918 Club, the Soroptimists, the Headmasters at the Settlement, the Medical and Literary Society and the Forum Luncheon Club, but no date — re-set as an essay. The argument, structure, and emphases follow his manuscript notes sheet by sheet; the prose is editorial — connective sentences, examples, and asides in his manner that the notes do not contain. For exactly what is his, word for word, see the source-bounded reading edition; for his notes beside the reconstructed prose, the side-by-side reconstruction.
The title sheet lists, in Stapledon's own hand, five Liverpool bodies — 1918 Club; Soroptimists; Headmasters (Settlement); Medical + Literary Soc; Forum Luncheon Club — evidently the occasions before which versions of the talk were given. That is sheet evidence for multiple deliveries, but no sheet carries a date. The dating, c. 1932–1935, is internal-evidence inference, per the project's lecture concordance: Brave New World treated as current (1932), the American system "collapsing" (the Depression), Japan expanding, and no hint of the coming war as fact. The notes themselves suggest that at least one venue was a café — "Future of this building: not always a café", and the aside "as I sat down — thinking of this moment" — though which of the five bodies met there is not recorded. A diagonal jotting on the title sheet, "4.0 Davies", is unexplained.
The manuscript (Liverpool University Library OS/F13/33) is twelve sheets, several of them versos carrying afterthoughts keyed by insertion marks. A paler pencil supplies headings, page numbers and corrections — evidence of reworking, presumably across the listed deliveries, though the layers cannot be assigned. One heading, "Future of England", is struck (the England question returns on a later sheet) and is not voiced in this edition; the final sheet is a verso of compressed jottings carrying four disputed readings, quoted here with their alternatives recorded, and the file's archive stamp.
The argument opens with the audience's own imagined futures — bogeys (Bolshies in London, Brave New World, savagery, the next war, the Yellow Peril) and utopias — and brings the question home: the future of the very building, and of Liverpool as a port. Prophecy is dismissed in favour of the consideration of possibilities, "fascinating, educative (emotionally)", across three ranges: a near future of vital questions (will the world be better or worse; England no longer a great power "but what matter?"; America, Russia, the East; internationalism; culture); a middle future of one to ten thousand years, where extinction risks are listed — "atomic explosion / bad eugenics / lack of chemicals" — and power must come from tides or subatomic sources; and a far future in which "certainly not like us" is the one firm answer to "Will there be men?".
In the corpus the concordance uses this set three times: sheet 5's "let us eat drink + be merry", set beside the superman question, is the same hedonist shrug the sceptic of Humanism and Superhumanism raises at South Place in 1934; sheet 10's "bad eugenics" among the extinction risks is its eugenics thread's "capacity question in demographic key"; and sheet 11's "new intelligent species / or improved humanity ... brain — super intellect" stands as "the far-future superman as open biological question". The concordance's synthesis reads such club talks as carrying the whole futurist scaffolding, in a plain and almost cheerful register, before the 1934 lecture "added the worship".
What is not known: the date and order of the five deliveries; which manuscript layer served which; who "Davies" was; and what the final sheet's most compressed jottings — the disputed "1000 yrs r b a day" among them — were meant to say in full. The notes end in mid-material, without a summing-up sheet.
When we begin to talk about the future, most of us find ourselves thinking either of bogeys or of utopias. The bogeys are familiar enough: the Bolshies in London; the prospect held up by Brave New World; a relapse into savagery; the next war; the Yellow Peril. The utopias are familiar too: the Young Soviet League's world, perhaps, or a world run like a Ford factory, or a garden world. Bogey and utopia alike tell us more about the fears and wishes of the present than about the future itself.
This very building
So let us begin nearer home — with the future of this very building. It will not always be a café. The site may be cleared for something bigger. The place may be taken over by Americans; at some later time it may be used by Russians as a child-welfare centre, or by Japanese or Chinese. It may be destroyed by bombs. Or, without any drama at all, it may simply be allowed to fall to pieces.
Then consider the future of Liverpool — and the crossing of the Mersey. Liverpool will not always be a great port. Some day the port may be deliberately removed; or it may merely decay. The river may silt up, as the Dee has silted. The dock gates may fall to pieces and the buildings crumble.
We are repeatedly shocked by the reality of the past — by the discovery that things were once really otherwise. The real future will give shocks of precisely the same order. And some of them are just round the corner.
Why bother about foreseeing?
As I sat down just now, thinking of this moment, the obvious maxim occurred to me: "Let us eat, drink and be merry." We cannot possibly tell what will happen. Almost the only safe prediction is that the future will be utterly different. Is the whole inquiry useless, then?
