Search Worlds Without End

It was at the moment of creation that the nebulae first found awareness. And they were to burn with it for countless millennia, changing, struggling, shifting on an axis that had only the Mystery at its centre.

The Launching of the Cosmos, the First Cosmical War, the appearance of Bright Heart the saint and of Fire Bolt the revolutionary - all led to that Mystery - the terrifying, eternally fascinating enigma of the Nebula Maker...

Sirius is the titular character and a 1944 science fiction novel by the British philosopher and author Olaf Stapledon.

Scientist Thomas Trelone creates a super-intelligent dog, named Sirius. He is the only dog to have attained a humanlike intelligence. Other dogs of the same breed Trelone created, have an intermediate intelligence (they are above the dog's average intelligence, but they cannot master human language and complex analytic thinking as Sirius does. A sense of existential questioning suffuses the book, as the author delves into every aspect of Sirius's psyche. The novel deals with a lot of human issues through Sirius and his experiences, his unusual nature, his ideas and his relationships with humans, showing a very gloomy, intelligent, obscure, sad, and complex tale, whose significance and depth cannot be fully understood, and is often misinterpreted.

Widely regarded as one of the true classics of science fiction, Star Maker is a poetic and deeply philosophical work. This 1937 successor to Last and First Men offers another entrancing speculative history of the future. The story details the mental journey of an unnamed narrator who is transported not only to other worlds but also other galaxies, intelligent star clusters, mingles amoung alien races and continues on to parallel universes, until he eventually becomes part of the "cosmic mind."

First published in 1937, Olaf Stapledon's descriptions of alien life are a political commentary on human life in the turbulent inter-war years. The book challenges preconceived notions of intelligence and awareness, and ultimately argues for a broadened perspective that would free us from culturally ingrained thought and our inevitable anthropomorphism.

This is the first scholarly edition of a book that influenced such writers as C.S. Lewis, Doris Lessing, and Arthur C. Clarke. Jorge Luis Borges called this work "a prodigious novel."

John Wainwright is a freak, a human mutation with an extraordinary intelligence which is both awesome and frightening to behold. Ordinary humans are mere playthings to him. And Odd John has a plan - to create a new order on Earth, a new supernormal species. But the world is not ready for such a change.

Contents:

• Last and First Men - (1930) - novel
• Odd John - (1935) - novel
• Sirius: A Fantasy of Love and Discord - (1944) - novel
• Star Maker - (1937) - novel
• The Flames - (1947) - novella (variant of The Flames: A Fantasy)
• The Vision of Olaf Stapledon - (1953) - essay by Basil Davenport
• Introduction (To the End of Time) - (1975) - essay by Curtis C. Smith

In this work written in 1941, at the most frightening point of World War II, Stapledon projects two separate futures for humanity, depending not on the outcome of that particular conflict but on the failure or success of a future "Tibetan Renaissance" to influence the temper and ideology of the militaristic Russian and Chinese empires that threaten it. One of the futures involves worldwide Chinese imperialism and subsequent degeneration and extinction of the human race, unable to defend itself against speedily evolving rats. The other ends in overthrowing the empires and creation of a worldwide socialist utopia.

Epic Science Fiction Classic! "No book before or since has ever had such an impact on my imagination." Arthur C Clarke

A work of unprecedented scale in the genre, it describes the history of humanity from the present onwards across 2 billion years and 18 distinct human species, of which our own is the first and most primitive. Stapledon's conception of history is a repetitive cycle with many varied civilizations rising from and descending back into savagery over millions of years, but it is also one of progress, as the later civilizations rise to far greater heights than the first. The book anticipates the science of genetic engineering, and is an early example of the (up to now) fictional supermind; a consciousness composed of many telepathically-linked individuals.

Sir Patrick Moore said "This novel Last and First Men is immensely thought-provoking and I've read it time and time again." Profound in the extreme - loved, lauded and recommended by the best SF writers.

The sequel to Last and First Men, Olaf Stapledon's great classic work of science fiction.

In Last Men in London the author follows up the themes of his earlier masterpiece in presenting a Neptunian 'last man's' views on our twentieth-century world, views informed by the huge dimensions of space and time which separate him from our tiny contemporary world. Once again, Olaf Stapledon has been totally successful in creating a work of such stunning imagination and brilliance that it has taken its place amongst the classics of science fiction.