Opening Passages: From Odd John:
When I told John that I intended to write his biography, he laughed.
“My dear man!” he said. “But of course it was inevitable.” The word “man” on John’s lips was often equivalent to “fool.”
“Well,” I protested, “a cat may look at a king.”
He replied, “Yes, but can it really see the king? Can you, puss, really see me?”
This from a queer child to a full-grown man.
From Star Maker:
One night when I had tasted bitterness I went out on to the hill. Dark heather checked my feet. Below marched the suburban street lamps. Windows, their curtains drawn, were shut eyes, inwardly watching the lives of dreams. Beyond the sea’s level darkness a lighthouse pulsed. Overhead, obscurity.
I distinguished our own house, our islet in the tumultuous and bitter currents of the world. There, for a decade and a half, we two, so different in quality, had grown in and in to one another, for mutual support and nourishment, in intricate symbiosis. There daily we planned our several undertakings, and recounted the day’s oddities and vexations. There letters piled up to be answered, socks to be darned. There the children were born, those sudden new lives. There, under that roof, our own two lives, recalcitrant sometimes to one another, were all the while thankfully one, one larger, more conscious life than either alone.
All this, surely, was good. Yet there was bitterness. And bitterness not only invaded us from the world; it welled up also within our own magic circle. For horror at our futility, at our own unreality, and not only at the world’s delirium, had driven me out on to the hill.
From Sirius:
Plaxy and I had been lovers; rather uneasy lovers, for she would never speak freely about her past, and sometimes she withdrew into a cloud of reserve and despond. But often we were very happy together, and I believed that our happiness was striking deeper roots.
Then came her mother’s last illness, and Plaxy vanished. Once or twice I received a letter from her, giving no address, but suggesting that I might reply to her “care of the Post Office” in a village in North Wales, sometimes one, sometimes another. In temper these letters ranged from a perfunctory amiability to genuine longing to have me again. They contained mysterious references to “a strange duty,” which, she said, was connected with her father’s work. The great physiologist, I knew, had been engaged on very sensational experiments on the brains of the higher mammals. He had produced some marvellously intelligent sheep-dogs, and at the time of his death it was said that he was concerned with even more ambitious research. One of the colder of Plaxy’s letters spoke of an “unexpectedly sweet reward” in connection with her new duty, but in a more passionate one she cried out against “this exacting, fascinating, dehumanizing life.” Sometimes she seemed to be in a state of conflict and torture about something which she must not explain. One of these letters was so distraught that I feared for her sanity. I determined therefore to devote my approaching leave to walking in North Wales in the hope of finding her.
Summary: Science fiction is in many ways, and often at its best, the romance of the adventure of the intellectual mind, a fictional and symbolic representation of the sublimity of the mind in progress of discovery, or knowledge, or understanding. Stapledon is an author who perhaps more than any other has sought to depict this sublimity in and of itself, the cold but glorious limitlessness of the lucid mind. To bring out such a sublime vastness requires a point of contrast, and we have in these three works three different attempts to do it. The sublime is the infinite that crushes to exalt, and I think I would say that of these three works, Odd John emphasizes the crushing, Sirius the exaltation, and Star Maker the infinite; but all three have all three elements. The infinite progress of the mind is terrible and exhilarating, splendid and horrifying, a brightness that blinds and a blindness opening out to an endlessness that eludes comprehension. Such is the aesthetics of Stapledon.
In Odd John, the titular character, John Wainwright, is a deformed mutation with a mental capabilities well beyond those of an ordinary human being. We follow his life through the reporting of the normal human narrator. However, as time goes on, it becomes unclear how reliable the narrator is; John and the group of 'supernormals' he slowly develops around himself turn out to have a sort of mesmeric power to manipulate weaker minds, and the narrator -- whom John and the supernormals call 'Fido' -- despite having some clear uneasiness about things that John does (including, at times, murder) regularly goes out of his way to try to excuse them. How far is the narrator simply under John's spell, and how far is he bending the story to tell the story that John wants told? We never quite know. John, after a period of acting out, makes it his mission to find people like himself. He finds that being the next stage of the evolution of man is a tricky thing; the supernormals are not merely scattered over the world, they are often not faring well, being locked in madhouses or roaming as vagabonds. Perhaps the most effective scene in the book is when John comes across the most powerful supernormal he has met, a mind of extraordinary telepathic ability locked inside the body of an infant growing abnormally slowly, who as the result of the frustration has become consumed with an all-devouring hatred of everyone and everything. With those supernormals who are less extreme, John establishes a colony on an island -- the island is inhabited, but it is soon deserted because the supernormals kill all the natives -- to be the first society of homo superior. But inevitably, word gets out of the weirdness of the island, and the political powers of the world do what they always do: adapt to the threat.