No — but we must distinguish. Prophesying what will happen is futile. Considering what may happen is another matter: fascinating, and educative — educative, I mean, emotionally. It stretches the feelings to fit the facts.
For my purposes, three degrees of futurity. The near future: roughly the next hundred years — Waterloo is already more than a century behind us. The middle future: one thousand to ten thousand years — ten thousand years takes us back beyond Egypt. The far future: a million years and onward — a million years takes us back toward early man. And the questions proper to each are of different orders. Near: will England still be a world power? what of Russia? what of the family, and education? Middle: coal, oil, subatomic power? some huge cultural advance? Far: what will man himself be like? Extinct? Or super-man?
One near possibility deserves its own line: the end of capitalism. Capitalism and nationalism are incompatible; and of the two, I expect nationalism to be victorious — for we are still more tribal than self-seeking.
The near future: the vital questions
Let me quite deliberately enumerate the vital questions of the next hundred years.
First: will the world be better or worse? By "better" I mean politically unified; socially coherent, happy and rich; culturally more vital. By "worse" I mean civilisation breaking up in successive wars; a world without unity, or unified only in economic slavery, after the fashion of Brave New World; impoverished; degenerate. But the alternatives will not present themselves so neatly. The future may well be better-worse — better in some respects, worse in others.
Second: will England still be a great power? I see no possibility of it. Her peculiar advantage is over; she must lose her trade. But what matter? Let us think cosmopolitanly. England may be the better for it — compare Scandinavia: a quieter, more thoughtful people, perhaps, with a smaller population.
Third: will the United States become dominant, and its individualism spread over the planet? One can imagine an Americanised world — America is in Asia today. But the United States is now in the throes: financially its system is collapsing; culturally there is insincerity, graft, rackets — the universities not exempt; there is even talk of a kind of Balkanisation. The danger is that the world be infected by the defects of an Americanised civilisation rather than raised by its virtues.
Fourth: Russia. Will the present order last? Will it be modified toward capitalism, or overturned by counter-revolution? May there be an anti-Russian war? And behind these, the questions of population and of culture: the Americanisation of Russia — or the Russification of the world?
Fifth: the East. Japan is expanding, though the expansion will become stationary. India, with its population, must be reckoned with. And there is China, with a vast potentiality and a more sane mentality. A war of East and West cannot be ruled out.
Sixth: internationalism. Rival empires, or a world state? Nationalism may collapse — it is not an instinct, whatever the patriots say. But if culture declines, there will be more nationalism, not less.
Seventh, the cultural questions. What will be the influence of science — the influence Russell and Huxley have been debating? Or will science itself become more humane? What of religion — a new one, perhaps? What of the family, and the position of women? Will the people of the near future be free citizens or slaves; and if politically free, will they have free minds? And there are the technical questions besides.
The middle future
Pass now to the middle future — one to ten thousand years hence. At that distance all present states will have disappeared, and our present culture with them. Will there have been continuous progress? There is the possibility of extinction instead: my notes list an atomic explosion, bad eugenics, and the lack of essential chemicals. Oil and coal will be long gone; power must come from the tides or from subatomic sources; and there is the question of the ether, and of voyaging. Above all, what of human nature itself? Fundamentally the same? Improved — with two question marks? Or degenerate?
The far future
Finally, the far future: a million years and onward. The earth itself may remain much as it is now, unless it has been burnt; but there will be fluctuations of climate and shifts of the continents. Will there be men? Certainly not men like us. Things now move too fast for that — and they may move ever faster; or there may be long stagnation. Intelligence might pass to some new species; or humanity might be improved out of recognition: altered senses — better eyes; the hand perhaps no longer necessary; above all a transformed brain — a super-intellect, and a far higher power of coordination.
There is the opposite possibility too: the decay of the human stock, and some new dominant species arising — one is tempted to name the rat. Or the combining of human and animal stocks into a new species. And here the wider speculations crowd in, and my notes compress almost to shorthand: Spengler and the decay of cultures; Russia and the East, and Russian planning for the present and the far future; new worlds; whether our civilisation is unique. Much will turn on fertility, on the brain, on life on other planets, on the increase of population. Whatever happens — are we moving toward the domination of one people, one power? On these scales a thousand years may be a day, and a hundred years scarcely matter.
And the British future — what would be the finest British future? There is the Irish problem. Looking further out: whether Japan may ultimately be Sinified; whether there may arise a group consciousness; whether there may be an emotional advance. For the neurotic in us must be given a normal environment — aggressiveness needs its outlet; and nations, too, may suffer from something like neurosis. There my notes end — in mid-question, which is perhaps the only honest place for a talk on possible futures to stop.