¶9As 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 years into the future. Despite its vast scope, "The Last Judgement" runs to less than 7,000 words. Haldane was already a scientist of renown, having made and being destined yet to make major contributions to the science of genetics. To the general public he was even better known as a controversial popularizer of science with leftist leanings. His penchant for science fiction never left him. He enjoyed Last and First Men and wrote its author, "Where have you been hiding all this time?" As late as 1958 he sent a letter of enthusiastic praise to Fred Hoyle for the latter’s novel The Black Cloud, being particularly delighted with its realistic presentation of scientists and the concept of intelligent clouds. Once convinced of his true calling, Olaf Stapledon began to reduce his intensive lecturing and special classes to provide ample time for writing. This meant he would be in the house and underfoot even more than previously. Fortunately for his wife he proved to be one of the most amiable of men, unflaggingly even-tempered, rarely raising his voice, and seemingly interested in everything, whether related to his work or not. Visitors were welcome and treated with courtesy. Olaf also had the knack of perceiving their personal concerns and involving himself with them. He was not only considerate of his family but of virtually everyone he met. Agnes Stapledon had a wide variety of her own interests, including the community, the schools, and local activities. She found her husband always ready to hear details of these, evaluate problems seriously, and offer suggestions. Inevitably this resulted in a high degree of amiable reciprocity on her part. Olaf used her for a sounding board for his ideas, and her assistance in the final revision of his manuscripts helped them attain their polished clarity. A part of this involved checking spelling, which she has said was not one of her husband’s strong points. After his death it was she who transcribed the notes for The Opening of the Eyes, with their many difficult-to-decipher abbreviations, wrote the dedication to the work, and attended to all other details preceding publication.
¶10Olaf’s good sense of humor helped their relationship. He enjoyed good-natured jokes and entered into the spirit of fun on every occasion. His health was always good, which undoubtedly contributed to his even disposition. For all his easy-going casualness, however, he was extremely systematic in almost everything he did— as is proved, for example, by the extraordinary completeness of his scrapbooks. He could never be called an absent-minded professor. Evidence of his devotion as a parent is still in his home. Wedged in a wall of books, many of them inherited from his father, is a little volume titled Verses for Mary and David. These are Olaf’s original (and extremely well-written) rhymes for his children, hand-lettered and illustrated by him in color. Through a good part of his life Stapledon dabbled in painting. At one time he even joined an art class in London. One result of this, his painting of a harvested cornfield, still hangs in the Stapledon home. It shows a good color sense and a style that lies between realism and impressionism. Some readers will be surprised to learn that he did the cover jacket for the English edition of his book Odd John. The original is in crayon in shades of pink, blue and black and is quite striking as a visualization of the protagonist of the novel. A catalog of the books in his home would have to be made to help determine what he may have read. These are present in literally every room, since his wife was an avid reader with an intellectual curiosity of her own. Serious philosophical volumes are there in great concentration. A cursory examination also reveals George Du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson, David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Areturus, Erewhon Revisited by Samuel Butler, the 1929 edition of The Purple Cloud of M.P. Shiel and H.G. Wells’ The World of William Clissold. (Stapledon, incidentally, had a short correspondence with H.G. Wells, which included a discussion of science fiction films.) This library leaves us no reason to doubt his assertion that he could not remember ever having read a science fiction magazine up to the time of writing Star Maker. However, he did admit to having read books by Verne, Wells, and—shockingly for some who might like it otherwise— Edgar Rice Burroughs. Most of Stapledon’s papers (which are willed to the University of Liverpool) his wife wisely insists on retaining until her death. "What is the sense of visiting the home of Olaf Stapledon if the soul and spirit have been removed?" she asks. "People who have some regard, some love, some feeling for his work can secure small satisfaction in seeing just the physical walls and furniture of his rooms. But to find his library, scrapbooks, diaries and papers actually still in place is something else again. The real essence of the man remains. The nature of some of the serious works he read and which are in his library is shown in the bibliography of his second book of philosophy, Waking World, published by Methuen in 1934. These are categorized under the following headings: To-Day and the World-Aim, Human Personality, Art, Science, History, Philosophy, and Religion. It is of particular interest to note that Haldane’s Possible Worlds is cited. The preface to Waking World reveals that Stapledon could accept criticism and was willing to rewrite when necessary, for he twice refers to a rejected earlier version of the book and credits five people for helping him revise it into acceptable shape: these included his wife Agnes; E.V. Rieu, a long-time friend and an editor at Methuen; and Professor L.C. Martin of Liverpool University. He had similarly credited all these three, and in addition Gerald Heard, in the preface to his second work of fiction, Last Men in London. (Heard was to become an important writer of detective stories and science fiction.) This book, originally published by Methuen on October 27, 1932, was reissued at a lower price in 1934; the printings were small, and copies soon became difficult to find. Perhaps the fact that more than half of it was devoted to the origins, execution, and aftermath of World War I, told by a Briton from a British viewpoint to a people who had lost millions of men and no longer constituted the dominant world power, gave it a certain narrow appeal.
