Once again I’m revisiting classic SF novels that had a mighty effect on me when I first encountered them in the 1940s and 1950s, this time taking a new look at Olaf Stapledon’s superman novel of 1936, Odd John. In an autobiographical essay I wrote forty years after I discovered it in 1947 or 1948 I had this to say of it:
[It is] the quintessential peculiar-little-boy book, a haunting and tragic tale of a child prodigy—one far beyond my own attainments, but with whom, nonetheless, I was easily able to identify. You are not alone, Stapledon was saying to me. You will find others of your sort; and if you are lucky you and your peers will withdraw to a safe island far from the cruel and clumsy bullies who clutter your classroom, and do your work in peace, whatever it may be. Even though it all ends badly for John and his friends, Odd John must be a powerfully comforting work for any bright, unhappy child. Certainly it was for me. I was unhappy because of my brightness; through Stapledon I saw a mode, fantastic though it might be, of escaping all of that into a more secure life. If it is a novel that also feeds paranoia, arrogance, and elitist fantasy, so be it. It made me feel better. I think I am not the only one who used it that way.”
Stapledon’s Odd John isn’t just a very bright little boy who has trouble getting along with the slower-witted people around him, as I was sixty years ago: he’s a mutant superman, a genetic freak. Maybe I could name all the English monarchs in order, but I was, at least, human. John is physically as well as mentally different from normal humans, a slender, spidery-looking boy with huge green eyes, a massive head, and strange woolly white hair—a member of a successor species, our replacements on Earth, Homo superior.
John and his fellow mutants remind me of the Second Men of Stapledon’s earlier novel Last and First Men, which is, I think, the most stupendous vision of the far future ever conceived. The Second Men are said to have huge heads, large, finely shaped hands, and big jade-green eyes. Like John and his companions they are slow to reach physical maturity, but have greater life-spans than ours. But the Second Men don’t appear in the world until ten million years from now; the mutants we meet in Odd John are already among us, and have been for hundreds of years. And there are other differences. The Second Men, for example, are physically gigantic; the mutants of Odd John are all slender, even flimsy in build.
The two books differ in technique. Last and First Men does without such fictional standbys as dialog, character, plot. It describes the next two billion years in the dry, impersonal manner of a history text. (“Of the great practical uses to which the Sixteenth Men put their powers, only one need be mentioned as an example. They gained control of the movement of their planet. Early in their career, they were able, with the unlimited energy at their disposal, to direct it into a wider orbit. . . .”) The whole book is like that, and it is not an easy thing to read if one is looking for the pleasures of conventional storytelling.
Odd John, though, is straightforwardly novelistic in form, and Stapledon makes it clear right away that he can handle conventional narrative technique as well as anybody else. Consider this elegant bit of foreshadowing on the very first page:
I knew almost nothing of the inner, the real John. To this day I know little but the amazing facts of his career. I know that he never walked till he was six, that before he was ten he committed several burglaries and killed a policeman, that at eighteen, when he still looked a young boy, he founded his preposterous colony in the South Seas, and that at twenty-three, in appearance but little altered, he outwitted the six warships that six Great Powers had sent to seize him. I know also how John and all his followers died.
Stapledon (1886-1950) was by profession a professor of philosophy, but he was well versed in the physical sciences as they were understood in his day. Nevertheless, I have some doubts about the scientific assumptions behind Odd John. He would have us believe that the Homo superior mutation occurred more or less simultaneously among humans of widely varying races: John is English, but his companions include not only French and Russian superbeings and a Swede but also an Ethiopian, some Chinese, a Turk, a surprising number of Tibetans, and some others. The preponderance of Asians leads Stapledon to propose that the starting point for the mutation was somewhere in Central Asia, perhaps Mongolia, which is reasonable enough, but I don’t see any genetic trail that could have led from the Asian steppes to France, Sweden, or England.