In Star Maker, an Englishman finds himself transported mentally out of his body and able to explore the galaxy. He discovers many different alien civilizations, and as he does so he ends up melding into a kind of communal mind with others, scattered from about the different civilizations of the universe; they later learn that this process is being directed by a particular highly advanced civilization. The tendency of the universe is toward the collective mind, but the unfolding evolution is a tumultuous and stormy process. Civilizations fail again and again and again, their development of 'lucidity' and 'being awake' disrailed due to prejudice, or war, or disease, or catastrophe, or spreading addictions, or any number of other things. Through it all, the community of minds keep finding suggestions that perhaps there is a great purpose behind all of this, that perhaps there is a Star Maker guiding it all; the pattern and directionality of it makes the suggestion unavoidable, but at the same time there is everywhere suffering and death and failure and despair as the universe itself becomes more and more conscious. At the end the narrator finally comes face to face with the Star Maker, although the Star Maker is beyond his comprehension, making universe as universe in search of one that will meet the Star Maker's inscrutable, incomprehensible standard, caring nothing at all for the suffering and the death and the failure, because all of it is insignificant to him. (It is this part of the book that led C. S. Lewis, who admired the work artistically, to say that the book ended in sheer devil-worship.)
Of the three works, Sirius is, I think, the best. It explores many of the same issues, but it is in some ways the opposite of Odd John. In Odd John the progress of intelligence is depicted as something alien and foreign to us; but in Sirius, we are the alien superintelligence. Sirius is a dog, roughly of Alsatian breed, who has through experimental means been given superior intelligence -- and, as it turns out, intelligence greater than a typical human being, although still within human range. The novel is a masterful exploration of this concept. Sirius has the intelligence of a human being; therefore he is not really able to relate with dogs properly. But he has the body and emotional make-up of a dog, and therefore has a complicated and occasionally tortured relationship with human beings. How does a human-level intelligence deal with having no hands, particularly in a world where almost all other human-level intelligences do? How does a human-level intelligence deal with a dog's highly limited vision, in a world where the dominant intelligences are all highly visual? How does human-level intelligence struggling with a wolf-nature work in a world designed by human-level intelligences struggling with an ape-nature? Sirius's being a dog ironically humanizes Stapledon's themes about the evolution of intelligence; John is disturbingly alien, but we can see in Sirius's struggles analogues of our own. Of course, being a dog in a man's world is sometimes difficult; being a dog-person in a world that does not see dogs as people is a disaster waiting to happen, a germinating tragedy. But here, too, Sirius gives us more humanity than we find in other works by Stapledon: intelligence and love have a power to unite even very different people, such as Sirius and the Trelanes of whose family he is an adopted part, and while the bond cannot fend off tragic happenings, it can give even to them a sort of beauty. Reason and love, as Stapledon says in one of his nonfiction works, are the two wings of the human spirit; and having both, we fly, even if only for a brief moment.
Stapledon's world is an unsettled one. The consistent theme is that all of the traditional pieties of yesterday have been shown not to be adequate, but all the modern attempts to replace them have glaring gaps that show that very valuable things are being lost in change. Progress is good; and it is a costly and destructive good. Every improvement comes at a cost, and sometimes the costs are not made up, and all one's progress ends in catastrophe as the debts approach default. An interesting recurring theme in Star Maker is that rather than take advantage of the opportunities of progress to improve themselves, societies regularly become sidetracked into degenerating self-indulgence, as sexual mores collapse, and with them the bonds of society, and addictions of various sorts spread a sort of stagnation and death, and tensions due to unresolved bigotries mount up to war. What is more, at every stage the temptations are new and more sophisticated versions of the same old temptations. Intelligence is not guaranteed to solve any of our real problems at all; but it certainly can also give us new ways to make them worse. But Stapledon also has an ambiguity toward this. He wants to say that being the sort of being who can mess things up more badly is just the cost of being a better kind of being, and that part of enlightenment is coming to recognize this in one's own struggle and failure. There is no theodicy, no justification; suffering and struggle just are. But in the midst of it, we can find community and love -- like John's island, or the narrator's community of minds in Star Maker, or Sirius and Plaxy Trelane -- and be, if not wholly content or satisfied, at least more awake.
