Themes : Posthuman : SFE : Science Fiction Encyclopedia. Themes : Scientific Romance : SFE : Science Fiction Encyclopedia. Authors : Stapledon, Olaf : SFE : Science Fiction Encyclopedia. Olaf Stapledon. William Olaf Stapledon (10 May 1886 – 6 September 1950) — known as Olaf Stapledon — was a British philosopher and author of several influential works of science fiction. Life[edit] Stapledon was born in Seacombe, Wallasey, on the Wirral Peninsula near Liverpool, the only son of William Clibbert Stapledon and Emmeline Miller.
The first six years of his life were spent with his parents at Port Said. He was educated at Abbotsholme School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he acquired a BA in Modern History (Second Class) in 1909 and a MA in 1913.[1][2] After a brief stint as a teacher at Manchester Grammar School he worked in shipping offices in Liverpool and Port Said from 1910 to 1913. During World War I he served as a conscientious objector with the Friends' Ambulance Unit in France and Belgium from July 1915 to January 1919. On 16 July 1919 he married Agnes Zena Miller (1894–1984), an Australian cousin. In 1940 the family built and moved into Simon's Field, in Caldy, in the Wirral. Olaf Stapledon. John Maynard Smith. John Maynard Smith[note 1] FRS (6 January 1920 – 19 April 2004) was a British theoretical evolutionary biologist and geneticist.[1] Originally an aeronautical engineer during the Second World War, he took a second degree in genetics under the well-known biologist J.
B. S. Haldane. Maynard Smith was instrumental in the application of game theory to evolution and theorized on other problems such as the evolution of sex and signalling theory. Biography[edit] Early years[edit] John Maynard Smith was born in London, the son of the surgeon Sidney Maynard Smith, but following his father's death in 1928, the family moved to Exmoor, where he became interested in natural history. On leaving school, Maynard Smith joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and started studying engineering at Trinity College Cambridge. Second degree[edit] Maynard Smith then took a change of career, entering University College London (UCL) to study fruit fly genetics under Haldane.
University of Sussex[edit] Death[edit]