In any case, scientific developments since Stapledon’s time lead me to doubt that Homo superior is going to emerge among us by way of spontaneous and random mutation, as Homo sapiens probably emerged among the precursor human species long ago. We, poor primitives though we would seem in John’s eyes, already have the capacity for genetic screening of fetuses and a certain degree of prenatal genetic manipulation. Despite the present climate of political hostility to such things, I think the future will see a steadily increasing reliance on genetic enhancement of zygotes and prenatal destruction of sub-par fetuses, and the end result of that can only be the gradual emergence of Homo superior right out of Homo sapiens stock, not by random mutation but by deliberate design.
John, who sets himself apart from human morality like Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, stands outside society and analyzes its flaws. To the extent that Stapledon concentrates on that, the book is as much social satire as it is a superman novel. An early chapter shows the pre-adolescent John cornering a supermarket magnate aboard a commuter train and demanding to know why he is so interested in making money, since plainly he already has more than enough. Poking at the befuddled capitalist as a banderilla harasses a bull at a bullfight, John hits him with Socratic thrusts straight out of the socialist property-is-theft playbook. (“Of course, you couldn’t work properly unless you had reasonable comfort. And that means a big house and two cars, and furs and jewels for your wife, and first-class railway fares, and swank schools for your children. . . .”)
In a later chapter called “The World’s Plight,” John offers explicit criticisms of modern human society—its xenophobia, its superstitiousness, its irrational bellicosity. (“One of the main troubles of your unhappy species is that the best minds can go even farther astray than the second best. . . . That’s what has been happening during the last few centuries. Swarms of the best minds have been leading the populace down blind alley after blind alley, and doing it with tremendous courage and resource. . . .”)
How I felt about these passages when I was twelve, I can no longer accurately say; but I suspect I nodded sagely in agreement with all of them, the socialist critique of moneymaking as well as the attack on religiosity and militaristic nationalism. Socialism holds less appeal for me nowadays. But I see, as I could not have seen then, that Odd John was for Stapledon not just a romantic flight of the imagination, but a vehicle for his own political beliefs.
* * *
What had the greatest impact on me then, surely, and still spoke to me in this latest rereading, was precisely that element of the fantastic that makes Odd John not just a novel about a very intelligent boy but a work of science fiction. In his early years John is shown merely as being very, very clever. He learns languages at a glance, designs wonderful gadgets, etc. Any high-IQ human might have done the same. But then, in chapter fifteen (out of twenty-two), we learn that John also has telepathic powers, then that some of the Homo superior folk are hundreds of years old, and then in the next chapter—a staggering moment, delivering the real SF frisson—John engages in telepathic conversation with a member of his species, an Egyptian born in 1512, who has been dead for thirty-five years and is casting his mind forward in time to make contact with others of his kind in the twentieth century. No longer is this just a novel of social criticism; it’s an out-and-out fantastic romance. We know now that we are reading about the next version of the human race, not merely a high-performance version of the present species.
The sexual content of the book was something that caught my virginal eye back there in the 1940s. Science fiction was, and to some measure still is, pretty chaste stuff, constricted by pulp-magazine taboos. But Stapledon shows us the pre-pubescent John engaged in overt sexual events with a bovine young woman named Europa, which of course I, as a barely pubescent reader, found tremendously exciting. When that affair fizzles out, John turns for incestuous sexual comfort to a person unnamed by Stapledon, but who surely must have been his mother, Pax (oddly enough, also described by Stapledon as bovine (“a great sluggish blonde. . . . Just a magnificent female animal. . . . Conversation with her was sometimes almost as one-sided as conversation with a cow.”)
John also has a homosexual period—part of his experimental study of humanity, I suppose. As a non-homosexual boy living in an era not very tolerant of the gay life, I must have found that off-putting and puzzling. Still, homosexual activity in a science fiction novel back then was just about unknown, so Stapledon ranks as a pioneer in that area.
As for the cataclysmic ending—the suicides of John and all the other supermen as the world closes in on them—I once thought it needlessly nihilistic, and implausible besides. But that was before the Jonestown debacle of thirty years ago, the Branch Davidian holocaust, and other such mass immolations of modern times.
All in all, a fascinating, compelling book. I think I’ll go on soon to Stapledon’s other masterpiece, Last and First Men, and see what a rereading of that will yield.
