Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #197332 in Books
• Published on: 2009-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 309 pages

Customer Reviews

STEPPENDOG
Until 2002 Sirius was the only thing by Stapledon I had read. Now with Last and First Men, Star Maker, Nebula Maker and Odd John, plus a good few more years, behind me, it means a lot more to me. Like his author, the dog with an equal-to-human brain is one of a kind, but the main theme is Stapledon's familiar tragic theme of the futile destruction of what intellect, mind and spirit can achieve. This is a Stapledon story with some very unfamiliar ingredients like characters and humour. It may be the strangest love story ever, but it's a love story all right, and a harrowing one. This time he is not looking directly into the mind of the Creator, but the religious professionals get it in the neck from him, in his gentlemanly way, particularly on pp 249/250. This strikes a chord with me. At a recent college reunion I attended a service for which 'unctuous and complacently servile' would have been an excellent description. If there is a Creator, to behave to him in this manner seemed to me to be verging on blasphemous, and I was relieved to get out before a thunderbolt struck. 'Find your calling...or be damned' may be an important message of this book, but the forces of futility may get you whether you do or not.

Bertrand Russell has a story that Macaulay never spoke until the age of 6, when hot tea was spilled over him at a children's party and he reassured his fussing hostess with 'Thankyou madam, the agony is abated'. The early story of Odd John Wainwright, the son of slightly eccentric and mildly talented parents, started by reminding me of this, but I knew I would soon have to take it seriously. Odd John is a superhuman and he knows it. He is not cruel or evil, but like the Star Maker he has more important priorities than, say, human life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Life will be calmly forfeited if it interferes with his mission. His 'property-is-theft' attitude to the local tycoon is probably a mask for the kind of early-20th century socialism that appealed to Stapledon, and his sexual mores have a touch of Bloomsbury about them -- the activity that dares not speak its name seems to be obviously incest, except that this does not appear to create any downstream waves in his later relations with any of his family. The thought crossed my mind that I might be on the wrong track altogether. What could be more unmentionable, something on which the taboo is more cosmic than human? But on folk-dancing I dare not dwell.

Odd John will not wring your emotions the way Sirius ought to do. It has other virtues. The creativity that conjured such a riveting series of human species and would later create the planetary civilisations in Star Maker is at work here with the freakish superhumans, including one that is surely the most hellish being in all literature. The book is also obviously the main inspiration for Clarke's Childhood's End, in which the writer surpasses himself and achieves a stupendous reinterpretation of the whole legend of God and Satan. In Odd John the supreme being is staying mum about his ultimate intentions for humanity, but in a way more reminiscent of the Overmind in Childhood's End than of the terrifying Star Maker. The main difference for me is not the stylistic gulf between the two authors but that in Childhood's End I am always conscious that I am reading a colossal piece of imagination. Stapledon, like his Sirius, upsets me by giving me the uncomfortable sense that he may be sniffing around the truth.

A work of genius
Having just read these two novels for the first time, I feel compelled to add my comments. The most striking thing about these works is the insight they give, through wonderful prose, to the brilliant mind of Stapledon (an example of Homo Superior?). This is sci-fi at its most mind-expanding, with wonderful throw-away observations which make you think for hours after (Odd John describes Homo Sapiens as 'an Archaeopteryx of the spirit'). Read and wonder - sci-fi at its very best.

The next step
The story of Odd John serves a didactic function for the rest of us. Man as we know him has evolved, and continues to do so. Stapeldon gives us in Odd John the next evolutionary step in man: Homo-Superior! Just as what once was sience fiction (flying machines, spacecraft, communications satellites, etc.), this story has become science fact! Odd John is already here, maybe not as physically described, but definitely here none the less.