stapledon

So perhaps Stapledon thought of this or someone else thought about this (Lemaitre?) and Stapledon read or heard it.

Somehow, Stapledon had been spectacularly smart/lucky in crafting his story from a mix of freshly-proposed and freshly-discarded theories.

He has two essays in which he analyzes Stapledon two great works: Last and First Men, and Star Maker[2].

Which didn't seem to make the slightest bit of sense, so Einstein dropped it, and Stapledon didn't.

But knowledge of the Big Bang and the Hubble redshift aren't, by themselves, sufficient to explain what Stapledon wrote.

A year later, Dark Energy was discovered, and suddenly it appeared that Stapledon was right all along.

Lewis and AC Clarke's credit, they do acknowledge the importance of Stapledon to their work.

Still, like you, I do like to imagine that Stapledon tapped into something that was somehow beyond the ordinary.

So I chalked this passage up as one of several things that Stapledon had definitely gotten wrong.

I've tried reading Stapledon (Last and First Men, and Star Maker), and I wanted to like him, I really did.

In any case, I guess Stapledon must have been working off of Lemaître's model, rather than cooking up something unique.

Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon (Spinoza-inspired scifi).

There's also some other "big scale" SF like Greg Egan's Diaspora or Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker that might qualify.

I suspect that there is a slight conspiracy: "the first rule of science fiction writers club is that you don't talk about Stapledon".

His first book was Latter-Day Psalms, published in 1914 by Henry Young and Sons, Ltd., of Liverpool." Stapledon's writing reflected intense wrestling with concepts of God and faith.

Frank was a brother of Olaf's mother, Margaret the daughter of Charles Barnard, headmaster of a Quaker school in Yorkshire..." Stapledon spent four years in the Friends Quaker Ambulance Corps.

Stapledon's book is the story of the entire universe combining into one intelligence to attempt to contact God.

Although he was involved with socialist groups and contributed some articles to leftist journals, Stapledon's earliest literary aspirations were poetic.

Curiously, despite Stapledon's enormous influence, to my knowledge none of his books have ever been made in to major motion pictures.