Olaf Stapledon was one of the most distinguished writers of science fiction in English in the period between World War I and World War II. He was often proclaimed the successor of H. G. Wells, and he and Wells corresponded for almost a decade. Stapledon openly acknowledged his debt to Wells, but he lacked Wells's intellectual certainties even when he criticized him. Like many writers of the 1930s, such as W. H. Auden and George Orwell, Stapledon expressed in his work a crisis of conscience, a loss of faith in capitalism and parliamentary democracy, and a sense of contempt for organized religion. Unlike Orwell, who was a participant greatly affected by the Spanish Civil War, Stapledon remained a socialist, and a pacifist, all of his life.

As a science-fiction writer, he was concerned with the fate of humanity in the universe, which he believed was not just matter...