Tara B. M. Smith, PhD
Tara is a Research Associate at the Leverhulme Centre for Humanity and Space (LCHS), Leicester University exploring the ways in which science fiction teaches us about space. She is particularly interested in science fiction that has social, religious or cultural themes. In May 2026 she visited the Science Fiction Collection (a partner of LCHS) at Liverpool University specifically to access the Olaf Stapledon materials.
If you had to write a letter to your hypothetical great grandchild, what would it say?
This exact provocation was on the mind of science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon when he wrote a number of drafts and letters penned to his fictional descendent. Amidst far off tales of cosmic alien communities, human evolutionary timescales stretching eons, it was this letter he wanted them to read.
The collection of letters from Olaf Stapledon’s archive held at the University of Liverpool (OS/D1/30/1) contain two from Stapledon to his great grandson. The letters were edited and published by Robert Crossley in a 1989 collection of essays on the legacy of Olaf Stapledon (1989). In a review of the work Huntington described Stapledon’s letters as being reflective of “Stapledon’s failure” to convey his own philosophy. The letters are considered too abstract, too religious and too childish (Huntington 1989). This critique, commonly held by others, that Stapledon should simply stick to his lane of speculative fiction is not without some merit. As you read Stapledon it is immediately clear that he struggles to articulate his beliefs. But rather than detract from the letters, I think it makes them feel more realistic and human. Who doesn’t struggle to write down the beauty of a sunset? Or the love and warmth from a hug? I think it is precisely the sort of adolescent and humorous elements that make this glimpse into Stapledon’s spiritual world so compelling.
At the heart of the letters is Stapledon’s desire to make a vivid and genuine confession of his faith. This faith, or spirituality, is sometimes called the Way or the Path (and perhaps a reflection of Stapledon’s interest in Taoism) and consists loosely of three main ideas. Some of these are found in the letters and others can be captured in different notes within the Stapledon archive. Firstly, Stapledon promotes a sense of the individual who reaches for the stars and the cosmos. Secondly, he positions the importance of worldliness and fostering community. Finally, he suggests that humanity needs to reach its full spiritual potential.
Rather than an angel, or one of religion’s more obvious symbols, it is the simple sparrow that Stapledon uses to articulate his religious philosophy. In the letters, he notes that the sparrow is composed of the same electrons that constitute the rocks beneath it and the stars above it. Yet when we point and say, “look at that sparrow”, we mean far more than an arrangement of particles, reflexes or instincts. The atoms within the sparrow are “much finer fellows than they could possibly be were they cast adrift”, for they have become organised into a unique centre of awareness. The sparrow is “ingredient throughout the universe”, prehending within itself the past and “perhaps even the furthest stars”. What makes the sparrow that sparrow, however, is not simply its physical composition but the world it gathers into itself: Stapledon’s garden, its passerine ancestors, its habits of flight and feeding, and above all its capacity for awareness, pleasure, pain and striving.
The sparrow is unique, without them “there would be a queer hole in the universe, and all things would be subtly disturbed”. Put simply, Stapledon in his letters asks his great grandson to create a new spiritual meaning in the sparrow, and themselves, and revel in the scientific explanation rather than let it reduce us to nothing. But this is not just a simply a scientific task of seeing beauty in evolution or the big bang theory, but a much more concrete religion in which we recognise our unique selves and strive for the cosmos and to understand God whilst still acknowledging and enjoying fleshly and worldly existences.
In his notes on Doctrinal Religion (OS/F48/68), from his debate in Manchester Students Union in 1947, Stapledon expands on these religious concepts in a discussion on the meaning of progress. For Stapledon, progress does not just mean scientific progress or the sort of progress where humanity dominates the natural environment. Progress here instead means progressing in terms of our increased awareness of the world and our creative actions. This is enacted through “knowing, feeling, striving”, having a sensitive and intelligence awareness, and taking “spiritually creative action”. Or, put more simply, spiritually creative action. Religion, according to Stapledon, consists of both the feeling and the theory. In the endeavour to replace religion and enlightenment with science, we removed both. For Stapledon, we need to maintain the feeling of religion without the theory. Religion is necessary for us to progress both towards the whole as well as towards the “supremely admirable thing”. Without religious experience, at least for Stapledon, human existence becomes meaningless.
The religious experiences that can best survive scientific rationality is living a way that is loyal to both our spirit and to worshipping the cosmos – the great unknown. The first experience refers to the loyalty to the spirit – this can be considered the how we live, a Way, or Tao, a way that promotes an increased sensitivity and emphasis on love. The second experience is the mute worship of the ineffable reality.
In writing to his great grandson in early manhood Stapledon struggles to articulate and condense his entire religious, philosophical and metaphysical world view into two letters. He redacts certain phrases, gets frustrated and finds his faith incredibly elusive – a flicker of light constantly moving out of view. But he feels a strong urge, a need, to at least try and condense it. This comes mostly from concern, concern of his own context – a Britain (and wider world) coming to terms with increased scientific and technological achievements, the horror of two world wars and the decline of religious values. Stapledon feared that scientific and technological progress alone could never tell humanity what was ultimately worth striving for. The imperative, Stapledon asks, is to know the world – all of it – “the world of lands and seas, cornfields and cities, pigs in their sties and soaring gulls, and miners…jellyfish and flies and chickweed, armies, trade unions, colleges, prisons and panic stricken nations…”. To know this world, and its spirit, means we can enjoy and also want to save it.
Science fiction writers are often uncomfortable being treated as prophets, insisting that they write about the present rather than predict the future. Stapledon does something rather different. In these letters he abandons the protective distance of fiction and addresses posterity directly, not to predict the future, but to speak across time. Stapledon writes to a fictional great-grandson because he cannot know the future. Yet the letters survived in an archive and are now read by people who were never meant to receive them. In a sense, we have become the great-grandson. Not because history has vindicated Stapledon, but because we have inherited exactly the position he imagined: another generation trying to make sense of scientific progress, social upheaval, and the question of what deserves our devotion. The letters are therefore less an attempt to preserve Stapledon’s faith unchanged than an invitation to undertake the same search ourselves. They ask us to attend to the world in all its richness – from rocks and sparrows to the stretching cosmos – and to discover, in our own age, what is worthy of admiration, loyalty and creative action.
References
Figure 1. House sparrow (Passer domesticus). Photograph by Mick Lobb, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Huntington, John. 1989. “The Legacy of Olaf Stapledon: Critical Essays and an Unpublished Manuscript.” Modern Fiction Studies 35 (4): 810–811. Review.
McCarthy, Patrick A., Charles Elkins, and Martin Harry Greenberg, eds. 1989. The Legacy of Olaf Stapledon: Critical Essays and an Unpublished Manuscript. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press
Archive Materials
The Manuscripts, Correspondence, and Books of Olaf Stapledon. OS/D1/30/1. Letters to My Great Grandson (manuscript collection). The Science Fiction Collection, University of Liverpool..
. The Manuscripts, Correspondence, and Books of Olaf Stapledon. OS/F48/68. Doctrinal Religion (notes for debate at Manchester Students’ Union, 1947). The Science Fiction Collection, University of Liverpool.