SOURCE: "Olaf Stapledon and the Idea of Science Fiction," in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1, Spring, 1986, pp. 21-42.

In the following essay, Crossley studies the writings and views on science fiction of Olaf Stapledon.

Unlike his great predecessor H. G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon never wrote an essay on the genre of the scientific romance or about the influences on his own imagination. Wells's career endured long enough for him to see a collected edition of his works and numerous reissues of separate texts. Sometimes he contributed Forewords to such later editions, but one of them—a 1933 omnibus of his best-known scientific romances—prompted a retrospective Preface surveying his entire achievement in what he called "my fantastic stories" (240). Although there is some self-disparaging revisionism as Wells, approaching seventy, looks back over his shoulder at books written mostly in his thirties, the Preface to The Scientific Romances is important as...