Pale Shadow of Science. Brian Aldiss
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so variously, so swoopingly, expressed, as if in contradiction to itself, that his admirers honour him.
Last and First Men belongs to that class of book which needs to arrive in a reader’s life at the right moment if it is to arrive at all. Then one never forgets it.
I remember my first encounter with it. I was awaiting a typhus inoculation in Assam in 1943, before the British Second Division advanced on Japanese-held Mandalay. The medical officer was housed in a commandeered bungalow outside Kohima which possessed a considerable library. On the shelves stood a book I had never heard of, in two volumes, the first two volumes Allen Lane published in his blue series of Pelican Books (for he had taken Stapledon at his word and issued the work as non-fiction). I was captivated before I was inoculated.
For the last and first time in my life, I deliberately stole a book. I could not bear to be parted from it.
While great things went forward in the world – destruction and victory – Stapledon’s voice proved to be what was needed, in marked contrast to the pedestrian chat of soldiers. His daring time-scales in particular corresponded to something felt in the bloodstream.
What filled me then was Stapledon’s all-embracing vision of humanity locked within the imperatives of creation, untainted by a Christianity which seemed to have failed. Star Maker, written only seven years later, amplifies this vision, elevates it, and marks a great advance in the writer’s art. The two billion year long history of the future which is Last and First Men is encompassed in one paragraph of the second book. Again, human kind – this time one individual soul – is confronted with the necessity of comprehending the cosmic process of which it is part: a noble and ever-contemporary quest.
Noble or not, Stapledon has been neglected. He had a dislike of Bloomsbury and satirised the coterie in Last Men in London – which presumably did for him. If his name is to be preserved, it will be by science fiction readers. Science fiction studies are now so alarmingly advanced in the United States that the first two studies of Stapledon’s oeuvre are American. First was Patrick McCarthy’s Olaf Stapledon (Twayne, 1982). Now here comes the energetic, unorthodox Professor Leslie A. Fiedler, with Olaf Stapledon, A Man Divided (O.U.P., 1983). His volume appears in a series flatly entitled ‘Science Fiction Writers,’ edited by Robert Scholes, in which studies of Wells, Heinlein and Asimov have already appeared.
Fiedler has problems. One initial difficulty is that Last and First Men evidently did not arrive in his life at the right moment. He was ‘infuriated’ that it had no story or characters. He finds it improbable that he should be writing on ‘so anomalous an author.’ Not an encouraging start, not an encouraging attitude.
One’s initial misgivings are never allayed. Fiedler briefly covers Stapledon’s life (though not the Oxford years, when Stapledon rowed for his college), deems it an uneventful one, like the lives of most writers, and hurries on to investigate the glories and shortcomings of the fiction. The book reaches roughly the same conclusions as would any reasonable man: that Odd John is a worthwhile contribution in the Poor Little Superman line, that Sirius is late gold, and that Star Maker is the great triumph, with its ‘all but intolerable appeal.’ While finding the other writings disappointing, it relates them illuminatingly to one another.
On the whole, more engagement would have been welcome, and a recognition that Stapledon is the first to write about an Immanent Will, or whatever you call It, which stands completely outside the universe He or It has created – a remarkable alienation effect derived from the scientific despairs of the time.
Despite its remote title, Sirius is the most approachable of all Stapledon’s inventions. Although Fiedler surprisingly finds its theme pornographic, he gives a perceptive account of its Beauty and the Beast theme, in which the super-dog, Sirius, and the human girl, Plaxy, consummate their love. Stapledon essays this unpalatable theme, interspecific sexual relations, with genuine warmth and pathos.
The scientist who develops Sirius’s intelligence exclaims, ‘I feel as God ought to have felt towards Adam when Adam went wrong – morally responsible.’ But this, as Fiedler rightly insists, is a love story, and a doomed one at that. The ordinary clamour of human affairs, the rattle of coffee spoons, the marrying and begetting, lie beyond Stapledon’s compass: yet this harried canine life, with its struggle for self-realisation on lonely hillsides, does grow to represent, as Fiedler declares, ‘the condition of all creatures, including ourselves.’
It is Stapledon’s most famous book, Last and First Men, which most troubles Fiedler. The problem with that splendid flight of the imagination is that four opening chapters intervene before take-off. These are the chapters purporting to cover terrestrial history from 1930, when the book was published, until the fall of the First Men (us), five thousand years after the death of Newton. Not only do these chapters get everything wrong (Germans good, Americans bad, Russians nice, Chinese still sporting pigtails in 2298 A.D.); they show racial prejudice, with short shrift given Negroes, Jews, and capitalist Americans.
Only after Stapledon has struggled through this weary catalogue of fake history do we get to the great scientific myth. Should we trust the myth when the fact is so faulty? Charity suggests that Stapledon was, by all the evidence, a pleasant, self-effacing man who preferred to live quietly with his wife, son and daughter in the Wirral. His contacts with the outside world were few; he was glad to dream and cultivate his garden. He got the facts wrong but the dream right. Many contemporary science fiction writers achieve the opposite.
So Fiedler spends some while talking about the long out-of-print American edition of Last and First Men, abridged by Basil Davenport, ignoring what we may term the Allen Lane solution. Such is the price we pay for the defects of English scholarship.
British readers will also sense Fiedler’s difficulties in coming to terms with Stapledon’s Englishness and his English self-deprecation. That Stapledon was a late developer is clear; his early transplantation to Egypt may help account for that. But there was nothing particularly unusual about a Victorian man remaining virgin into his thirties, owing to lack of opportunity and the sexual mores of the time; repression is a theme occurring more than once in Stapledon’s works – however odd this may appear to the generation which invented AIDS. Fiedler stresses the homosexual relationships he detects in Stapledon’s books, worries about no loves free of ‘shameful miscegenation,’ and shakes his head in a fuddy-duddy way over Stapledon’s ‘not-quite-incestuous’ marriage to his Australian first cousin, Agnes. He also claims to find in the works a streak of sado-masochism ‘verging on the pathological.’ Myself, I think it was just a passing Zeitgeist.
Perhaps this pop psychology serves to add a little melodrama to an otherwise humdrum existence, but it distorts the truth. What a reader of Stapledon would really like to know is whence came his intense imaginative gift, which can at once create such effects of distancing in space and time and yet brings us close to multitudinous beings unlike ourselves in almost every way. Could it have been something to do with those restless early years, exiled back and forth between Merseyside and Port Said? The sea voyages would have been odysseys of estrangement for a sensitive child.
The exclusion of events from his life suggests that, like Bertrand Russell, Stapledon felt cursed by loneliness. His novels are short on dialogue and read often like debates with himself. In one remarkable section of Chapter X of Star Maker, the journeying human soul, with spirit friends, views the galaxy at an early stage of its existence. The passage is far too long to quote here; it concludes with a view of the fully evolved galaxy:
The stars themselves gave an irresistable impression of vitality. Strange that the movements of these merely physical things, these mere fire-balls, whirling and travelling according to the geometrical laws of their minutest particles, should seem so vital, so questing. But then the whole galaxy was itself so vital, so like an organism, with its delicate tracery of star-streams, like the streams within a living cell; and its extended wreaths, almost like feelers; and its nucleus of light. Surely this great and lovely creature must be alive, must have intelligent experience