Favorite Passages: Stapledon has many excellent passages, but they tend to be slowly developed, which means that gettign a sense of things requires chunkier quotation.
From Odd John:
The programme of activities on the island was now altered considerably. All work that could not bear fruit within the next few months was abandoned. The islanders told me that they had certain supreme tasks on hand which must, if possible, be finished before the end. The true purpose of the awakened spirit, they reminded me, is twofold, namely to help in the practical talk of world-building, and to employ itself to the best of its capacity in intelligent worship. Under the first head they had at least created something glorious though ephemeral, a microcosm, a world in little. But the more ambitious part of their practical purpose, the founding of a new species, they were destined never to fulfil. Therefore they were concentrating all their strength upon the second aim. They must apprehend existence as precisely and zestfully as they could, and salute That in the universe which was of supreme excellence. This purpose, with the aid of Langatse, they might yet advance to a definite plane of achievement which at present still lay beyond them, though their most mature minds had already glimpsed it. With their unique practical experience and their consciousness of approaching doom they might, they said, within a few months offer to the universal Spirit such a bright and peculiar jewel of worship as even the great Langatse himself, alone and thwarted, could not create.
From Star Maker:
In vain my fatigued, my tortured attention strained to follow the increasingly subtle creations which, according to my dream, the Star Maker conceived. Cosmos after cosmos issued from his fervent imagination, each one with a distinctive spirit infinitely diversified, each in its fullest attainment more awakened than the last; but each one less comprehensible to me.
At length, so my dream, my myth, declared, the Star Maker created his ultimate and most subtle cosmos, for which all others were but tentative preparations. Of this final creature I can say only that it embraced within its own organic texture the essences of all its predecessors; and far more besides. It was like the last movement of a symphony, which may embrace, by the significance of its themes, the essence of the earlier movements; and far more besides.
This metaphor extravagantly understates the subtlety and complexity of the ultimate cosmos. I was gradually forced to believe that its relation to each earlier cosmos was approximately that of our own cosmos to a human being, nay to a single physical atom. Every cosmos that I had hitherto observed now turned out to be but a single example of a myriadfold class, like a biological species, or the class of all the atoms of a single element. The internal life of each ‘atomic’ cosmos had seemingly the same kind of relevance (and the same kind of irrelevance) to the life of the ultimate cosmos as the events within a brain cell, or in one of its atoms, to the life of a human mind. Yet in spite of this huge discrepancy I seemed to sense throughout the whole dizzying hierarchy of creations a striking identity of spirit. In all, the goal was conceived, in the end, to include community and the lucid and creative mind.
From Sirius:
But now at last she thought of a fitting thing to do. She would sing his requiem. Returning to her dead darling, she stood erect beside him, facing the dawn. Then in as firm and full a voice as she could muster, she began singing a strange thing that he himself had made for her in his most individual style. The wordless phrases symbolized for her the canine and the human that had vied in him all his life long. The hounds’ baying blended with human voices. There was a warm and brilliant theme which he said was Plaxy, and a perplexed one which was himself. It began in playfulness and zest, but developed in a tragic vein against which she had often protested. Now, looking down on him she realized that his tragedy was inevitable. And under the power of his music she saw that Sirius, in spite of his uniqueness, epitomized in his whole life and in his death something universal, something that is common to all awakening spirits on earth, and in the farthest galaxies. For the music’s darkness was lit up by a brilliance which Sirius had called “colour,” the glory that he himself, he said, had never seen. But this, surely, was the glory that no spirits, canine or human, had ever clearly seen, the light that never was on land or sea, and yet is glimpsed by the quickened mind everywhere.
As she sang, red dawn filled the eastern sky, and soon the sun’s bright finger set fire to Sirius.
Recommendation: Odd John is Recommended; Sirius is Highly Recommended. Star Maker is a tricky one; I would put it Highly Recommended, but I think it requires a particular set of reading interests, and if you only read one of the three, I think Sirius is the one you should read.
****
Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker, Dover (Garden City, NY: 2021).
Olaf Stapledon, Odd John and Sirius, Dover (New York: 1964).
