Pale Shadow of Science

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 of itself and of things other than it.

Then comes one of those quick contradictions which endow Stapledon’s narrative with its tensile strength:

In the tide of these wild thoughts we checked our fancy, remembering that only on the rare grains called planets can life gain foothold, and that all this wealth of restless jewels was but a waste of fire.

Under the detached tone is an almost animist belief in life everywhere, sentience everywhere. One of Stapledon’s last fantasies, The Flames, postulates a madman’s vision of fire with intellect.

With such paradox, such bleakness and beauty, Fiedler is well-equipped to deal. ‘Ecstasy’ is one of Stapledon’s favourite words, and the ecstasy is usually one of both pain and pleasure. For there is pleasure of a high order in making that desperate voyage to come face-to-face with the Star Maker, and pain in discovering that this universe is but one in a sequence of universes, each imperfect in its way. ‘Cosmos after cosmos, each more rich and subtle than the last, leapt from his fervent imagination.’ In the extraordinary Chapter XV, Stapledon describes a progression of these flawed cosmoses, each one in turn failing ultimately to satisfy its creator, who stores them away like so many old video games in a cupboard, as he turns to prepare a yet more complex strategy.

Our own cosmos is in turn about to be put away. In the succeeding cosmos, according to the thought of the Star Maker, the physical will be ‘more patently phantasmal than in our own cosmos,’ while the beings who inhabit it will be ‘far less deceived by the opacity of their individual mental processes, and more sensitive to their underlying unity.’

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