Olaf Stapledon's Thwarted Cosmopolitics in Last and First Men and Star Maker

ABSTRACT: In this essay I argue that Olaf Stapledon's speculative writing in Last and First Men and Star Maker is deeply informed by a thwarted cosmopolitics. The dream visions of science fiction to come in these novels are born of the failure of a cosmopolitan idealism. In his profound devotion to the cause of attempted cosmopolitanism, as we might put it, and in his rich imagining of what happens right before it goes wrong, Stapledon is a very Kantian speculative writer. I flesh out a Kantian philosophical context for Stapledon in this essay, not only because of the quite practical value of considering Stapledon in a Kantian frame, but also because of Kant's uptake in recent years by critics deeply interested in the stealthy presence of a central science-fictional motif in Kant's writing: that of the extraterrestrial.