Yeah. Stapledon is older—Star Maker was written in 1937, and it builds on the themes of Last and First Men, a book he wrote in 1930. They don’t really have much plot to speak of, they’re more purely exploratory and written as a kind of future history/scifi cosmogony/speculative evolutionary engineering/secular eschatology. But they’re quick reads and I think they’re interesting worldbuilding thought experiments.
I do think there’s some inspiration of that type that goes on, yes. But also, it is often possible for a field to know early on what some of the theoretical limits are for what can be achieved through it, even if it takes decades or more to even start seeing it happen. The great scifi authors are the ones that ask what it will mean when they do.
Yeah. Stapledon is older—Star Maker was written in 1937, and it builds on the themes of Last and First Men, a book he wrote in 1930. They don’t really have much plot to speak of, they’re more purely exploratory and written as a kind of future history/scifi cosmogony/speculative evolutionary engineering/secular eschatology. But they’re quick reads and I think they’re interesting worldbuilding thought experiments.
I do think there’s some inspiration of that type that goes on, yes. But also, it is often possible for a field to know early on what some of the theoretical limits are for what can be achieved through it, even if it takes decades or more to even start seeing it happen. The great scifi authors are the ones that ask what it will mean when they do.