death in February 2018. The film premiered at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival, and later screened at other film festivals around the world and released on VOD. Influences on other writers Brian Aldiss, in his preface to the 1962 edition, acknowledges the deep impression on him—and considerable influence on his own later writing–of Stapledon's book, which he encountered in 1943 while a British soldier fighting the Japanese in Burma – "An appropriately unusual period of life at which to encounter a vision so far outside ordinary experience". Aldiss also mentions James Blish as another writer deeply influenced by Stapledon. C. S. Lewis in his own preface to That Hideous Strength, notes: "I believe that one of the central ideas of this tale came into my head from conversations I had with a scientific colleague, some time before I met a rather similar suggestion in the works of Mr. Olaf Stapledon. If I am mistaken in this, Mr. Stapledon is so rich in invention that he can afford to lend, and I admire his invention (though not his philosophy) so much that I should feel no shame to borrow". The reference to objecting to Stapledon's philosophy was no accident. In particular, Christian Lewis objected to Stapledon's idea, as expressed in the present book, that mankind could escape from an outworn planet and establish itself on another one; this Lewis regarded as no less than a Satanic idea – especially, but not only, because it involved genocide of the original inhabitants of the target planet. Professor Weston, the chief villain of Lewis's Space Trilogy, is an outspoken proponent of this idea, and in Out of the Silent Planet, Lewis opposes to it the depiction of the virtuous and stoic Martians/Malacandrians who choose to die with their dying planet, even though they possessed the technology to cross space and colonise Earth. Arthur C. Clarke has said of Stapledon's 1930 book Last and First Men that "No other book had a greater influence on my life ... [It] and its successor Star Maker (1937) are the twin summits of [Stapledon's] literary career". H. P. Lovecraft held the book in very high regard (though he did not say whether it influenced any of his own stories), saying in a 1936 letter to Fritz Leiber "no one ought to miss reading W. Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men ... Probably you have read it. If