¶19Stapledon denied being either a Communist or a Christian, "Though I am, however, a Socialist, as are the majority of my countrymen." He considered the American attitude toward the conference very immature, and cited a British cabby who in driving him to the airport said, "Tell those Yanks to stop putting it over on us." He was very worried about the adamancy and belligerence of the United States, feeling it could lead to war. To the Russians he suggested that the triumph of their system might be much further off than they dreamed. He ended with the plea, "For God’s sake, let’s get together!" Stapledon’s performance was weak, and when I wrote him as much he replied that he had been extremely tired, and not at his best. When Stapledon landed in England, the Associated Press quoted him as saying, "I was amazed to see great excitement and worry in the United States about the prospects for a forthcoming conflict. There may be a war at any moment." In September, 1949, the USSR tested its first atom bomb; we no longer had a monopoly on the weapon. At the end of that month the Berlin blockade was terminated, ostensibly because the billions of tons of food, fuel, and supplies flown into the city made it a futile exercise, but most probably because Russia no longer needed to prove itself. It, too, had atomic weapons. Stapledon had been taken and he knew it. He had permitted himself to be used in the name of peace, but he had also been abused. He had listened to the meaningless diatribes of his fellows. He noted that not since the first day of the conference, when Norman Cousins of The Saturday Review of Literature spoke against it, had anyone been permitted on the rostrum who might do the same. He knew the Marxist philosophy of the end justifying the means and did not agree with it. This event marked Stapledon’s complete break from the Communist movement as a vocal supporter. The schism was reflected in his very next book, A Man Divided, where the protagonist has become the "British Lenin," stumping for the cause. In the end, however, he decides to disengage himself from Communism, and gives his reason: "The turning point," he said, "was when they expected me to write articles in the local press to the effect that the organization of the unemployed was entirely spontaneous, and not inspired by the Communists… When I protested, they replied that it really didn’t matter lying, even to personal friends, if it was for the Revolution....We had many long and heated arguments, in which they simply insisted that the Revolution justified any means whatever… In the end I said I wouldn’t do the job, and if they persuaded someone else to do it, I would publish the truth." The same thought is found in The Opening of the Eyes: "If one must reject the comrades, it is not because they work for a world-wide revolution. For in the world today revolution, a painful social change, is the only hope. But what sort of revolution do the comrades desire, and by what means do they work for it?" Not long after his return to England Stapledon met his longtime friend E.V. Rieu in London. Rieu describes the meeting in these words: "He had reached the goal of his thinking; he had come to terms with reality; and comprehension had been added to acceptance. There was a note of serenity in his bearing which it is a pleasure to remember, now that he is gone." Agnes Stapledon regrets now ever having let those passages remain in the introduction, but at the time she had no inkling that posthumous interest in her husband would reach its present intensity. "It is much too simple and too final," she says. "I hope that Olaf was actually as serene in his thinking as Rieu believed him to be—but if he was serene I don’t believe it was because ‘comprehension had been added to acceptance.’ I believe, rather, that he came to terms with reality by preparing himself to surrender the struggle to comprehend and agreeing to accept the reality unquestioningly whatever it might turn out to be. Did he actually renounce Communism and Socialism? He had never been a member of the Communist party, but he continued to admire some things about the Communist philosophy, just as he continued to detest some
¶20attitudes and actions of the party members. He never abandoned the socialist ideal in which he included all that was best in Communism, but equally he was openly critical of the Socialist party. He was too modest a man ever to believe that he had the final word to pronounce either for anyone else or for himself. But I think his ‘acceptance’ was open-minded—therefore serene and at peace." Wolfgang Brueck met Stapledon in London for the last time about three weeks before his death. Brueck then had a job in London, and joined Olaf, Agnes, and Mary for a meal at a Polish restaurant near Victoria Station. The four had a very pleasant evening and parted at Tottenham Court Road. Stapledon ate relatively little meat. He enjoyed vegetables and they constituted a good part of his diet. At the time of that last meeting Brueck remembers that Stapledon looked extremely fit and showed not the slightest indication of that shortness of breath which is sometimes an advance indicator of circulatory problems. On September 5, 1950, Olaf Stapledon chopped wood. He felt more tired than usual, and Agnes persuaded him to lie down on the couch in the study. She went to Heswell that afternoon to visit her son. On a September 6th the two were joined at supper by Agnes’ mother, who was staying with them at the time. Olaf had little appetite and ate scarcely anything. After the meal he carried a tray of dishes into the kitchen. He put the tray down on a cupboard and collapsed, falling backward and hitting his head as he fell. He was dead before the family could do anything to assist him. The cause of death was later given as a coronary arterial occlusion. Deposits had built up, culminating in the attack that ended his life. Brueck received a telegram from John the next day, informing him of the tragedy. Agnes retained her surface calm, but two days later, when Brueck visited her, she finally broke down and cried, remembering an old Australian aborigine saying: "If a strong gale blows in the evening it takes the souls away." She suffered terribly before time eased the loss. William Olaf Stapledon's ashes were scattered to the winds on the cliffs of Caldy, near Simon's Field