Sunday, November 13, 2011

Spinozan SF

I've never read Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker, I've only read about it -- partially because C. S. Lewis wrote his Space Trilogy to provide a sort of Christian counter-example to it. Now I learn that Star Maker can be seen as a science-fiction expression of Spinoza's philosophy. That moves it to the top of my list.

1 comment:

Michael Caton said...

Stapledon's Last and First Men was pretty good as well. In the 1920s he imagined a future in which world hegemony would be a competition between the U.S. and China, but he got some of the intervening stuff wrong, i.e. a second world war between the U.S. and England. But he goes much further out than just some future foreign policy and has a good narrative trick to boot.