Freeman Dyson said Dyson spheres should really be named after Olaf Stapledon
A Liverpool philosophy lecturer imagined, in a 1937 novel, civilisations wrapping their stars in shells to capture all their energy. The physicist Freeman Dyson later credited Star Maker with the idea and suggested the structures be called Stapledon spheres. The same author sketched genetic engineering and terraforming in 1930.
William Olaf Stapledon was born on the Wirral in 1886 and spent his first six years in Port Said, Egypt. After Balliol College, Oxford, he tried teaching, worked in shipping offices in Liverpool and Port Said, and taught for the Workers' Educational Association. In the First World War he was a conscientious objector who drove ambulances for the Friends' Ambulance Unit across France and Belgium, serving from July 1915 until January 1919, winning the Croix de Guerre for bravery. The experience fed a lifelong commitment to peace and to the idea of world government.
He earned a philosophy doctorate from Liverpool in 1925 and turned it into A Modern Theory of Ethics in 1929, then switched to fiction to reach more readers. Last and First Men, which charts 18 human species rising and falling in turn, did well enough in 1930 that he became a full-time writer. A teenage Arthur C. Clarke found it in a library in Minehead and said no book ever had a greater impact on his imagination. Star Maker went further, outlining the history of the whole universe. Admirers ranged from Borges and Virginia Woolf to Bertrand Russell and Winston Churchill.
Recurring ideas include a supermind formed from many individual minds, and in Sirius a dog raised to human intelligence, which is why some transhumanists see him as a forerunner. His heroes are often torn between higher and lower impulses, striving in a universe indifferent to their yearnings. C. S. Lewis found the philosophy amoral and wrote his Cosmic Trilogy partly in reply, while still calling him a corking good writer. Stapledon was an agnostic who distrusted religious institutions but respected spiritual longing, naming intelligence, love and creative action as his core values, with Spinoza as a major influence.
He dropped his pacifism during the Second World War to back the fight, then lectured widely after 1945, including at Clarke's invitation for the British Interplanetary Society. He died suddenly of a heart attack at home in Caldy in 1950. In 2014 he entered the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
Source: Olaf Stapledon
