ABSTRACT
Olaf Stapledon is a British science-fiction writer and social philosopher, whose two great novels – Last and First Men and Star Maker – challenge assumptions about the way modernist subjectivity is created through the tension between individuality and community. In Modernism and the Fate of Individuality, Michael Levenson identifies several key ways in which urban subjectivities were thrown into crisis in modernist literature. The manner in which individual subjectivity is defined and created in relation to different communities is a central topic not only for Last and First Men and Star Maker, but also for thinking on modernist individuality, both during the modernist period and after. Last and First Men offered three stages of communion – duality, the all and the racial mind – and Star Maker has a similar structure, offering a community of explorers, a symbiotic race and planets and stars.
